The internet is big, and it's still growing. With the many people connected to the network, things can get noisy because many of them have different thoughts.
On the web, there are places where light shines, and locations where darkness haunt unsuspecting internet wanderers. There are places for brands and businesses, there are places for leaders, politicians and influencers, and there are places for researchers and hackers.
There are venues to carter pretty much everyone.
And due to the so-called 'Rule 34', there are also content to please every soul
And 'Kiwi Farms' is one of those filthiest places on the web, where bad things can travel from online to real life.
These happened for about a decade, before users of the platform messed with the wrong people.
Clara Sorrenti, a trans activist and Twitch streamer who also goes by the handle Keffals, was traumatized when she woke up early in one morning by police officers who put an assault rifle to their face.
The activist who provided political commentary had gained quite an enemy, and that in retaliation for her activism, someone sent an email to city councillors claiming that Sorrenti had killed her mother and would soon go to City Hall to shoot every cisgender person she saw.
"When I was woken up by police officers and saw the assault rifle pointed at me, I thought I was going to die," Sorrenti later recounted in a video on YouTube.
"I feel traumatized."
And as an activist, Sorrenti had what it takes, and began a campaign called the 'Drop Kiwi Farms', with the goal to kill Kiwi Farms once and for all.
In particular, Sorrenti target Cloudflare, which has been Kiwi Farms' web security provider.
After gathering enough supporters, Sorrenti pressured Cloudflare to help end the website.
Other individuals who went full force against Kiwi Farms, include Clay, a pseudonym of a user who joined forces with Liz Fong-Jones and Katherine Lorelei, to call the site to be taken offline, especially after it played a role in mass killings in Christchurch, New Zealand.
At first, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince responded indirectly to the campaign with a post on Cloudflare’s abuse policies.
While Prince didn't mention anything about Kiwi Farms by name, Prince wrote that "overbroad takedowns can have significant unintended impact on access to content online."
"Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy."
Cloudflare is known for its strong stance, and against shutting down websites, even to neo-Nazi platforms.
But later, Prince reverted his thoughts, following the death of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville.
On September 2022, Prince said in a blog post that Cloudflare officially blocked the site from using its services.
Prince stated that the company acted because "the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats [had] escalated over the last 48 hours" at the time of the decision. Following Cloudflare, other middleware providers, such as hCaptcha, followed suit in halting support for Kiwi Farms.
Because of this, Kiwi Farms experienced frequent down time and was at the brink of death.
The operators of the website quickly moved everything to a Russian-based service provider DDoS-Guard and a Russian, and gave the site another life through another domain that had been registered on July 12, 2021. But DDoS-Guard also stopped providing services to Kiwi Farms a while later, and that the site's domain was also made inaccessible.
Kiwi Farms jumped to a Ukrainian hosting service to Zayo, a Colorado-based hosting service, to VanwaTech, a Vancouver, Washington-based hosting and security company known for providing refuge to 8chan, a message board notorious for white-supremacist content.
During this time, Kiwi Farms also suffered to keep its user data safe, as it also suffered a data breach, where users' IP addresses, email addresses, and passwords had been leaked.
But Kiwi Farms would not go down without a fight.
Founder Joshua Conner Moon defended the website, but blames its struggle on everything but its toxicity.
"This is an organized attack. There is a coalition of criminals trying to frame the forum for their behavior. These criminals provide opportunities for professional victims to amplify their message. Journalists canonize the crimes as the behavior of the forum itself, which becomes the effective truth for the general public," he said.
"This meme about Russia being a free country is a joke," Moon said on Telegram.
But he also added that he didn't see any other reason to keep the site online.
"I do not see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate. It will either become a fractured shell of itself [...] ," he said.
Even the Internet Archive, whose goal is to preserve the entire web, has purged the website from its database. Search engines, like Google, also dropped results from the site, and refuse to surface its content when users searched for it.
"We won," Sorrenti said.
But it's worth noting that following this, Kiwi Farms is neither living, or dying.
While it may never be fully offline, Sorrenti acknowledged that Kiwi Farms is becoming "completely impotent."
Whether or not Kiwi Farms has been completely removed, Sorrenti said, "is irrelevant to the fact that the goals of our campaign have not only been achieved, but have achieved more than we could have ever expected."
While the #DropKiwiFarms ended, neither side is really winning.
On the internet, it's a constant battle between harassment and censorship. This is inevitable, because neither of the two is independent.
Harassments online require an opposing force to hit where it hurts, whereas censorship is irrelevant when there is nothing to obscure. And when demand is high, in one way or another, the supply will be available.
Founded in 2013 by Joshua Conner Moon, a former 8chan administrator, Kiwi Farms is a web forum, originally meant to troll and harass a webcomic artist
But people loved the idea, and because of that, the forum expanded to also facilitate the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities.
Users of the forum use the platform to organize group for trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and harassments.
These actions have led Kiwi Farms to be behind at least three suicides of people targeted by members of the forum.
Because of this, the abuses that came from Farms have sparked concerns about both harassment and free speech, as well as safety and well-beings of people.
