Cloudflare blocks Kiwi Farms due to an ‘immediate threat to human life’ - The Verge

Cloudflare, a web hosting and security provider, has blocked the hateful site Kiwi Farms after seeing an increase in "specific, targeted threats."

Cloudflare, a website security and hosting provider, announced on Saturday that it had blocked Kiwi Farms, an online forum known for hateful content. In a post on Cloudflare’s blog, the company said Kiwi Farms posed an “immediate threat to human life,” citing an increase of “targeted threats” over the past two days.

Concerns about Kiwi Farms grew after transgender YouTuber and Twitch streamer, Clara Sorrenti (Keffals), had been targeted by a dangerous harassment campaign by users from the site. Last month, Kiwi Farms users waged a swatting attack against Sorrenti, otherwise known as the act of providing a false tip to police that someone’s planning on carrying out a violent crime, resulting in police swarming the victim’s home.

Sorrenti later went into hiding and started a #DropKiwifarms campaign that urged Cloudflare to stop serving Kiwi Farms. Users across Twitter shared the hashtag, also with some revealing the harassment they’ve experienced at the hand of Kiwi Farms’ users.

Cloudflare initially resisted calls to drop Kiwi Farms, saying that it would be “an abuse of power” to do so. In an update posted to its site last week, Cloudflare outlined its policies on abusive content, laying out an argument for maintaining service without explicitly mentioning Kiwi Farms. In the post, Cloudflare argues that its termination of sites like The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi message board, and 8Chan, a forum that breeds extremist content, led “authoritarian regimes” to ask Cloudflare to “terminate security services for human rights organizations.”

“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 explains.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/4/23336772/cloudflare-blocks-kiwifarms-immediate-threat-human-life

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