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Home / World

Cloudflare blocks hate-filled platform Kiwi Farms that mocked NZ cops over mosque attacks

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8 Sep, 2022 09:13 AM4 mins to read

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Kiwi Farms has become notorious for doxxing and swatting, where a false tip is made to police in the hope an individual's home will be raided. Photo / 123rf

Kiwi Farms has become notorious for doxxing and swatting, where a false tip is made to police in the hope an individual's home will be raided. Photo / 123rf

A company just made life hell for the operators of a platform so disturbing it could take the title of "worst place on the internet".

Online hate forum Kiwi Farms brings together the very worst content from far-right, anti-trans, pro-white extremists and uses it to target people.

Its founder Joshua Moon celebrated the work of the Christchurch massacre terrorist, republishing the terrorist's manifesto, and told New Zealand police they were "clowns" from a "small, irrelevant island nation" for daring to ask him to remove a livestream of the worst attack on NZ soil in history.

"Is this a joke?" Moon told an officer in a conversation he later shared online.

"I feel real bad for you guys, you've got a quiet nation and now this attack is going to be the first thing people think of for the next 10 years when they hear the name New Zealand."

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The website was temporarily blocked in New Zealand following the attack.

Kiwi Farms has become notorious for doxxing - releasing an individual's private information with malicious intent - and swatting, where a false tip is made to police in the hope an individual's home will be raided.

But all of that unravelled this week in the most humiliating way for Moon and his supporters when the Kiwi Farms platform was pulled from underneath them.

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The online security giant Cloudflare has blocked the controversial site, following a campaign started by transgender woman Clara Sorrenti, who also goes by Keffals, who had been targeted by the site.

A discussion thread about her was started in March, after another streamer who criticised Sorrenti was removed from the Twitch platform, NBC reported.

The thread included sexually explicit photographs of Sorrenti, phone numbers and addresses belonging to her friends and family and the name she used before her transition.

Our statement on Cloudflare dropping Kiwi Farms. pic.twitter.com/PrjtnfPLuX

— Keffals (@keffals) September 3, 2022

Then on August 5, Sorrenti opened her front door to find a police officer pointing a gun at her face - the result of a 'swatting', after someone impersonated her in an email and said she was planning a mass shooting.

"It was particularly bad because I'm trans, but literally anyone could make a burner email in your name and attach a photo of a gun and say you're going to go on a mass shooting," Sorrenti told NBC.

"Depending on who the cops are and how you react, you might die as a result of it."

The Guardian reports that Sorrenti fled to a hotel but made the mistake of posting a picture online.

Kiwi Farms users compared the sheets in the hotel and let her know she had been found.

When she fled to Ireland, a person showed up outside her apartment with a handwritten note filled with abusive messages for the transgender community and its supporters.

Sorrenti started a campaign online urging Cloudflare to drop Kiwi Farms as a client. The security firm provides protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, where sites are overloaded with traffic in an attempt to take them offline.

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While Cloudflare had previously dropped its services to 8chan, the messageboard where the Christchurch mosque terrorist posted his manifesto, earlier this week its chief executive Matthew Prince resisted calls against Kiwi Farms.

However, the company u-turned and later announced it was blocking Kiwi Farms as a client.

We just blocked Kiwifarms. The threats on the site escalated enough in the last 48 hours that, in spite of proactively working with law enforcement, it became enough of an imminent emergency we could no longer wait for them to act. Details of our decision: https://t.co/xNnSXn65R6

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) September 3, 2022

Anyone attempting to access the site was met with a message reading, "Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare's infrastructure".

In a blog post, Prince wrote that Kiwi Farms had "frequently been host to revolting content" and that alone was not enough to take action.

"However, the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site and specific, targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike we have previously seen from Kiwifarms or any other customer before," he wrote.

Prince denied Cloudflare was taking action in response to Sorrenti's pressure campaign.

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"We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign. While we have empathy for its organisers, we are committed as a security provider to protecting our customers even when they run deeply afoul of popular opinion or even our own morals."

-news.com.au, RNZ

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