# Kiwi Farms Kiwi Farms is an online discussion-forum founded in 2013 by Joshua Moon, originally as a CWCki Forums offshoot dedicated to following internet-personality Christian Weston Chandler. The site evolved into one of the most-documented organized-harassment platforms on the internet — operating discussion-threads dedicated to specific named individuals (overwhelmingly transgender people, neurodivergent individuals, women with online visibility, sex-workers, and others perceived as transgressing social norms) that produced sustained harassment campaigns, multiple documented swatting cases, several deaths by suicide of harassment-targets, and one of the most-sustained organized infrastructure-deplatforming controversies in contemporary internet history. The platform is one of the canonical case studies of *organized-doxxing-and-harassment infrastructure* operating at scale through the 2013–present period. The Cloudflare deplatforming controversy in September 2022 was a watershed moment in the broader policy-discussion of how infrastructure providers should respond to platforms whose primary use is the coordination of targeted harassment. ## The platform structure Kiwi Farms operates as a discussion-forum (the technical infrastructure is XenForo software, similar to many other forums) with thread-based discussion. The site's defining feature is the practice of maintaining persistent threads on specific named individuals (called *lolcows* in the in-site vocabulary), in which users document target's online activity, real-name and home-address information, employer information, family members, medical and psychological history, photographs, and any other information that can be aggregated. The thread-structure produces several documented operational outcomes: 1. **Sustained-attention harassment** — targets are subject to *sustained* multi-year monitoring and harassment, not just immediate-incident attention; some Kiwi Farms threads have remained active for years 2. **Coordinated-cascade harassment** — when users post content in target-threads, the readership often participates in downstream-action against the target (mass-reporting of social-media accounts, employer-contact campaigns, swatting, in-person stalking) 3. **Persistent-archive function** — the platform serves as an archival aggregator of harassment material; even when targets succeed in having content removed from other platforms, Kiwi Farms thread-content persists and remains discoverable 4. **Recruitment-and-radicalization function** — the in-site culture functions as a pipeline into more-extreme harassment-and-extremist communities; documented cases include progression from Kiwi Farms participation to white-nationalist organizing 5. **Cross-platform coordination** — the platform serves as a coordination point for harassment operations conducted across other social-media platforms The user-population of Kiwi Farms is substantially-anonymous; the platform's culture is hostile to identification of users, and the in-site protection norms make participant-attribution difficult. ## Documented harm patterns The most-comprehensive documentation of Kiwi Farms-linked harm comes from academic-research (Whitney Phillips; Tara Burton), investigative-journalism (Vice, Wired, The Atlantic, [[BuzzFeed News]], multiple smaller-outlet investigations), targeted-individual documentation (Keffals's 2022 documentation campaign), and the Cloudflare 2022 deplatforming-announcement infrastructure. Documented harm patterns include: - **Suicide deaths of harassment targets** — at least three deaths by suicide have been publicly-attributed in part to sustained Kiwi Farms harassment: Near (computer-programmer; suicide 2021), Chloe Sagal (game-developer; self-immolation 2018), and others. Each case involved months-to-years of sustained Kiwi Farms thread-based harassment preceding the death - **Multiple swatting cases** — coordinated false-emergency-call campaigns against targets that produced armed-police-response situations; at least one fatality is publicly-linked to a Kiwi Farms-coordinated swatting (Andrew Finch, Wichita 2017, in a case with multiple sources of attribution including Kiwi Farms-adjacent communities) - **In-person stalking and physical harassment** — targets have documented Kiwi Farms-coordinated physical visits to their homes, workplaces, and family members - **Employer-pressure campaigns** — coordinated contact with target employers, frequently resulting in target's termination from employment - **Medical and psychological harm** — sustained-harassment effects on target mental-health, professional-functioning, ability to maintain social relationships; documented through both target-testimony and clinical literature ## The Cloudflare 2022 deplatforming A specific KB-relevant institutional event: in August 2022, transgender Twitch-streamer Keffals (Clara Sorrenti) was swatted at her London, Ontario home in an attack coordinated through Kiwi Farms threads; she launched a sustained social-media campaign documenting the attack and pressuring Cloudflare to discontinue its CDN-and-DDoS-protection services for the Kiwi Farms domain. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince initially defended the company's content-neutral policy on August 31, 2022, then reversed the decision on September 3, 2022, blocking Kiwi Farms from Cloudflare's services. The Cloudflare decision was the most-consequential infrastructure-deplatforming action in the platform's history. The reasoning Prince articulated: > *Kiwifarms has frequently been host to revolting content. Revolting content alone does not create an emergency situation that necessitates the action we are taking today. The rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site has 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.* The Cloudflare blocking was the first time the company had taken such action against a customer; it followed an earlier, similar action against the [[Daily Stormer]] in August 2017. Cloudflare's broader policy-evolution on these questions has been substantively-engaged with by academic-and-policy researchers as a precedent-setting case in infrastructure-platform content-moderation. ## The post-Cloudflare reconstitution Following the Cloudflare deplatforming, Kiwi Farms cycled through multiple alternative infrastructure providers (DDoS-Guard, the Russian-affiliated VanwaTech, others) with periodic returns to availability and periodic forced-takedowns. The platform's operational pattern through 2023–2025 has been one of *sustained presence with intermittent service disruption*, rather than full discontinuation. The structural lesson the case study provides: *infrastructure-level deplatforming of a single platform produces operational difficulty but does not eliminate the operation*; alternative-infrastructure providers, mirror-sites, and migration to less-regulated jurisdictions allow harassment-platforms to maintain operations despite mainstream-infrastructure withdrawal. ## KB significance Kiwi Farms matters for the right-wing knowledge base on several registers: 1. **It is the canonical documented organized-harassment platform**, providing case-study evidence of the [[Doxxing]] and downstream-cascade infrastructure documented at the Terminology entries 2. **The transgender-targeting concentration** documents the operational connection between the broader contemporary anti-LGBTQ political project (the [[Groomer]] slur deployment, the *transition-care* legislative wave, the broader Rufo-strategy infrastructure) and the *actual operational targeting* of named transgender individuals 3. **The Cloudflare 2022 case** is one of the most-significant precedents in contemporary infrastructure-platform content-moderation policy; the precedent-setting decision has been substantively-cited in subsequent policy discussions 4. **The post-deplatforming reconstitution** documents the *limits* of infrastructure-level counter-operations; the broader structural-policy question of how to address persistent harassment platforms remains substantively unresolved ## See Also - [[Doxxing]] — the principal operational category Kiwi Farms is built around - [[Sockpuppet Accounts]] — the account-level infrastructure Kiwi Farms participants frequently use - [[Stochastic Terrorism]] — the mechanism by which Kiwi Farms thread-content produces downstream violence - [[Online Harassment]] — the broader operational category - [[Joshua Moon]] — the platform's founder