Article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...i-farms-was-its-most-dangerous-customer-ever/
Archive: https://archive.ph/7UYMd
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Over Labor Day weekend, one of the biggest online security services providers, Cloudflare, made what it called a “dangerous” decision to block access to one of its most controversial customers, an increasingly violent alt-right web forum called Kiwi Farms.
The decision came two weeks into a pressure campaign dubbed "Drop Kiwi Farms," which was launched by Clara Sorrenti—online alias “Keffals”—a transgender activist and Twitch streamer among those targeted most venomously by Kiwi Farms. The goal was to protect people like Keffals and fight back by forcing Cloudflare and other Internet service providers to stop enabling Kiwi Farms’ escalating attacks on trans people and other vulnerable communities.
Cloudflare held out for weeks as the pressure campaign raged on social media. But then, within a 48-hour period, Cloudflare noted that Kiwi Farms users were growing increasingly aggressive and had started doxxing and swatting victims. (Doxxing is when someone publishes private information to incite violence against a target, and swatting involves placing a hoax call reporting imminent suicide or gun violence to police so they descend on targets with force.)
Drop Kiwi Farms also reported that the forum’s attacks were becoming more extreme. (Drop Kiwi Farms has documented a complete history of Kiwi Farms' attacks on thousands of victims dating back years.) Cloudflare said this escalation was in direct response to the pressure campaign. Cloudflare watched as Kiwi Farms mutated from what it saw as a valid customer in need of the company's protection from cybersecurity attacks to a site that posed an “imminent threat to human life.”
"We definitely had complaints coming in," Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare's VP, global head of public policy, told Ars. "But if you were watching even mainstream social media over the weekend, what you saw are some things that were really direct threats, some very specific information about things that were planned."
"That escalation is what started to worry us," Starzak told Ars. "That's really what prompted us to act over the weekend."
There was no time to involve law enforcement and allow for due process, Cloudflare decided. This was a new level of violence unlike that seen in prior high-profile cases. In those instances, Cloudflare waited through a legal process before blocking similarly hateful forums like 8chan in 2019 or The Daily Stormer in 2017.
“We believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike [what] we have previously seen from Kiwi Farms or any other customer before,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog on Saturday explaining the decision.
Because 20 percent of the Internet relies on Cloudflare to provide security services, Prince clarified that this decision does not set a precedent for how Cloudflare will respond to complaints against any of its millions of customers in the future. He also said that it's likely that Kiwi Farms would find other Internet infrastructure to come back online, so Cloudflare saw the solution as only temporary—but that it possibly set a dangerous precedent of companies wielding outsized control over which websites should be allowed to be attacked because of their content.
Prince said Cloudflare would continue to support law enforcement investigations into Kiwi Farms but that the company's decision in no way represents Cloudflare’s ideal resolution process for complaints over its security services customers.
“We will continue to work proactively with law enforcement to help with their investigations into the site and the individuals who have posted what may be illegal content to it,” Prince wrote. “And we recognize that while our blocking Kiwi Farms temporarily addresses the situation, it by no means solves the underlying problem. That solution will require much more work across society. We are hopeful that our action today will help provoke conversations toward addressing the larger problem. And we stand ready to participate in that conversation.”
Because of that seemingly unavoidable vulnerability, Cloudflare’s decision appears to have effectively shut down the increasingly violent forum. Sorrenti tweeted that another Kiwi Farms target known as “remembrancermx” recently got the alt-right forum’s web history entirely scrubbed from the Internet Archive. Sorrenti tweeted that she’s hoping that Google search results history for Kiwi Farms content will be deleted next. Drop Kiwi Farms posted a statement that confirmed “all the major corporations that provided the services to keep Kiwi Farms online have decided that Kiwi Farms poses a great risk.” The post also included a statement reportedly from Kiwi Farms founder Joshua Moon.
“I do not see a situation where Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate,” Moon said. “It will either become a fractured shell of itself like 8chan or jump between hosts and domains like Daily Stormer.”
Drop Kiwi Farms and Moon’s legal team did not immediately respond to Ars' requests for comment.
Because disabling Kiwi Farms was a primary goal of Drop Kiwi Farms and because the forum has struggled to maintain an online presence since the Cloudflare move, the campaign declared victory on Monday.
The company's security services for customers like Kiwi Farms include protections against cyberattacks and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks designed to maliciously disrupt a website’s traffic. These customers are subject to different policies than customers whose content Cloudflare hosts.
Because Cloudflare did not host Kiwi Farms’ content, Kiwi Farms was not subject to the tech company’s content policy, which bans “content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.”
“Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice,” Cloudflare’s abuse policies say. “But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.”
Starzak told Ars that since Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, the company's stance on this issue has been misunderstood.
"I think people have misunderstood what our overarching view is on this," Starzak said. "And largely, the sort of situation here was that we were being asked to step aside as a security provider so that the site could be subject to cyberattack. And that has been the longstanding question for us—like this idea that you're addressing problematic content" by stepping aside to allow "an attack that's probably itself illegal."
Cloudflare said that it consults with human rights experts, activists, academics, and regulators in crafting its abuse policies and that out of the thousands of complaints it fields daily to terminate services based on content, only twice before Kiwi Farms has it ever made the decision to block security services due to “reprehensible” content. First came “neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer,” then came “conspiracy theory forum 8chan,” and Kiwi Farms makes three.
In his blog post, Prince wrote that Cloudflare is still committed to upholding its current abuse policies and that Kiwi Farms remains an exception, not the rule. “To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did,” the policy says. “Or that we will ever do it again.”
“We need a mechanism when there is an emergency threat to human life for infrastructure providers to work expediently with legal authorities in order to ensure the decisions we make are grounded in due process,” Prince wrote. “Unfortunately, that mechanism does not exist and so we are making this uncomfortable emergency decision alone.”
Cloudflare’s abuse policy says that the company has held “significant discussions” with policymakers to attempt to change the culture so that decisions come down from legal bodies and aren't left to tech companies. What’s needed, Cloudflare says, is a regulatory framework giving companies guidance on when to terminate security services and proper channels for vulnerable users like Keffals to report grave escalations of violence.
Cloudflare maintains that pressure campaigns are not the appropriate mechanism for “addressing problematic content online.”
Currently, Cloudflare follows the law and terminates security services “from being used by sanctioned organizations and individuals” or websites hosting illegal content like child sexual abuse material or content violating human trafficking laws.
Doxxing is already in some cases illegal. What’s missing, Cloudflare suggests, is legislation that blocks websites from hosting content that promotes doxxing. Starzak told Ars that some countries proposing such regulations have seen progress, but so far, no laws have been passed. Even so, Starzak said it's unclear how effective such laws would ultimately be. "[F]rom a regulatory regime standpoint, I think we're moving toward a better place," she said. "But again, verdict's still out about whether any of those would actually solve this problem or not."
Doxxing has become so pervasive across popular social media that the first large study on the trend in 2017 found that most platforms had already deployed abuse filters to combat the problem more quickly. But as a security services provider, Cloudflare doesn't have the clear guidelines that more heavily regulated content-hosting platforms do.
“While we believe we have an obligation to restrict the content that we host ourselves, we do not believe we have the political legitimacy to determine generally what is and is not online by restricting security or core Internet services,” Cloudflare’s policy states. “If that content is harmful, the right place to restrict it is legislatively.”
Until the law makes clear how companies like Cloudflare should respond to customers like Kiwi Farms, tension will remain between Internet users and the tech companies they expect to prevent abuse. And in extreme cases, that tension will escalate into online pressure campaigns, a mechanism that Cloudflare inherently opposes. In the meantime, the pressure campaign has taken credit for companies deciding to block access to Kiwi Farms.
“What we have accomplished in such a short time has never been done before in the entire history of the Internet,” Sorrenti wrote. “The countless victims of Kiwi Farms can sleep soundly knowing that the site is doomed, will never regain its former momentum, and will continue to bleed followers and become more and more irrelevant with each passing week.”
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Archive: https://archive.ph/7UYMd
--------------------------------------------------
Over Labor Day weekend, one of the biggest online security services providers, Cloudflare, made what it called a “dangerous” decision to block access to one of its most controversial customers, an increasingly violent alt-right web forum called Kiwi Farms.
The decision came two weeks into a pressure campaign dubbed "Drop Kiwi Farms," which was launched by Clara Sorrenti—online alias “Keffals”—a transgender activist and Twitch streamer among those targeted most venomously by Kiwi Farms. The goal was to protect people like Keffals and fight back by forcing Cloudflare and other Internet service providers to stop enabling Kiwi Farms’ escalating attacks on trans people and other vulnerable communities.
Cloudflare held out for weeks as the pressure campaign raged on social media. But then, within a 48-hour period, Cloudflare noted that Kiwi Farms users were growing increasingly aggressive and had started doxxing and swatting victims. (Doxxing is when someone publishes private information to incite violence against a target, and swatting involves placing a hoax call reporting imminent suicide or gun violence to police so they descend on targets with force.)
Drop Kiwi Farms also reported that the forum’s attacks were becoming more extreme. (Drop Kiwi Farms has documented a complete history of Kiwi Farms' attacks on thousands of victims dating back years.) Cloudflare said this escalation was in direct response to the pressure campaign. Cloudflare watched as Kiwi Farms mutated from what it saw as a valid customer in need of the company's protection from cybersecurity attacks to a site that posed an “imminent threat to human life.”
"We definitely had complaints coming in," Alissa Starzak, Cloudflare's VP, global head of public policy, told Ars. "But if you were watching even mainstream social media over the weekend, what you saw are some things that were really direct threats, some very specific information about things that were planned."
"That escalation is what started to worry us," Starzak told Ars. "That's really what prompted us to act over the weekend."
There was no time to involve law enforcement and allow for due process, Cloudflare decided. This was a new level of violence unlike that seen in prior high-profile cases. In those instances, Cloudflare waited through a legal process before blocking similarly hateful forums like 8chan in 2019 or The Daily Stormer in 2017.
“We believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life unlike [what] we have previously seen from Kiwi Farms or any other customer before,” Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog on Saturday explaining the decision.
Cloudflare’s “uncomfortable” call
In the blog post, Prince wrote that Cloudflare’s decision was not in response to the pressure campaign but rather to Cloudflare's realization that the law enforcement process was moving much too slowly.Because 20 percent of the Internet relies on Cloudflare to provide security services, Prince clarified that this decision does not set a precedent for how Cloudflare will respond to complaints against any of its millions of customers in the future. He also said that it's likely that Kiwi Farms would find other Internet infrastructure to come back online, so Cloudflare saw the solution as only temporary—but that it possibly set a dangerous precedent of companies wielding outsized control over which websites should be allowed to be attacked because of their content.
Prince said Cloudflare would continue to support law enforcement investigations into Kiwi Farms but that the company's decision in no way represents Cloudflare’s ideal resolution process for complaints over its security services customers.
“We will continue to work proactively with law enforcement to help with their investigations into the site and the individuals who have posted what may be illegal content to it,” Prince wrote. “And we recognize that while our blocking Kiwi Farms temporarily addresses the situation, it by no means solves the underlying problem. That solution will require much more work across society. We are hopeful that our action today will help provoke conversations toward addressing the larger problem. And we stand ready to participate in that conversation.”
Kiwi Farms’ struggle to stay online
Starzak told Ars that Kiwi Farms did find other infrastructure to stay online, but without security services like Cloudflare's protections, the site cannot necessarily withstand the onslaught of cyberattacks intended to block all access to the site.Because of that seemingly unavoidable vulnerability, Cloudflare’s decision appears to have effectively shut down the increasingly violent forum. Sorrenti tweeted that another Kiwi Farms target known as “remembrancermx” recently got the alt-right forum’s web history entirely scrubbed from the Internet Archive. Sorrenti tweeted that she’s hoping that Google search results history for Kiwi Farms content will be deleted next. Drop Kiwi Farms posted a statement that confirmed “all the major corporations that provided the services to keep Kiwi Farms online have decided that Kiwi Farms poses a great risk.” The post also included a statement reportedly from Kiwi Farms founder Joshua Moon.
“I do not see a situation where Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate,” Moon said. “It will either become a fractured shell of itself like 8chan or jump between hosts and domains like Daily Stormer.”
Drop Kiwi Farms and Moon’s legal team did not immediately respond to Ars' requests for comment.
Because disabling Kiwi Farms was a primary goal of Drop Kiwi Farms and because the forum has struggled to maintain an online presence since the Cloudflare move, the campaign declared victory on Monday.
Who deserves protection from cyberattacks?
Cloudflare's decision was difficult for the company because it believes its duty as an Internet infrastructure provider is to not pull security services from customers without offering some legal recourse.The company's security services for customers like Kiwi Farms include protections against cyberattacks and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks designed to maliciously disrupt a website’s traffic. These customers are subject to different policies than customers whose content Cloudflare hosts.
Because Cloudflare did not host Kiwi Farms’ content, Kiwi Farms was not subject to the tech company’s content policy, which bans “content that discloses sensitive personal information, incites or exploits violence against people or animals, or seeks to defraud the public.”
“Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice,” Cloudflare’s abuse policies say. “But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.”
Starzak told Ars that since Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, the company's stance on this issue has been misunderstood.
"I think people have misunderstood what our overarching view is on this," Starzak said. "And largely, the sort of situation here was that we were being asked to step aside as a security provider so that the site could be subject to cyberattack. And that has been the longstanding question for us—like this idea that you're addressing problematic content" by stepping aside to allow "an attack that's probably itself illegal."
Cloudflare said that it consults with human rights experts, activists, academics, and regulators in crafting its abuse policies and that out of the thousands of complaints it fields daily to terminate services based on content, only twice before Kiwi Farms has it ever made the decision to block security services due to “reprehensible” content. First came “neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer,” then came “conspiracy theory forum 8chan,” and Kiwi Farms makes three.
In his blog post, Prince wrote that Cloudflare is still committed to upholding its current abuse policies and that Kiwi Farms remains an exception, not the rule. “To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did,” the policy says. “Or that we will ever do it again.”
One improvement Cloudflare and activists can agree on
Kiwi Farms isn’t the only web forum responsible for doxxing and swatting attempts. Earlier this year, Twitch streamers asked law enforcement for a better mechanism to report intensifying attacks. Cloudflare asked for a similar way to respond more responsibly to rapidly escalating situations where criminal activity or mortal danger appears imminent.“We need a mechanism when there is an emergency threat to human life for infrastructure providers to work expediently with legal authorities in order to ensure the decisions we make are grounded in due process,” Prince wrote. “Unfortunately, that mechanism does not exist and so we are making this uncomfortable emergency decision alone.”
Cloudflare’s abuse policy says that the company has held “significant discussions” with policymakers to attempt to change the culture so that decisions come down from legal bodies and aren't left to tech companies. What’s needed, Cloudflare says, is a regulatory framework giving companies guidance on when to terminate security services and proper channels for vulnerable users like Keffals to report grave escalations of violence.
Cloudflare maintains that pressure campaigns are not the appropriate mechanism for “addressing problematic content online.”
Currently, Cloudflare follows the law and terminates security services “from being used by sanctioned organizations and individuals” or websites hosting illegal content like child sexual abuse material or content violating human trafficking laws.
Doxxing is already in some cases illegal. What’s missing, Cloudflare suggests, is legislation that blocks websites from hosting content that promotes doxxing. Starzak told Ars that some countries proposing such regulations have seen progress, but so far, no laws have been passed. Even so, Starzak said it's unclear how effective such laws would ultimately be. "[F]rom a regulatory regime standpoint, I think we're moving toward a better place," she said. "But again, verdict's still out about whether any of those would actually solve this problem or not."
Doxxing has become so pervasive across popular social media that the first large study on the trend in 2017 found that most platforms had already deployed abuse filters to combat the problem more quickly. But as a security services provider, Cloudflare doesn't have the clear guidelines that more heavily regulated content-hosting platforms do.
“While we believe we have an obligation to restrict the content that we host ourselves, we do not believe we have the political legitimacy to determine generally what is and is not online by restricting security or core Internet services,” Cloudflare’s policy states. “If that content is harmful, the right place to restrict it is legislatively.”
Drop Kiwi Farms’ final statement
In a final statement on the Drop Kiwi Farms site, Sorrenti wrote that Kiwi Farms' hosting service had yet to drop the forum but that Moon expected the termination to be imminent. “Our team will monitor the vestiges of Kiwi Farms in the coming weeks and months,” Sorrenti wrote. “It is highly unlikely that Kiwi Farms will resurface with enough resources to maintain the online presence they once had. As a result, this is the final statement of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign until further notice.”Until the law makes clear how companies like Cloudflare should respond to customers like Kiwi Farms, tension will remain between Internet users and the tech companies they expect to prevent abuse. And in extreme cases, that tension will escalate into online pressure campaigns, a mechanism that Cloudflare inherently opposes. In the meantime, the pressure campaign has taken credit for companies deciding to block access to Kiwi Farms.
“What we have accomplished in such a short time has never been done before in the entire history of the Internet,” Sorrenti wrote. “The countless victims of Kiwi Farms can sleep soundly knowing that the site is doomed, will never regain its former momentum, and will continue to bleed followers and become more and more irrelevant with each passing week.”
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