Clara ‘Keffals’ Sorrenti is one of Kiwi Farm’s most well-known ‘lolcows’. As a candidly left-wing, neurodivergent trans-woman with a large Twitch and Twitter following, the 28-year was a textbook target for users on the site—and they were ruthless in their cyber-stalking. 

She recounted their harassment in an interview with VICE News: Over the course of six months, Kiwi Farms users managed to hack her social media and Uber Eats accounts, sending her orders through the app under her dead name (Gilbert, 2022). They exposed her address, threatened and doxxed her close friends and family members, and even sent SWAT teams and police officers to her home under false charges. The harassment got so bad that she felt she had to leave North America to escape it, moving abruptly to Northern Ireland, only to be doxxed once again not a week later (Gilbert, 2022). 

Fed up with the abuse and lack of response from law enforcement, Sorrenti created “Drop Kiwi Farms”: a campaign that advocated for Kiwi Farm’s cyber-security provider, Cloudflare, to stop servicing the site. 

Cloudflare is a US-Based web performance and service management company. As a security provider for Kiwi Farms, they protected the site from malicious bots, hackers, and DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks (Cloudflare, 2023).

On the official website for the “Drop Kiwi Farms” campaign, Sorrenti wrote that, by continuing to host Kiwi Farms, Cloudflare was taking the side of the forum’s users, allowing them to continue their tirade of abuse (Sorrenti, 2022). 

Cloudflare, recognizing the growing recognition the movement was getting, put out a community post on August 31, 2022, explaining its abuse policies. In the post, Cloudflare argued that, as a third-party provider, they didn’t have the right to decide what was and wasn’t protected on the internet—no matter how morally reprehensible that content may be (Prince & Starzak, 2022). They said that as long as the content wasn't illegal in some way, it wasn’t in their political jurisdiction to drop the site for ethical reasons (Prince & Starzak, 2022). 

However, just three days later, Cloudflare put out another post explaining that they had, albeit reluctantly, dropped Kiwi Farms.

“This is an extraordinary decision for us to make and, given Cloudflare's role as an Internet infrastructure provider, a dangerous one that we are not comfortable with” (Prince, 2022, para. 8).

In the post, Cloudflare explained that while they did not believe that cancelling the security services of their clients was in any way justifiable, regardless of what was being posted on the website, the pressure that the Drop Kiwi Farms movement had been putting on the site had caused Kiwi Farms users to "lash out in increasingly violent and targeted ways" (Prince, 2022). Recognising that the content was "becoming an imminent threat to human life", Cloudflare attempted to report it to local authorities but the police simply could not handle it (Prince, 2022). They had neither the resources nor the legislation to deal with the issue. Seeing no other choice, Cloudflare dropped the site. 

Still, they warned that this was by no means a good or permanent solution. 

“Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online, as the Daily Stormer and 8chan did themselves after we terminated them" (Prince, 2022, para. 10).

On the “Drop Kiwi Farms” site, Sorrenti wrote a post celebrating the movement's achievement, calling their results historic. But even she recognized that this wasn’t a permanent solution (Sorrenti, 2022). 

Unfortunately, Cloudflare was right. While Kiwi Farms may have struggled to find a security provider for some time, they were eventually able to get the site back up and running. As of As of April 8th, 2023, there are over 90,000 active users on kiwifarms.net.

The ‘hate-watching’ continues in full force.