There Are No Girls on the Internet - Kiwi Farms: The rise and fall of a hateful corner of the internet.

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Known for almost a decade of harassment, violence, and transphobia, the message board Kiwi Farms has effectively been shuttered.    INPUT-Tracking Chris Chan started Kiwi Farms. Will her arrest be its end? https://www.inputmag.com/culture/tracking-chris-chan-started-kiwi-farms-will-her-arrest-be-its-end   MSNBC- My experience as a target of Kiwi Farms speaks to a scary truth about internet culture: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/kiwi-farms-made-internet-more-dangerous-trans-people-n1298815   VERGE - How Cloudflare got Kiwi Farms Wrong: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/6/23339889/cloudflare-kiwi-farms-content-moderation-ddos   Join our newsletter: Tangoti.com/newsletter  Want to support the show? (thank you!) Subscribe, tell a friend, leave a review, or buy some merch at There Are No Girls on the Internet’s store: TANGOTI.COM/STORE Say hello at [e-mail] omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. So I've been wanting to do an episode about Kiwi Farms for a while now, but it's a little bit like Beetlejuice. You know, I didn't want to go saying their name too many times and having them wind up at my door. I should say right up front that this is going to be some pretty dark stuff. We're going to be talking about things like harassment, suicide, incest, and honestly, it's the kind of stuff I try to avoid talking too much about on the show.

Now, you know I love the Internet, but these are the pockets of the internet that I just don't even like thinking about. I'll get into this more in a little bit. But that inclination, you know, the inclination to just not think about it or talk about it, that I have, is actually part of the problem. Last week, the website Kiwi Farms was essentially shuttered. So I think it's time to discuss the havoc that Kiwi Farms waged on marginalized people on the internet, the successful campaign to stop them, and what it all means.

So first of all, if you don't know what Kiwi Farms is, at its core, Kiwi Farms is an old school message board website. It was started in 2013 by Joshua Moon, who was a former administrator of the website 8chan. Now, the original Kiwi Farms origin story is also pretty dark. It was originally started as a message board to track the trans amateur cartoonist called Christine Weston Chandler in 2008. Now, originally, the site was called CWC-K-I, an acronym for Christine Weston-Chandler's

name, pronounced as Quicky. So Chandler used to make these really crude Sonic the Hedgehog Pikachu hybrid cartoons chronicling her life as an unemployed person with autism. And Joshua Moon made it his mission to document her entire digital footprint from Facebook post to items on her Etsy storefront. And this, this obsessive documenting of a trans person's online life and behavior would go on to become kiwi farms. To kiwi farms, people like Chandler are what they call lull cows, or an LOL cow, which is a person that they can essentially stalk whose behavior will provide the milk of being able to laugh at them and harass them.

Now, Christine Chandler's story gets very, very dark. It involves her being arrested for sex crimes against her mother. And if you want to know more, there is a great piece in input that goes into great detail about the origins of Kiwi Farms and Chandler, which I'll put in the description. So Kiwi Farms was basically created to harass people on the internet, most of whom are marginalized in some way.

Usually, Kiwi Farms coordinates harassment against trans people or non-binary people, but also feminists, neurodivergent people, people who are like really online or considered online figures, or people who they perceive as deviant in some way. And I know I say this a lot on the podcast,

but their harassment wasn't just a thing happening on the internet. It often had a really dangerous and violent real-world component. This includes tactics like revealing their targets in real-life addresses or contact information through doxing. Check out our episode on Doxing 101 for more information in how this works. They also engage in a pretty dangerous tactic called swatting.

Swatting is a tactic associated with online gaming where someone calls law enforcement and reports a bogus crime happening at the address of the target, with the hopes that law enforcement will rush in and potentially open fire. Kiwi Farms has a long documented history of really dangerous IRL harassment. Journalist Caitlin Burns wrote about her experience

being doxed on Kiwi Farms for NBC. Her piece is in the description, and it's a must read. She says, at the time that she started being harassed by Kiwi Farms, she was a young transjournalist with a small but growing online audience. And a friend of hers was moderated. Kiwi Farms and saw a post that someone made on the website about obtaining her PII or personal identifying information to docks her. And it turned out that they have gotten this information on a really old Twitter account where she tweeted her location. And that was all they

needed to track down her name change documents and contact information. So pretty scary stuff. In her piece, she goes on to describe how once you're on the radar of a website like Keebee Farms, it basically gets into your head and that is the whole point. She writes, this of course is the entire point of the site to get in your head. As a target of Kiwi Farms, the more you let in that you thought about them, the happier they would get. For trans people in particular, who are more likely to have an online social life after friends and family abandoned them after transitioning, Kiwi Farms was especially dangerous.

So she goes on to talk about how, because of these attacks, she basically has given up the luxury of really being her true self on the internet. You know, she doesn't post about her dating life or her personal life. If she wants to tweet anything that she knows will get her undue attention, she doesn't. She writes, No other force in the history of my life has restricted my free speech as much as Kiwi Farms did. And I think this really raises a key point. So many people use free speech as the reason to keep sites like Kiwi Farms up.

But what can often go overlooked are the ways that allowing sites like Kiwi Farms to operate like they do actually suppresses the free speech of the people they target, who tend to be already marginalized. Kiwi Farms has also been linked to deaths by suicide. Just a quick note to say that I say linked to with some intention. The foundation for reporting on suicide says that it's important not to oversimplify or speculate on the reason for suicides, so I don't want to do that.

But I will say that the people who died specifically mentioned being harassed by Kiwi Farms before their deaths. In 2016, 19-year-old Julia Terry Berry died by suicide after being targeted by Kiwi Farms. In 2018, a trans game developer named Chloe Sagal died by suicide after being harassed by Kiwi Farms. In a piece from Oregon Live, her friend, A.J. Luxon said that one factor that made it much harder for her to get help was that whenever she talked about suicide, Kiwi Farmers

members would report her Facebook page and get it locked down. This happened multiple times in the month prior to her death. And just last year, a highly respected non-binary Nintendo emulator developer who went by NIR died by suicide. Neer was kind of prolific in the gaming community. They were known for scanning over a thousand Super Nintendo games for long-term preservation and to accurately emulate the gameplay. Before Neer's death, they offered Kiwi Farms founder Joshua Moon their entire life savings.

About $150,000 to remove a threat about them from the site. Moon refused. The last thread that NIR posted on Twitter chronicles the abuse. they faced from Kiwi Farms, and it is heartbreaking. Neer wrote, the honest truth is I've been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now, it's always hurt me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan, but Kiwi Farms has

made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic to attacking and doxing my friends and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction. from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible. I have tried changing in every way possible as they wanted me in order to get this to stop, but it just never does. Every few months, it's something new. A new docs, a new thread, a new tangent. It's just too much to bear any longer. The internet is not a game. It's real life. I'm a real person. This stuff really hurts. I poured my entire life into this. I have no real life friends. I have no other reason for being. Only this.

and now I have nothing. It's too late for me, but I pray that someone at some point will do something about that website. There's too many people suffering and no one seems to care because we're all relative nobody's online and they know that.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Keeby Farms was also put on a lot of people's radars after the Christchurch terror attack in 2019 where a gunman entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and killed 51 people while they were at worship and injured 40 more. After the Christchurch terror attack, Kiwi Farms founder, Joshua Moon, refused a request from

law enforcement to provide data of users who had posted videos of the attack. He responded to an email from a detective calling the request for help a joke, labeling New Zealand a, quote, small irrelevant island nation and a shithole country with F-sler laws. So this is a bit of a case of strange bedfellows. But after Kiwi Farms recently attacked Republican congressperson Marjorie Taylor-Ga, Green, she called for Kiwi Farms to be shut down. Marjor Taylor Green was swatted by a Kiwi Farms member. Police got a call about a man who had been shot in a bathtub at her address, and when they arrived, they realized the call was fake. Authorities later got a call from a person

using a computer-generated voice who said they were a Kiwi Farms member and that they had tried to swat Green in connection with her stance on transgender youth rights. Now, given that Kiwi Farms has used this very same model, you know, calling in both. and attributing them to trans people in order to harass and attack them, I think it's fair that we should be skeptical of the claim that the person who did this was actually doing so out of some kind of affinity for trans use. So basically, Kiwi Farms was this horrible, cesspool internet website that coordinated dangerous harassment against trans folks,

non-binary folks, and other marginalized people on the internet. Which brings us to Keffels. So who is Keffels? Keffles is a Canadian Twitch stream. and trans activist named Clara Sorrenti. She had her personal information docksed by Kiwi Farms and was also swatted by them last month. That swatting attack sounds terrifying.

She was arrested and detained for over 10 hours after someone spoofed her identity and sent emails to local politicians threatening mass violence in her name. So after this happened, she fled from her home and started living out of a hotel. She posted a picture that happened to show the hotel bedding and people on Kiwi Farms were able to determine what hotel she was staying in

just from that one photo by cross-referencing which hotels used that specific type of betting. They sent pizzas to her hotel room under her dead name, and eventually she ended up leaving the hotel and fleeing the country for her own safety. Kepples started a campaign to have Kiwi Farms dropped by Cloudflare. So what is Cloud Fair? Cloud Fair is a content delivery network or a CDN. Basically, long story short, Cloudfair is a company that people use to securely run websites on the internet. The kind of services they provide are essential for protecting Kiwi Farms and keeping them up and running.

And this is what the drop Kiwi Farms campaign targeted in order to get them shut down. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman helped make you funny. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform?

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Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So we were talking about Kiwi Farms, a website on the internet known for coordinating harassment against trans people. And after a dangerous hate campaign against Twitch streamer Keffles, in which she had to flee her home, and then later the country, she fought back by starting a campaign targeting the company Cloudflare to drop Kiwi Farms. CloudFare services were basically protecting Kiwi Farms

from denial of service attacks, which are cyber attacks that can take a site offline by overwhelming them with bot traffic. And CloudFair protected Kiwi Farms by hiding the identity of their website hosting company so that people couldn't pressure that company to take action against the site. So CloudFair is pretty notorious

for just kind of brushing aside content moderation questions. But they have taken action twice before. They pulled their protections for the website 8chan and for the Nazi website, The Daily Stormer. Now, because of Kafalis' large Twitch streaming audience, her campaign to get CloudFair to drop Kiwi Farms grew in support very quickly. Cloudfare initially just kind of dragged their feet

and basically said that they would not drop Kiwi Farms. Cloudfair put out a statement saying, quote, some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks and knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires in homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. So it's kind of interesting that Cloudflare's position is that they do not want to be the arbiters of who they provide their protection services to. Because it's also worth noting that they did drop services

for the website Switter back in 2018, a social media website popular with sex workers. So basically, they're saying that they want to help prevent denial of service attacks for everyone and that that will make the internet better for all of us. But, interestingly enough, in a really great piece for Verge, Casey Newton reports that Sergey P. USA Tuk, who was convicted of running a denial of service for a higher scheme, said that Cloudfair actually profited from the exact kind of schemes that he was convicted of running by basically helping him to do it and then turning around in selling their protection to his victims. He writes in a blog post, CloudFair is a fire department that prides itself on putting out fires at any house, regardless of the individual that lives there. What they forgot to mention is that they are actively lighting those fires and making money from putting them out. So in my opinion, whenever a tech company says they can't do something, what they're actually really saying is they don't want to do something because it will be inconvenient or costly for them to do so. And Keffel's campaign pretty much proved that to be correct. in a statement from Kauffalois' drop Kiwi Farms campaign website,

they basically called them out on it, saying, Cloud Fair maintains the fiction that they can be a neutral provider of services, but there is nothing neutral about helping maintain a site that leads to real-world violence, harassment, and harm. If you protect a person's ability to commit heinous crimes, you bear responsibility for those crimes. You cannot pretend to be the neutral bodyguard of a killer.

And eventually, after all of the pressure that Kafalis generated and organized against Cloudfare, the CEO of Cloudfare reversed course and dropped Kiwi Farms, eventually saying that the site represented an imminent and emergency threat to human life, which led to a chain reaction of other companies dropping them as well. According to a statement from the Drop KeeV Farms campaign website, after the announcement that Cloudfair would drop Kiwi Farms as a customer, the site came online again with a Russian domain and switched to DDoS Guard.

Less than 24 hours later, DDoS Guard, a Russian company that specializes in denial of service attack protection, also dropped Kiwi Farms. Their Russian domain is now offline, and Joshua Moon has stated, I do not see a situation where Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate. It will either become a fractured shell of itself like Ait Shan or jump between hosts and domains like Daily Stormer. So Kevles actually did it. after almost a decade of harassing people and targeting people on the internet, she took them down. So I want to talk a little bit about why this campaign was successful. First, the drop Kiwi Farms campaign is a really good reminder about the business end of hate.

Keeby Farms is not just a standalone website acting in a vacuum. Companies like Cloud Fair support, protect, and prop up dangerous websites like Keebe Farms, and they do so for profit. after Cloud Fair dropped Kiwi Farms, H-Cathra, a company that basically provides that service where you go to a website and you have to pick out all the different pictures that contain stoplights or motorcycles in order to prove that you're not a bot,

followed suit. Now, these are all services provided by companies that are essential to keep websites operating. And I'm sure that many of these companies would probably like to not be associated with the illegal, dangerous behavior of some of the websites that they are responsible for keeping running.

Like, for instance, Cloudfair's Twitter bio says that they have an ambitious goal to help build a better internet. Now, can they really say that if they're providing protection for a website that is making people, particularly people who are already marginalized, fear for their lives and safety? Many of the people that Kiwi Farms target are vulnerable or marginalized. And they might not have a lot of support. You know, if they're queer or trans, it's not uncommon that they might not have strong relationships with family or other traditional support systems. Or if a lot of their friends

are friends they've made on the internet, but the internet is also where they're being attacked, it can really erode whatever support system they've managed to use the internet to build for themselves and isolate them from that support. So there is a saying in the black community, if somebody ever says to you, you got the right one,

or if they say to you, you got the wrong one, you have picked the wrong person to mess with. And I think this campaign was successful, in part because in messing with Keppels, they had the right one and they had the wrong one, as we say. Kavales happened to have a lot of support.

She had built up a big audience base of people who liked her streams and would help amplify her campaign against Kiwi farms. She also had the financial means to be able to move for her safety. And I think it's a great indicator of what happens when the victims and targets of this kind of harassment are listened to, taken seriously and supported. someone who did not have this kind of support might not have been able to wage a successful campaign

that would ultimately bring down kiwi farms because they'd just be trying to survive, which is precisely why kiwi farms target people who are already vulnerable or marginalized to begin with. So what does this all mean? Well, in my line of work, when we're talking about hateful, harmful, violent pockets of the internet, people often ask, well, if we take these sites down,

won't they just go further underground and be that much harder to monitor? And the answer is actually really clear that de-platforming works. It is successful in taking away some of the power of these darker corners of the Internet. Listen, we will probably never completely rid the Internet of websites like Kiwi Farms

or the kinds of people who use them to cause harm. But de-platforming makes it that much harder for those sites to operate. In a statement after Kiwi Farms was dropped by Cloudflare, Keffles said, many sites that have faced pressure campaigns to be deplatformed like 8chan and the Daily Stormer are still online. They are nevertheless completely impotent.

Whether or not we are able to completely remove Kiwi farms from the internet is irrelevant to the fact that the goals of our campaign have not only been achieved, but have been achieved more than we could have ever expected. I also think it sets a really powerful precedent that companies who aid and abet people hell-bent on using the internet to cause this kind of harm should be on notice that they cannot

do this and continue to say that they are neutral parties. You know, when people are dying because of what you're doing, you're not neutral. When people are having to flee the country for their own safety because of what you're doing, you're not neutral. And I think that's a really powerful and clear precedent that, you know, statements about how you want to do good and build a better internet or donating to the right kinds of charities or causes, while you continue to profit off of this kind of harm is not going to be acceptable. The only thing that it's going to be acceptable is accountability. So all of that to say, as gross as I find even thinking about sites like kiwi farms, we cannot ignore them as tempting as that is. Because when we

ignore them, we just allow them to fester and grow and become more powerful and more tolerated. And in talking about kiwi farms, I think it can actually be kind of a hopeful story. Because I think it actually demonstrates that we really can change the internet to be a healthier and safer place for trans people. It's a clear example of what happens when we imagine that things can be better than they are and actually making that dream a reality. Now, our safety online should not come down to the decisions made by a handful of rich white tech dudes. But if it does, our voices can be way more powerful than theirs. So what do you think about the whole Kiwi Farms thing? This was meant to be a summary. There is a lot more to say about it.

We're going to be doing a follow-up episode, so stay tuned for that. But hit me up and let me know what you think. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

Tara Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, write and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from Iheart Radio, check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.