KiwiFarms Went Down. Now Everything is KiwiFarms.

It’s been a year since the famous hate forum went down, and the Internet is more hostile than ever to marginalized groups.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

A sign that says “POST NO HATE” on a graffiti’d wall. It will not be enforced.
I absolutely do not expect anyone to honor this message. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

This Sunday, September 3rd, the Washington Post reminded the world that it had been exactly one year since KiwiFarms — the Internet’s most notorious hate forum, which keeps a kill count of transgender people it has taunted to suicide — was dropped by its server, Cloudflare. At the time, this was reported as the “end” of KiwiFarms. The death announcements were premature.

The truth is that KiwiFarms has been up and down and up again for the past 12 months, booted from one server to the next. Its hate campaigns have drawn international attention from the media, and have targeted at least one lawmaker (conservative Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who was presumably chosen to counter allegations that KF was a right-wing forum) but there is still no clear legal pathway to taking it down for good.

Nor is KF without its defenders. As per WaPo, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit, has labeled the attempts to take the site down “censorship,” saying that “if the site in question were Reddit, or Planned Parenthood, or even EFF, the internet would be up in arms.”

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Responses (8)

What are your thoughts?

Small technical detail: Cloudflare doesn't act as a hosting provider for an organization's servers. It's a web security provider. It has become nearly ubiquitous in the web world, so when you lose access to its services, it can become easier to hack…...

Wow! Good to know and very sad! This is like the recent news about Turkey’s Volleyball team winning the championship and the hate they got… not the same but just similar. I wrote about it in my recent post if you wanna check it out🙏🏼✨

I’m glad you shared this! Thank you for your writing!!!

Well-said. Sites dedicated solely to hate speech do need to be de-platformed, but that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stopping transphobia.