The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website
For a year, a former Kiwi Farms user worked with transgender engineers to keep the stalker site offline. Still, the website has endured. In the past week, a group of internet sleuths, trans engineers and activists have chased Kiwi Farms across servers and networks around the globe, successfully persuading more than two dozen companies to drop the site. They joined forces with Liz Fong-Jones and launched a dogged campaign to keep the site offline. After one of the site’s targets, “Clay” who spoke on the condition that he be identified by a pseudonym to avoid retribution, joined the group to fight for the site's future. He pointed to Frederick Brennan, the creator of 8chan, who called for it to be taken offline after it played a role in mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso. The experience showed that top-tier providers were willing to prioritize enforcing their acceptable use policies. There are less than 20 Tier 1 ISPs in the world, and they get a ton of complaints: Spam.
Published : 2 years ago by Nitasha Tiku in Tech
But in the week that followed, Kiwi Farms scrambled to stay alive, jumping from Russian servers to a Ukrainian hosting service to VanwaTech, a Vancouver, Wash.-based hosting and security company infamous for providing refuge to 8chan, a message board notorious for white-supremacist content. As it became increasingly clear that Kiwi Farms would not go down without a fight, “Clay” — who spoke on the condition that he be identified by a pseudonym to avoid retribution — joined forces with Liz Fong-Jones, one of Kiwi Farms’s fiercest adversaries, and launched a dogged campaign to keep the site offline.
Over the past year, their little group of internet sleuths, trans engineers and activists has methodically chased Kiwi Farms across servers and networks around the globe, successively persuading more than two dozen companies to drop the site. Despite this laborious undertaking — described exclusively to The Washington Post — the site has endured, showing up for months at a time, sometimes as a “mirror” of itself on an entirely different URL or as a foreign domain in countries such as Poland.
Clay had been a member of Kiwi Farms in his teens. He was bored, seeking community, pressured by his friends and going through a libertarian phase, he said. But following the suicide of one of the site’s targets, he began to push back on the forum’s creed that its victims weren’t human. He withdrew from the site after he saw Kiwi Farms members turn their talents for doxing and harassment on other members.
His goal in joining Fong-Jones and Lorelai’s group was to help the forum’s users, he told The Post. He pointed to Frederick Brennan, the creator of 8chan who called for that site to be taken offline after it played a role in mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso. Brennan, he said, “wanted to free [the] user base of that site from being radicalized, from going down a darker path. And that’s what I’m sort of doing here.”
Clay could translate this language. He also could show how Kiwi Farms users migrated to Discord servers, where they were more explicit about planning attacks. He led activists to the threads most rife with racism and calls for violence. And he confirmed the trolls’ habit of using the phrase “in Minecraft” to pretend an illegal activity, such as revealing the Social Security numbers of their targets, was just something they did in the online game.
For Fong-Jones, it was a wake-up call. There are less than 20 Tier 1 ISPs in the world, and they get a ton of complaints: Spam. Malware. Harmful content. By and large, they try to stay out of such disputes, preferring to assume they are doing business with reputable companies. But the Zayo experience showed that — if Fong-Jones could reach the right people — top-tier providers were willing to prioritize enforcing their acceptable use policies.