How Journalists Botched Their Coverage Of #DropKiwiFarms

You can sympathize with the person you are covering without becoming their PR lackey

Hello! A bit of housekeeping: Some of you may already know this, but Blocked and Reported is going on tour next month. 

October 22 — Unconfirmed, but likely a show at a university in New England — stay tuned!

October 24 — Boston, Mass.

October 25 — NYC (sold out, but apparently they reserve some tickets for walk-ins at the last minute — or check the site on the off chance there were cancellations and some opened up)

October 29 — Arlington, Va. (first show sold out, tickets still available for late show)

I would obviously love to see any of you at these shows. I’m also giving a solo talk at the University of Wyoming early next month and another at MIT in November. The one in Laramie is public, Monday, October 3 at 5:00 p.m. in the Union Yellowstone Ballroom. It is about my book rather than internet drama. What a relief!

It’s tempting to look for easy answers to complex problems. But what if trendysolutions to pressing social issues actually hinder the progress we’re trying to achieve? Join us for a live conversation with the author of The Quick Fix. We’ll discuss the challenges of research in an overwhelming media landscape, and how to be responsible information consumers and adept critical thinkers. All are welcome!

I really like live talks and events and I’m hoping to ramp things up on that front, so if you have a connection to a university or venue or conference and think I/we would be a good fit, you know where to find me.

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A few times a year I get deeply obsessed with a story, and that happened this month. The story is #DropKiwiFarms. Despite its outward appearance as little more than inscrutable (and loathsome) Internet Drama, it is actually quite an important story about free speech, internet culture, and how journalism (dys)functions.

I’d offer a few news links to summarize the basic facts, but the reporting has been so bad and so credulous that I’m not really comfortable linking out on this, and will provide a short summary instead, keeping links to a minimum. We went loooong on this on Blocked and Reported, in two episodes (voluminous links there if you want to dig deeper), but this post will be crisper and more argumentative — a lot of this stuff is just easier to understand and process in print, especially if you are coming to this from a place of little prior knowledge of these figures and controversies (which also means you’re living a better life than I am).

I’m going to make sure this following section is public, but everything after that will be for premium subscribers only.

The Basic, Just-The-Facts Rundown That You Can Skip If You’re Familiar With This Story Already

Clara Sorrenti, a.k.a. Keffals, is a 28-year-old (according to the internet) leftist political Twitch streamer usually based in Canada. In early August she was “swatted” — someone sent a threatening email to the London, Ontario local government “from” her, leading to a terrifying, heavily armed response from law enforcement. She was taken into custody and her and her partner’s computer equipment and phones were taken away. Then she was released and her stuff was given back. 

Sorrenti launched a GoFundMe and raised $100,000. She also launched #DropKiwiFarms, a hashtag geared at pressuring Cloudflare to no longer offer DDoS protection to the website Kiwi Farms (I will define that shortly). Along the way, she experienced more doxxing and harassment, and eventually moved to Europe for a bit, where she stayed with her friend and fellow streamer Ellen Murray in Belfast and experienced yet more doxxing, calls for the cops to come where she was staying (though luckily not a full-blown swatting in this case), and an apparent stalker: Someone posted a very creepy image from outside Ellen’s apartment with a threatening note that had multiple Kiwi Farms references. (That image, and the kid who said he posted it, was the subject of our second episode on #DropKiwiFarms.)

There’s some background on Kiwi Farms here — I’d quibble with some of the details and claims but the history is correct, I think — but the short version is that it is a site where people gather to make fun of what they call “lolcows,” or laugh-out-loud cows, which are basically just ridiculous internet figures. 

Kiwi Farms is a very toxic place with a slur-laden argot — it has a lot of folks originally from the legendary/infamous Something Awful forums and the chan sites — but it also contains weirdly meticulous records of the online activities of a group of individuals who you will really only encounter if 1) you cross them on Twitter or some other social media platform; 2) you are already familiar with their internet subcommunity; or 3) you are a journalist or other type of researcher interested in internet bullshit [raises hand tiredly]. Let’s say you get in a fight with a communist furry named @ACABMarxPaw (I haven’t had enough coffee to come up with a more clever example). It’s a small account but a hyperactive one. You’re just blown away at how… off this person is. They have latched onto you and are tweeting at you over and over, obsessively, accusing you of being a fascist because you suggested that in some cases it’s okay to call the cops on someone. With a nervous chuckle, you hit the block button. You try to get back to work but the encounter stuck with you — it escalated so quickly! Eventually, your curiosity gets the best of you and, with a deep and world-weary sigh, you enter a stream of characters into Google that probably shouldn’t exist: @-A-C-A-B-M-A-R-X-P-A-W.

The only thing you’re likely to find is their posts on Twitter and elsewhere. Unless, of course, they have a Kiwi Farms page — in which case you might find hundreds of posts digging into their online history, with details about their real-world life and identity, online and offline associations, and so on. It’s a very strange feeling; you have come across a website that closely monitors someone who 99.999999% of the world wouldn’t think to be worth closely monitoring. 

Some folks call this “stalking,” including in the New York article I linked to above. I don’t think that’s a useful term. You can stalk someone in real life without them knowing it, but cyberstalking is defined as “the repeated use of electronic communications to harass or frighten someone, for example by sending threatening emails” — that is, you reveal yourself to them. Because what is “stalking” someone online if you don’t interact with them? It’s just… reading what they post. I guess there might be weird examples where you, like, gain access to their private online spaces but don’t reach out to them, but often when people accuse Kiwi Farms of “cyberstalking” or “stalking,” usually what they mean is “they keep an eye on this person and post a lot of information about them to Kiwi Farms.”

That’s where this all gets complicated. Kiwi Farms does have fairly strong internal norms against interacting with the targets in real life (“touching the poo”), or harassing them in ways that extend beyond the (often colorfully nasty) posts on the site itself. But as I pointed out on the pod, there’s an element of implausible deniability here: The longest threads on Kiwi Farms extend for literally thousands of pages and tens of thousands of posts, and include users mocking these individuals in the most colorful ways imaginable. “I’m going to kill this person” is frowned upon and, as far as I can tell, will generally get the post downvoted to hell and removed by a mod; “this person is so miserable and fucked up they should end it all, already” is just a normal Wednesday afternoon post. There were at least 50,000 posts about Sorrenti on the site before the two threads in question were locked. The idea that a website that focuses and incentivizes so much hate doesn’t contribute to real-world harassment is laughable, because if even a tiny fraction of Kiwi Farms’ regular users violated the internal norms in question — which they could do without anyone knowing — that could constitute a significant amount of harassment. Plus, anyone can read a Kiwi Farms thread, even if they don’t have an account on the site.

And the targets are often much smaller fries than Sorrenti (who herself isn’t even that popular a Twitch streamer, and who most people reading this probably haven’t heard of prior to this controversy). Kiwi Farms really does sometimes get obsessed with tiny, insignificant targets, many of them with severe mental health problems. It is not an easy place to feel any sympathy toward.

The owner of Kiwi Farms, Joshua Moon, who during the present controversy has taken on the aspect of a supervillain plotting from afar (he lives in Serbia if I’m remembering right, but don’t quote me on that), often emphasizes that nothing that goes on at Kiwi Farms is illegal, and I think he’s almost certainly correct about that. For very important, well-established reasons, a threat posted to a website by some user can’t really be used to cause legal problems for the site itself — if things were otherwise, it would destroy the internet instantly — and I think the fact that violent threats are usually taken down quickly from Kiwi Farms makes it harder to come up with a legal theory for why the site should be shut down. And you know what’s also legal, at least usually? Doxxing — that is, posting the address, phone number, and so on of someone on the internet. Kiwi Farms does that a lot. Some users are uncomfortable with it but big threads always seem to include doxxing. Sometimes KFers take it upon themselves to dox the targets, and sometimes they paste information posted on other sites onto the target’s KF thread.

A lot of horrible, virulent speech is legal! Especially in the States. You can insult someone with transphobic slurs, mock their looks, mock their mental health conditions, mock their family drama, post their address, post the address of their annoying online friend you don’t like, and so on. All this speech is given textbook First Amendment protection, with the exception of illegally acquired information.

The fact that vile speech is First Amendment-protected, however, doesn’t mean that private companies have to participate in publishing it online, or keeping it there. This is where Cloudflare, the company Sorrenti began pressuring to drop Kiwi Farms, comes in. Cloudflare is one of the premier companies offering security and performance services for websites. Perhaps most importantly, it offers a shield against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. According to Cloudflare, “A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.” These sorts of attacks are illegal under U.S. law.

I am fuzzy on the technical specifics, but it’s harder to find reliable DDoS protection than it is to find a web host. To the best of my understanding, Kiwi Farms is likely always to be able to put its website online. The question is whether it will be able to fend off the inevitable attacks that follow, but there aren’t all that many options for companies that can do so. And those companies can always be pressured to say “no thanks” to Kiwi Farms. So Sorrenti’s argument was that Cloudflare should drop its protection and allow illegal attacks to take down Kiwi Farms.

This worked. The entire mainstream media agreed, showering her in positive coverage that presented #DropKiwiFarms as something of a no-brainer. At first, Cloudflare put out a principled statement which noted that “more than 20 percent of the web relies directly on Cloudflare’s services” and “Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn’t respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character.” (I guess in this analogy the residents aren’t fleeing, but instead are yelling threats at and personal information about @ACABMarxPaw out the window as everything collapses around them.) Days later, a 180: a new statement announcing that things had gotten so bad, so abusive, so dangerous, that Kiwi Farms had to go. The site’s continuing existence posed an “immediate threat to human life,” so Cloudflare was withdrawing its services. Hackers welcome! Anyone who went to Kiwi Farms was blocked and met with incredibly alarming language: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.” On top of that, Kiwi Farms was deleted from the Internet Archives, which, as The Verge points out, is quite unusual — the site’s policy is usually only to delete sites whose own owners ask for them to be scrubbed. 

That’s more or less where we’re at. Kiwi Farms has been jumping from domain to domain, and Sorrenti pressures any site offering DDoS protection to, you know, #DropKiwiFarms. Every new chapter in the saga is followed breathlessly by the media (a Vice film crew is or was following Sorrenti around), and Sorrenti has a moderately sized but very online and very motivated squad of activists and journalists who will rain online hellfire upon anyone who 1) questions the campaign in any way, 2) points out inaccuracies in her or the media’s claims about Kiwi Farms, or 3) attempts to raise broader free speech and open internet issues in even a general manner. (I had a bad time as a result.)

Thursday, after direct pressure from Sorrenti and her followers, Kiwi Farms’ latest security provider, DiamWall, folded, and what had been the most well-functioning iteration of the site since Cloudflare’s decision went down not long thereafter. Moon, for his part, has been consistent in his messaging since that decision: He thinks that in the long run, he’ll be able to prevail and a stable, speedy version of Kiwi Farms will be accessible. In the meantime, it’s been touch and go — accessing the site has sometimes been tricky or impossible, and sometimes even the onion site has been offline. But the site has generally been available over the last couple weeks, if you know where to look and have a little technical savvy, just in a vastly diminished state that would likely repel curious normies unfamiliar with the site, and probably (I’m guessing) even some regular users who don’t care enough about it to jump through the hoops of slow service, disconnects, and constant domain-hopscotching.

Okay, those are the basics as I understand them. On to some editorializing.

The Journalism About Kiwi Farms And Its History Has Been Extremely Lazy And Negligent