#DropKiwiFarms

Overview

#DropKiwiFarms refers to an online campaign for DDoS protection company Cloudflare to remove lolcow gossip site Kiwi Farms from its clients. The campaign was spearheaded in August 2022 by prominent trans Twitch streamer and YouTuber Keffals after she was swatted and believed the perpetrators organized on Kiwi Farms. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was also swatted, and accused Kiwi Farms users of being the culprits. The swattings caused both women to call for the closing of Kiwi Farms, and the forum suffered from poor performance in the wake of the incidents. Though unconfirmed to be linked to Kiwi Farms, speculation swirled online around the events as some theorized the swatting of Greene may have been perpetrated by someone attempting to get the site shut down. In early September of 2022, Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, potentially killing the site for good.

Background

On August 5th, 2022, Keffals was reportedly doxxed and swatted at her home in London, Ontario, Canada. The news broke on August 9th, with Global News^[1] publishing a story on the incident. On that day, Keffals hosted a livestream on Twitch^[18] where she described the incident, saying she was woken up by an assault rifle in her face (excerpt shown below).

"The users had narrowed down my address to one in London, Ontario and one in Toronto, Ontario. The police sent SWAT teams to the addresses in both of those cities, including my home, because emails in my name were to local politicians making threats of committing mass violence. I’ve since talked to the elderly Italian man who shares my last name and lived at the address that got swatted in Toronto. He had nothing to do with this and innocent people are being hurt in an attempt to hurt me. This needs to stop."

According to Keffals, someone sent an email to every city councilor in her hometown impersonating her, claiming she had an illegal firearm, killed her mother and planned to carry out a mass shooting on cisgender people. Purportedly, the email was shown to Keffals and it used her deadname (the name she used before transitioning). She believes this was an attempt by a troll or trolls to get the police to humiliate her.

The police purportedly booked her in the station using her deadname and used that name the full time of the arrest, which Keffals perceived as evidence of prejudice towards trans people in the police force. The police also seized a number of items, including her streaming laptop. She also shared that a week earlier she had been the victim of an attempted swatting in Toronto. The video, reuploaded to YouTube, gained over 199,000 views in 10 days (shown below).

Global News then published an interview with Keffals on YouTube^[2] the next day, garnering over 13,600 views in nine days (shown below). On the same day, Keffals posted several tweets^[3][4] sharing news of the swatting that gained tens of thousands of likes, including screenshots of a report by CBC News that the conduct of the officers involved with the case.

Developments

Second Keffals Swatting Attempt

On August 18th, 2022, Keffals posted a video on YouTube^[5] where she revealed that she was the victim of another potential swatting attempt. According to the video, on August 14th, Keffals posted an image of a cat on her hotel bedsheet to her Discord server. Trolls allegedly began crossreferencing the patterns on the bedsheets with bedsheets at hotels around the Toronto area and determined where she was staying. They then began sending pizzas to her hotel room, after which she and her fiance checked out of the hotel quickly and moved to an undisclosed location.

The police then began investigating the incident as a hate crime, attempting to trace back the addresses of the people who sent the pizzas. Keffals claimed the swatting attempts were linked to Kiwi Farms, though unconfirmed. The video gained over 45,000 views in a day (shown below).

That same day on August 14th, Keffals posted a tweet^[6] tagging web hosting service Cloudflare and its CEO Matthew Prince, suggesting that Cloudflare should stop hosting and offering DDoS protection to Kiwi Farms due to the doxxing, garnering over 14,000 likes and 1,700 retweets in a day. Numerous media outlets reported on the story, many specifically mentioning Kiwi Farms, including Kotaku.^[7] Three days earlier, The Washington Post^[8] published an article about how Keffals, along with streamers iShowSpeed and Adin Ross were all swatted within the same week.

Prior to the swatting attempt on August 16th, 2022, numerous messages were posted to Keffals' Kiwi Farms^[9][10] page by users discussing the hotel sheets and sharing the alleged location of the hotel, with user HorseGirlSupremacy allegedly being one of the main perpetrators of the doxxing, offering evidence for Keffals' blaming the site's users (examples shown below).

Marjorie Taylor Greene Swatting

On August 23rd, 2022, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene reported that she had been swatted at her home. According to a police report^[11] obtained by the Daily Dot, a caller tipped the police to inform them that a man had been shot five times in a bathtub in Greene's home. Police arrived at Greene's home and confirmed no such incident had occurred. The tipper then called the police department again and, using a computer-generated voice, explained the motive for their false tip was their opposition to Greene's stances on transgender youth's rights. They also stated they were a Kiwi Farms user and said their username was AltisticRight, an admin on the site.

Some speculated the caller was lying about their identity in order to draw attention to Kiwi Farms. On August 24th, 2022, Twitter user @patriottakes^[12] noted that AltisticRight is a "far right troll" who is associated with other right-wing figures like Nick Fuentes and Baked Alaska. Considering this information, @patriottakes deemed it "doubtful" that the swatting was perpetrated by a "trans activist." The Daily Dot^[13] interpreted the history of AltisticRight's posting on Kiwi Farms as a suggestion "that the caller’s alleged motives and identity may have been fabricated."

On August 24th, Greene then appeared on Newsmax to discuss the incident. There, she discussed Kiwi Farms, perhaps under the impression it was a hub for militant left-wing activists, and said the site shouldn't exist (clip starts at 7:45 in the below video tweeted by Greene).

Hear the full story of what happened at my home late last night… pic.twitter.com/UTODt0bho0

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) August 24, 2022

"Isn't it concerning that such a website exists? Like, why does that even exist? That website needs to be taken down. There should be no business or any kind of service where you can target your enemy. That's absolutely absurd and this is the type of lawlessness that Democrats want all over the country."

Many found it ironic that Greene, historically and prominently against trans rights, had inadvertently joined calls started by a trans streamer to shut down Kiwi Farms. ^[14] On August 24th, YouTuber Rekieta Law published a video that criticized Greene, suggesting it was more likely that a Keffals supporter perpetrated the swatting in order to get Greene to call for Kiwi Farms' shutdown, and that she was falling for the bait (shown below).

Kiwi Farms' Response

After Greene's swatting, Kiwi Farms purportedly suffered from shutdowns, slow load times and overall poor performance. Kiwi Farms users are said to have vehemently denied swatting Greene on other channels.^[16] Keffals^[15] screenshot and posted a post from site owner Joshua Moon on her Twitter on August 25th, 2022, in which he expressed that the site's service provider had not returned emails from him in days (seen below). Moon also stated Greene and her representatives had not responded to attempts of communication. Moon expressed worry that the "powers that be" may find it easier to kill Kiwi Farms than track down the perpetrators of the swattings.

On August 26th, 2022, Keffals^[17] posted another message posted by Moon to her Twitter, who stated the site's prognosis is "better," as he had been in contact with multiple service providers to make a "Plan B and Plan C" if the site went down. The message included transphobic language and insinuated the "tide of public opinion" was turning against trans activists.

Campaign's Success

On September 3rd, 2022, Cloudflare blocked Kiwi Farms, citing escalating threats to human life appearing on the site. The decision came three days after the company said it wouldn't take action, comparing itself to a telephone service provider that wouldn't take away a person's ability to use the telephone despite that person saying horrible things.

Kiwi Farms then moved to a Russian domain, but that domain's DDoS provider, DDoS-Guard also quickly terminated services for Kiwi Farms. This led Joshua Moon to declare that the site's prospects were grim, foreseeing that Kiwi Farms would go the way of 8chan and Daily Stormer, two formerly prominent sites that became less prominent after they were deplatformed.

The blocking of Kiwi Farms by Cloudflare and DDoS-Guard caused Keffals to declare the #DropKiwiFarms campaign a success.

Search Interest

External References