Pressure On Cloudflare To Drop Kiwi Farms Rises As Keffals Organizes Protest

Pressure on the content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company Cloudflare is mounting after streamer and YouTuber Keffals announced that she was organizing a protest against the company for providing services to the gossip site Kiwi Farms.

If anyone is interested, I am organizing a protest in front of the @Cloudflare office in San Francisco to ask them to drop Kiwifarms as a customer. Please retweet if you have friends in the bay area who want to help.

— keffals (@keffals) August 19, 2022

Keffals, a prominent and outspoken trans streamer, was the victim of a swatting earlier this month, as police (acting on a tip fabricated by her trolls), reportedly burst into her London, Ontario home and arrested her at gunpoint.

The incident caused Keffals to check into a hotel, which was then doxxed by an internet user who crosschecked the bedsheets shown in a picture of the hotel Keffals posted to her Discord with bedsheets used in Ontario-area hotels to discover her location and send her pizzas — a way of threatening her by letting her know that the people she was hiding from knew where she was. Police then began investigating her case as a hate crime.

In a video, Keffals blamed the hotel doxxing on Kiwi Farms. Days prior to the hotel doxxing, discussions of the bedsheets in her picture appeared on the site, leading her to believe users of the site were the culprits behind the pizzas. At the time of writing, however, it appears there is no evidence that users of Kiwi Farms were behind the swatting incident.

Kiwi Farms, a gossip site focused primarily on internet lolcows, has pages of threads dedicated to Keffals, with users there deadnaming her as they discuss her various tweets and controversies, including her "ratio arc." The site has been criticized as a host for users harassing and driving people to self-harm. Some have claimed the site has a "kill counter," as there have been three separate incidents in which people have allegedly committed suicide after harassment from Kiwi Farms users.

Kiwi Farms is protected by Cloudflare from DDoS attacks that could dramatically slow down the site or see it shut down completely. While people have taken issue with Cloudflare's support of Kiwi Farms in the past, Keffals' protest has heightened scrutiny on Kiwi Farms, causing it to trend on Twitter this afternoon.

Just read this and Keffals could have died based on the email that was sent, which said she had already killed someone. This cannot happen to more trans people. Kiwifarms must be taken down. https://t.co/fs9EZqAQ9U

— A. H. (@a_h_reaume) August 21, 2022

Hey TechCrunch</a>, any of you all writing about <a href="https://twitter.com/Cloudflare?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Cloudflare protecting the Nazi harassment and identity theft site Kiwifarms? It's been trending for a few days now, thought you might know more ?mikebutcher</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/arrington?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">arrington @zackwhittaker pic.twitter.com/q96gXlDegS

— ✶✶Madison✶✶🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ (@MBragiel) August 22, 2022

How about dropping Kiwifarms? Or are you guys a bunch of Nazi Supporters? Hiding behind limiting who can comment will not do you guys any good https://t.co/vmSY6u4W4w

— SafetyTheFlameWolf (@safetythewolf) August 21, 2022

At the time of writing, Cloudflare has not responded to the protests while its executives have moved to limit replies to their tweets.