Only 24 hours after it was forced to flee to Russian servers, it now looks like hate forum Kiwi Farms—which has been in the news once again for its role in harassment campaigns and threats against life—has seen its last days as a functional website.
After Cloudflare and hCaptcha dropped support for the site yesterday, Russian company DDoS-Guard has now done likewise. This has led Kiwi Farms owner Joshua Moon to issue a lengthy statement that’s riddled with conspiracy theories, while also facing up to the fact that this is the end of the site as he knows it.
“This meme about Russia being a free country is a joke,” Moon writes on Telegram, seemingly only realising this now. He then moves onto laying the blame for Kiwi Farm’s demise at everyone except its own toxic, criminal and reprehensible community:
This is an organized attack. There is a coalition of criminals trying to frame the forum for their behavior. These criminals provide opportunities for professional victims to amplify their message. Journalists canonize the crimes as the behavior of the forum itself, which becomes the effective truth for the general public.
This is a machine that was built up formerly against 8chan and activates any time the cathedral wants to test the new fronts of its censorship. It is a massive amalgamation of various interests. I am one person. The financial limitations aren’t even the real problem - the problem is, I am powerless alone. There is no amount of money I can throw to convince people to be brave and be free. This is just the reality of our country.
And what this machine will not accept is compromise. If I censored specific kinds of behavior, it would not matter. They don’t want a specific thing censored. They want the average person to be able to speak in channels where only specific thoughts are acceptable.
More importantly, they want to make it so that no small organization can host a service which threatens the cathedral. It used to be that one guy with a good idea could open a platform and be a Tom Anderson, Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Fulp, Christopher Poole, or Richard Kyanka. Take note these names are all from 10+ years ago. There are no new groundbreakers online anymore because breaking ground in the new Internet’s corporate parking lot is not allowed.
I do not see a situation where the Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate. It will either become a fractured shell of itself, like 8chan, or jump between hosts and domain names like Daily Stormer.
Ok buddy. It’s poignant here that he brings up 8chan and Daily Stormer, two other former bastions of internet hate that, after similar deplatforming action, are now hollow shells of their former selves, fragmented and difficult to access. Because that’s the fate that surely now awaits Kiwi Farms, something streamer and political commentator Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti—herself the most recent target of Kiwi Farms’ violent threats—points out in her own statement:
The campaign is over. We won.
After the announcement that Cloudflare would drop Kiwi Farms as a customer, the site came online again with a Russian domain and switched to DDoS-Guard. Less than 24 hours later, DDoS-Guard, a Russian company that specializes in DDoS protection, has also dropped Kiwi Farms. Their Russian domain is now offline, and Joshua Moon has stated “I do not see a situation where Kiwi Farms is simply allowed to operate. It will either become a fractured shell of itself like 8chan, or jump between hosts and domains like Daily Stormer”.
Many sites that have faced pressure campaigns to be deplatformed, like 8chan and Daily Stormer, are still online. They are nevertheless completely impotent. Whether or not we are able to completely remove Kiwi Farms from the internet is irrelevant to the fact that the goals of our campaign have not only been achieved, but have achieved more than we could have ever expected.
All the major corporations that provided the services to keep Kiwi Farms online have decided that Kiwi Farms poses a great risk. The CEO of Cloudflare has said that Kiwi Farms poses an “imminent and emergency threat to human life” and former assistant director of the FBI has claimed Kiwi Farms carries a “threat of domestic terror”. It has become very clear in the last week that there is no tolerance for this kind of hate, and millions of people have come together to celebrate their defeat.
FiberHub, the company that houses the servers Kiwi Farms is hosted on, has not made a statement. Joshua Moon believes that FiberHub will also drop them, as Kiwi Farms is now considered a terror threat and there is no benefit for any company to provide them service. Our team will monitor the vestiges of Kiwi Farms in the coming weeks and months. It is highly unlikely that Kiwi Farms will resurface with enough resources to maintain the online presence they once had. As a result, this is the final statement of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign until further notice.
What we have accomplished in such a short time has never been done before in the entire history of the Internet. The countless victims of Kiwi Farms can sleep soundly knowing that the site is doomed, will never regain it’s former momentum, and will continue to bleed followers and become more and more irrelevant with each passing week. We have done our part to honour people like Julie Terryberry, Chloe Sagal, and David Kirk Ginder (Near). Thank you all for helping me and every other person affected by Kiwi Farms seek justice. Today the world is a better place.
A huge congratulations are in order to the #DropKiwiFarms team, and everyone else who has worked so hard—and endured so much—over the years to reach this point today.