There Are No Girls on the Internet - September 14, 2022


Kiwi Farms： The rise and fall of a hateful corner of the internet.

Topics
Kiwi Farms harassment
Why trad wife content is taking over social media right now (with Under the Influence's Jo Piazza) How do we stay optimistic about technology？

Episode Stats


Length

25 minutes

Words per minute

170.7

Word count

4,415

Sentence count

235

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
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00:01:42.200 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:01:47.260 So I've been wanting to do an episode about kiwi farms for a while now,
00:01:50.940 but it's a little bit like Beetlejuice. You know, I didn't want to go saying their name
00:01:54.800 too many times and having them wind up at my door. I should say right up front that
00:01:58.940 this is going to be some pretty dark stuff. We're going to be talking about things like
00:02:02.560 harassment, suicide, incest, and honestly, it's the kind of stuff I try to avoid talking
00:02:08.340 too much about on the show. Now, you know I love the internet, but these are the pockets
00:02:13.180 of the internet that I just don't even like thinking about. I'll get into this more in
00:02:17.260 a little bit, but that inclination, you know, the inclination to just not think about it
00:02:22.480 or talk about it, that I have, is actually part of the problem.
00:02:26.960 Last week, the website KiwiFarms was essentially shuttered.
00:02:30.580 So I think it's time to discuss the havoc that KiwiFarms waged on marginalized people
00:02:34.720 on the internet, the successful campaign to stop them, and what it all means.
00:02:39.020 So first of all, if you don't know what KiwiFarms is, at its core, KiwiFarms is an old-school
00:02:44.180 message board website.
00:02:45.680 It was started in 2013 by Joshua Moon, who was a former administrator of the website
00:02:50.920 8chan.
00:02:52.100 Now, the original Kiwi Farms origin story is also pretty dark.
00:02:55.880 It was originally started as a message board to track the trans amateur cartoonist called Christine Weston Chandler in 2008.
00:03:04.080 Now, originally, the site was called CWCKI, an acronym for Christine Weston Chandler's name, pronounced as Quickie.
00:03:11.880 So Chandler used to make these really crude Sonic the Hedgehog Pikachu hybrid cartoons chronicling her life as an unemployed person with autism.
00:03:22.540 And Joshua Moon made it his mission to document her entire digital footprint from Facebook posts to items on her Etsy storefront. 0.69
00:03:31.520 And this, this obsessive documenting of a trans person's online life and behavior would go on to become Kiwi Farms. 0.55
00:03:40.500 To Kiwi Farms, people like Chandler are what they call lolcals, or an LOL cow, which is a person that they can essentially stalk, whose behavior will provide the milk of being able to laugh at them and harass them.
00:03:54.040 Now, Christine Chandler's story gets very, very dark.
00:03:57.900 It involves her being arrested for sex crimes against her mother.
00:04:00.900 And if you want to know more, there is a great piece in Input that goes into great detail about the origins of Kiwi Farms and Chandler, which I'll put in the description.
00:04:10.900 So Kiwi Farms was basically created to harass people on the Internet, most of whom are marginalized in some way.
00:04:17.900 Usually, Kiwi Farms coordinates harassment against trans people or non-binary people, 0.92
00:04:22.180 but also feminists, neurodivergent people, people who are like really online or considered
00:04:28.400 online figures, or people who they perceive as deviant in some way. And I know I say this a lot
00:04:34.340 on the podcast, but their harassment wasn't just a thing happening on the internet. It often had
00:04:39.980 a really dangerous and violent real-world component. This includes tactics like revealing
00:04:45.400 their targets in real life addresses or contact information through doxing. Check out our episode
00:04:52.060 on Doxing 101 for more information on how this works. They also engage in a pretty dangerous
00:04:57.820 tactic called swatting. Swatting is a tactic associated with online gaming where someone
00:05:02.940 calls law enforcement and reports a bogus crime happening at the address of the target
00:05:07.600 with the hopes that law enforcement will rush in and potentially open fire. Kiwi Farms has a long
00:05:14.360 documented history of really dangerous IRL harassment.
00:05:19.620 Journalist Caitlin Burns wrote about her experience being doxed on Kiwi Farms for NBC.
00:05:23.980 Her piece is in the description, and it's a must read.
00:05:26.760 She says at the time that she started being harassed by Kiwi Farms, she was a young trans
00:05:31.540 journalist with a small but growing online audience.
00:05:34.180 And a friend of hers was monitoring Kiwi Farms and saw a post that someone made on the website
00:05:39.040 about obtaining her PII, or personal identifying information, to dox her.
00:05:44.360 And it turned out that they had gotten this information from a really old Twitter account where she tweeted her location, and that was all they needed to track down her name change documents and contact information.
00:05:56.580 So pretty scary stuff.
00:05:58.940 In her piece, she goes on to describe how once you're on the radar of a website like KiwiFarms, it basically gets into your head, and that is the whole point.
00:06:07.100 She writes, this, of course, is the entire point of the site, to get in your head.
00:06:11.040 as a target of Kiwi Farms, the more you let in that you thought about them, the happier they
00:06:15.280 would get. For trans people in particular, who are more likely to have an online social life
00:06:20.080 after friends and family abandoned them after transitioning, Kiwi Farms was especially dangerous.
00:06:25.440 So she goes on to talk about how because of these attacks, she basically has given up the luxury of
00:06:30.360 really being her true self on the internet. You know, she doesn't post about her dating life or
00:06:34.620 her personal life. If she wants to tweet anything that she knows will get her undue attention,
00:06:39.180 she doesn't. She writes, no other force in the history of my life has restricted my free speech
00:06:45.260 as much as Kiwi Farms did. And I think this really raises a key point. So many people use
00:06:51.720 free speech as the reason to keep sites like Kiwi Farms up. But what can often go overlooked
00:06:56.860 are the ways that allowing sites like Kiwi Farms to operate like they do actually suppresses the
00:07:01.980 free speech of the people they target, who tend to be already marginalized. Kiwi Farms has also
00:07:07.200 been linked to deaths by suicide. Just a quick note to say that I say linked to with some
00:07:12.900 intention. The Foundation for Reporting on Suicide says that it's important not to oversimplify or
00:07:17.740 speculate on the reason for suicides. So I don't want to do that. But I will say that the people
00:07:22.240 who died specifically mentioned being harassed by Kiwi Farms before their deaths. In 2016,
00:07:28.400 19-year-old Julia Terryberry died by suicide after being targeted by Kiwi Farms. In 2018,
00:07:34.120 a trans game developer named Chloe Segal died by suicide after being harassed by Kiwi Farms.
00:07:40.380 In a piece from Oregon Live, her friend AJ Luxton said that one factor that made it much harder for
00:07:45.720 her to get help was that whenever she talked about suicide, Kiwi Farms members would report
00:07:50.080 her Facebook page and get it locked down. This happened multiple times in the month prior to her
00:07:54.940 death. And just last year, a highly respected non-binary Nintendo emulator developer who went
00:08:01.420 Nier died by suicide. Nier was kind of prolific in the gaming community. They were known for
00:08:06.940 scanning over a thousand Super Nintendo games for long-term preservation and to accurately
00:08:11.720 emulate the gameplay. Before Nier's death, they offered Kiwi Farms founder Joshua Moon
00:08:17.580 their entire life savings, about $150,000 to remove a thread about them from the site.
00:08:25.000 Moon refused. The last thread that Nier posted on Twitter chronicles the abuse they faced from
00:08:30.960 Kiwi Farms, and it is heartbreaking. Neer wrote, the honest truth is I've been bullied, ridiculed,
00:08:37.040 and humiliated my entire life. From my earliest grade school memories to now, it's always hurt
00:08:41.820 me deeply enough that I can't describe it in words. I could only just tolerate it with heavy
00:08:46.620 depression when it was 4chan, but Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse.
00:08:52.600 It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic to attacking and doxing my friends
00:08:56.760 and trying to suicide bait another 0.61
00:08:58.740 just to get a reaction from me.
00:09:01.020 I lost one of my best friends to this.
00:09:03.060 I feel responsible.
00:09:04.500 I have tried changing in every way possible
00:09:06.240 as they wanted me in order to get this to stop,
00:09:08.800 but it just never does.
00:09:10.160 Every few months, it's something new.
00:09:11.960 A new docs, a new thread, a new tangent.
00:09:14.300 It's just too much to bear any longer.
00:09:16.420 The internet is not a game.
00:09:18.080 It's real life.
00:09:19.180 I'm a real person.
00:09:20.420 This stuff really hurts.
00:09:21.960 I poured my entire life into this.
00:09:23.920 I have no real life friends.
00:09:25.400 I have no other reason for being, only this, and now I have nothing.
00:09:30.040 It's too late for me, but I pray that someone at some point will do something about that website.
00:09:34.720 There's too many people suffering, and no one seems to care because we're all relative nobodies online, and they know that.
00:09:40.860 Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.
00:09:43.380 Kiwi Farms was also put on a lot of people's radars after the Christchurch terror attack in 2019,
00:09:48.600 where a gunman entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand
00:09:52.140 and killed 51 people while they were at worship and injured 40 more.
00:09:57.020 After the Christchurch terror attack, Kiwi Farm's founder, Joshua Moon,
00:10:01.340 refused a request from law enforcement to provide data of users who had posted videos of the attack.
00:10:06.580 He responded to an email from a detective calling the request for help a joke,
00:10:11.560 labeling New Zealand a, quote, 0.84
00:10:13.200 small, irrelevant island nation and a shithole country with F-slur laws. 1.00
00:10:19.340 So this is a bit of a case of strange bedfellows. 0.97
00:10:22.620 But after Kiwi Farms recently attacked Republican Congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene,
00:10:27.300 she called for Kiwi Farms to be shut down. 0.75
00:10:30.200 Marjorie Taylor Greene was swatted by a Kiwi Farms member.
00:10:33.620 Police got a call about a man who had been shot in a bathtub at her address.
00:10:37.520 And when they arrived, they realized the call was fake.
00:10:40.340 Authorities later got a call from a person using a computer-generated voice
00:10:43.940 who said they were a Kiwi Farms member and that they had tried to SWAT Green
00:10:47.520 in connection with her stance on transgender youth rights.
00:10:52.000 Now, given that Kiwi Farms has used this very same model,
00:10:55.580 you know, calling in bogus crimes and attributing them to trans people
00:10:58.640 in order to harass and attack them,
00:11:00.460 I think it's fair that we should be skeptical of the claim
00:11:02.900 that the person who did this was actually doing so
00:11:05.760 out of some kind of affinity for trans youth.
00:11:07.920 So basically, Kiwi Farms was this horrible, cesspool internet website that coordinated dangerous harassment against trans folks, non-binary folks, and other marginalized people on the internet.
00:11:19.860 Which brings us to Keffels.
00:11:23.160 So who is Keffels?
00:11:24.800 Keffels is a Canadian Twitch streamer and trans activist named Clara Sorrenti.
00:11:30.180 She had her personal information doxed by Kiwi Farms and was also swatted by them last month.
00:11:35.980 That swatting attack sounds terrifying. She was arrested and detained for over 10 hours
00:11:41.080 after someone spoofed her identity and sent emails to local politicians threatening mass
00:11:47.040 violence in her name. So after this happened, she fled from her home and started living out of a
00:11:51.500 hotel. She posted a picture that happened to show the hotel bedding and people on Kiwi Farms were
00:11:57.600 able to determine what hotel she was staying in just from that one photo by cross-referencing
00:12:02.960 which hotels used that specific type of bedding.
00:12:06.440 They sent pizzas to her hotel room under her dead name,
00:12:09.540 and eventually she ended up leaving the hotel
00:12:11.500 and fleeing the country for her own safety.
00:12:14.820 Keppel started a campaign to have Kiwi Farms dropped by Cloudflare.
00:12:19.440 So what is Cloudflare?
00:12:21.160 Cloudflare is a content delivery network, or a CDN.
00:12:24.940 Basically, long story short,
00:12:27.120 Cloudflare is a company that people use
00:12:28.860 to securely run websites on the internet.
00:12:31.340 The kind of services they provide are essential for protecting Kiwi Farms and keeping them up and running.
00:12:35.540 And this is what the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign targeted in order to get them shut down.
00:12:43.340 Let's take a quick break.
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00:15:40.840 at our back. So we were talking about Kiwi Farms, a website on the internet known for
00:15:52.560 coordinating harassment against trans people. And after a dangerous hate campaign against Twitch
00:15:57.580 streamer Keffels, in which she had to flee her home, and then later the country, she fought
00:16:03.420 back by starting a campaign targeting the company Cloudflare to drop Kiwi Farms. Cloudflare services
00:16:09.940 were basically protecting KiwiFarms
00:16:11.680 from denial-of-service attacks,
00:16:14.080 which are cyber attacks that can take a site offline
00:16:16.500 by overwhelming them with bot traffic.
00:16:19.020 And CloudFair protected KiwiFarms
00:16:21.540 by hiding the identity of their website hosting company
00:16:24.120 so that people couldn't pressure that company
00:16:26.260 to take action against the site.
00:16:28.280 So CloudFair is pretty notorious
00:16:30.000 for just kind of brushing aside
00:16:32.140 content moderation questions,
00:16:33.840 but they have taken action twice before.
00:16:36.720 They pulled their protections for the website 8chan
00:16:39.520 and for the Nazi website, The Daily Stormer.
00:16:42.460 Now, because of Kefalis' large Twitch streaming audience,
00:16:45.480 her campaign to get Cloudflare to drop KiwiFarms grew in support very quickly.
00:16:50.520 Cloudflare initially just kind of dragged their feet
00:16:52.920 and basically said that they would not drop KiwiFarms.
00:16:56.020 Cloudflare put out a statement saying,
00:16:57.520 quote,
00:16:58.220 Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible
00:17:02.220 so that others can launch attacks and knock it offline.
00:17:05.480 That is the equivalent argument in the physical world
00:17:07.760 that the fire department shouldn't respond to fires
00:17:10.080 in homes of people
00:17:11.040 who do not possess sufficient moral character.
00:17:13.800 So it's kind of interesting that Cloudflare's position
00:17:16.320 is that they do not want to be the arbiters
00:17:18.760 of who they provide their protection services to.
00:17:21.220 Because it's also worth noting
00:17:22.460 that they did drop services for the website Twitter
00:17:25.540 back in 2018,
00:17:27.420 a social media website popular with sex workers.
00:17:30.260 So basically, they're saying
00:17:31.440 that they want to help prevent
00:17:32.420 denial of service attacks for everyone
00:17:34.440 and that that will make the internet better for all of us.
00:17:36.800 But interestingly enough, in a really great piece for Verge, Casey Newton reports that
00:17:42.280 Sergey P. USA Took, who was convicted of running a denial of service for hire scheme,
00:17:48.320 said that Cloudfair actually profited from the exact kind of schemes that he was convicted of
00:17:53.040 running by basically helping him to do it and then turning around in selling their protection
00:17:58.520 to his victims. He writes in a blog post, Cloudfair is a fire department that prides itself on putting
00:18:04.460 out fires at any house, regardless of the individual that lives there. What they forgot
00:18:09.100 to mention is that they are actively lighting those fires and making money from putting them
00:18:13.860 out. So in my opinion, whenever a tech company says they can't do something, what they're actually
00:18:19.720 really saying is they don't want to do something because it will be inconvenient or costly for
00:18:24.140 them to do so. And Keppel's campaign pretty much proved that to be correct. In a statement from
00:18:29.980 Cephalis' Drop Kiwi Farms campaign website, they basically called them out on it, saying,
00:18:35.780 Cloudfair maintains the fiction that they can be a neutral provider of services, but there is
00:18:40.020 nothing neutral about helping maintain a site that leads to real-world violence, harassment,
00:18:44.400 and harm. If you protect a person's ability to commit heinous crimes, you bear responsibility
00:18:49.320 for those crimes. You cannot pretend to be the neutral bodyguard of a killer. And eventually,
00:18:54.780 after all of the pressure that Cephalis generated and organized against Cloudfair,
00:18:59.660 the CEO of CloudFair reversed course and dropped KiwiFarms,
00:19:03.920 eventually saying that the site represented an imminent and emergency threat to human life,
00:19:08.640 which led to a chain reaction of other companies dropping them as well.
00:19:13.240 According to a statement from the Drop KiwiFarms campaign website,
00:19:16.440 after the announcement that CloudFair would drop KiwiFarms as a customer,
00:19:19.940 the site came online again with a Russian domain and switched to DDoSGuard.
00:19:25.200 Less than 24 hours later,
00:19:26.940 DDoS Guard, a Russian company that specializes
00:19:29.460 in denial of service attack protection,
00:19:31.700 also dropped KiwiFarms.
00:19:33.260 Their Russian domain is now offline
00:19:34.960 and Joshua Moon has stated,
00:19:36.980 I do not see a situation where KiwiFarms
00:19:38.920 is simply allowed to operate.
00:19:40.780 It will either become a fractured shell of itself
00:19:42.740 like 8chan or jump between hosts
00:19:44.860 and domains like Daily Stormer.
00:19:47.240 So Keppel's actually did it.
00:19:49.920 After almost a decade of harassing people
00:19:52.360 and targeting people on the internet, 1.00
00:19:54.400 She took them down.
00:19:55.700 So I want to talk a little bit about why this campaign was successful.
00:19:59.000 First, the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign is a really good reminder about the business end of hate.
00:20:05.560 Kiwi Farms is not just a standalone website acting in a vacuum.
00:20:09.480 Companies like Cloudflare support, protect, and prop up dangerous websites like Kiwi Farms, and they do so for profit.
00:20:17.200 After CloudFare dropped KiwiFarms, Hcasa, a company that basically provides that service where you go to a website and you have to pick out all the different pictures that contain stoplights or motorcycles in order to prove that you're not a bot, followed suit.
00:20:30.720 Now, these are all services provided by companies that are essential to keep websites operating.
00:20:36.000 And I'm sure that many of these companies would probably like to not be associated with the illegal, dangerous behavior of some of the websites that they are responsible for keeping running.
00:20:46.660 Like, for instance, CloudFare's Twitter bio says that they have an ambitious goal to help build a better internet.
00:20:52.820 Now, can they really say that if they're providing protection for a website that is making people, particularly people who are already marginalized, fear for their lives and safety?
00:21:02.220 Many of the people that Kiwi Farms target are vulnerable or marginalized, and they might not have a lot of support.
00:21:08.320 You know, if they're queer or trans, it's not uncommon that they might not have strong relationships with family or other traditional support systems.
00:21:17.520 Or if a lot of their friends are friends they've made on the Internet, but the Internet is also where they're being attacked, it can really erode whatever support system they've managed to use the Internet to build for themselves and isolate them from that support.
00:21:30.720 So there is a saying in the Black community, 1.00
00:21:33.280 if somebody ever says to you, you got the right one,
00:21:36.640 or if they say to you, you got the wrong one,
00:21:39.980 you have picked the wrong person to mess with.
00:21:42.900 And I think this campaign was successful in part
00:21:45.840 because in messing with Keppels,
00:21:48.000 they had the right one and they had the wrong one,
00:21:51.160 as we say.
00:21:52.740 Kafalis happened to have a lot of support.
00:21:55.500 She had built up a big audience base
00:21:57.240 of people who liked her streams 1.00
00:21:58.560 and would help amplify her campaign against kiwi farms. 0.95
00:22:01.580 She also had the financial means
00:22:03.020 to be able to move for her safety.
00:22:05.120 And I think it's a great indicator of what happens
00:22:07.700 when the victims and targets of this kind of harassment
00:22:10.340 are listened to, taken seriously, and supported.
00:22:13.860 Someone who did not have this kind of support
00:22:15.980 might not have been able to wage a successful campaign 1.00
00:22:18.700 that would ultimately bring down kiwi farms
00:22:21.220 because they'd just be trying to survive, 0.99
00:22:23.820 which is precisely why kiwi farms target people
00:22:27.060 who are already vulnerable or marginalized to begin with.
00:22:30.000 So what does this all mean?
00:22:31.880 Well, in my line of work,
00:22:33.140 when we're talking about hateful, harmful,
00:22:35.640 violent pockets of the internet,
00:22:37.300 people often ask, well, if we take these sites down,
00:22:40.500 won't they just go further underground
00:22:42.340 and be that much harder to monitor?
00:22:44.680 And the answer is actually really clear
00:22:46.660 that deplatforming works.
00:22:48.940 It is successful in taking away some of the power
00:22:51.940 of these darker corners of the internet.
00:22:54.280 Listen, we will probably never completely rid
00:22:56.840 the internet of websites like KiwiFarms or the kinds of people who use them to cause harm.
00:23:01.760 But deplatforming makes it that much harder for those sites to operate.
00:23:06.060 In a statement after KiwiFarms was dropped by Cloudflare, Keffel said,
00:23:10.460 many sites that have faced pressure campaigns to be deplatformed like 8chan and the Daily Stormer
00:23:14.900 are still online. They are nevertheless completely impotent. Whether or not we are able to completely
00:23:20.620 remove KiwiFarms from the internet is irrelevant to the fact that the goals of our campaign have
00:23:24.960 not only been achieved, but have been achieved more than we could have ever expected.
00:23:29.040 I also think it sets a really powerful precedent that companies who aid and abet people hell-bent
00:23:35.140 on using the internet to cause this kind of harm should be on notice that they cannot do this
00:23:40.680 and continue to say that they are neutral parties. You know, when people are dying because of what
00:23:45.580 you're doing, you're not neutral. When people are having to flee the country for their own safety
00:23:50.440 because of what you're doing, you're not neutral.
00:23:52.860 And I think it sets a really powerful and clear precedent
00:23:56.000 that, you know, statements about how you want to do good
00:23:59.240 and build a better internet
00:24:00.340 or donating to the right kinds of charities or causes
00:24:03.620 while you continue to profit off of this kind of harm
00:24:06.880 is not going to be acceptable.
00:24:09.440 The only thing that it's going to be acceptable
00:24:11.440 is accountability.
00:24:13.500 So all of that to say, as gross as I find
00:24:16.700 even thinking about sites like Kiwi Farms,
00:24:18.940 we cannot ignore them as tempting as that is.
00:24:22.360 Because when we ignore them,
00:24:23.880 we just allow them to fester and grow
00:24:26.040 and become more powerful and more tolerated.
00:24:29.100 And in talking about Kiwi farms,
00:24:31.120 I think it can actually be kind of a hopeful story
00:24:34.120 because I think it actually demonstrates
00:24:36.200 that we really can change the internet
00:24:38.640 to be a healthier and safer place for trans people. 0.96
00:24:41.960 It's a clear example of what happens
00:24:44.520 when we imagine that things can be better than they are
00:24:46.920 and actually making that dream a reality.
00:24:51.240 Now, our safety online should not come down
00:24:54.580 to the decisions made by a handful of rich white tech dudes.
00:24:58.060 But if it does,
00:24:59.800 our voices can be way more powerful than theirs.
00:25:04.320 So what do you think about the whole Kiwi Farms thing?
00:25:07.040 This was meant to be a summary.
00:25:08.580 There is a lot more to say about it.
00:25:10.340 We're going to be doing a follow-up episode,
00:25:12.420 so stay tuned for that.
00:25:13.620 But hit me up and let me know what you think.
00:25:16.920 We'll see you next time.
00:25:46.920 For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.