As per Groundreport, the website of Kiwi farms is inaccessible since 5th September.
Kiwi Farms, a notorious online forum for discussion but majorly used for online harassment has been blocked by US internet service providers. The US-based company Cloudfare blocked the services with the bully-online forum citing ‘imminent threats’.
A few days ago, Clouflares CEO Mathew Prince wrote a blog post justifying providing services to companies like Kiwi Farms. Although, the entire blog post doesn’t mention Kiwi Farms name, but it was well know. The Cloudfare was under immense international pressure about the Kiwi Farms, and their life-threathening approach on cyber bullying.
Later, the DDos-Guard a russian company which was the backup hosting option for Kiwi Farms also suspended the services.
Read more: What is ‘KiwiFarms’ propagating right-wing hate?
History of Cloudfare with notorious sites
In 2017, Cloudfare terminated their DDoS services with Neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. Yet again company CEO Mathew Prince had written a lengthy blog post explaining the companies stance on the issue. The CEO said that Cloudfare had received complaints about the content on the website. He mentioned, that the company takes these matters of free speech very seriously.
To add flavour to the conversation, Daily Stormer said that Cloudfare too have similar beliefs, and ‘secretly support’ the content on their website.
Again, 8Chan was blocked by Cloudfare. A suspect in El Paso Walmart shooting, posted a rant [white nationalist rant] on the 8chan before the shooting. 8Chan had been associated with rise in hate crime. Even suspect from Christchurch, NZ shooting, and Poway, California shooting had posted on 8Chan or live Facebook feed.
The company believes the websites might not themselves violate the law, but they create an environment with violates the spirits of society.
Twitter Reacts
Conclusion
Kiwi Farms have been a notorious site which has bullied people to death in some cases. Through global pressure, the activists managed to get favourable results i.e. get the website blocked.
According to Cloudfare, they didn’t want to do anything under pressure and wanted to advocate for free speech.
Will this increase the hostility among the far-right conservative faction which believes in bullying people or milking them for laughter. KiwiFarms has bullied LGBTQ+ community to an extent of hell. Such mindset breeding takes years, and forums like KiwiFarms just present a toxic space for them to grow. To make it worse, the online-discussion forums give people courage to act on vicious-toxic mindset against fellow humans based ill-informed arguments.
Read more
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