I even messaged an admin at a UMass sports fan message board asking if it would be possible to delete my account there, which I had been posting on since 2004 - another 13 years of internet life gone. It meant a decade of internet life gone in an instant, but a small price to pay to protect my family and loved ones. I deleted the dormant Facebook account I had had in my deadname since 2007. I immediately went to work cleansing my online presence. Someone had posted that they had discovered my dox, personal identifying information meant to be released on the internet in an effort to intimidate or harass someone. In 2017, I had been given a heads-up that I was on Kiwi Farms’ radar by a friend who used to monitor the site for mentions of acquaintances' names. The things that likely made me an attractive target for the message board’s users were my trans identity, my young journalism career and a small but growing social media presence (I had a little more than 2,000 Twitter followers when I was first doxed). My own personal journey with Kiwi Farms has been a long and frankly strange experience, and speaks to the treacherous nature of a culture of online harassment. Kiwi Farms has been implicated in the suicide deaths of three different trans people, according to Vice, and has severely impacted the lives of countless others. But it hardly solves the dangerous problem online threats and stalking pose to so many people.Īnd it’s fair to ask what took so long. No one likes a band of random people running around monitoring and policing what anyone is putting online.
#Speek free for free
In the end, its demise is a victory for free speech and the social exchange of experiences and ideas. It’s a good thing that Kiwi Farms is mostly dead now. Late last week, the DDOS protection service Cloudflare terminated its services for Kiwi Farms, essentially driving the platform off the mainstream internet. It was this threat that seemingly, at last, broke the camel’s back for the site. Another said they wanted to personally fly to Ireland and bomb the house she was staying at. A few days later, a different user claimed that he had called up some local men there who would bomb the restaurant Sorrenti and her friend were going to. She was doxed again in the hotel room she fled to, and then again after fleeing the country to Northern Ireland, where a Kiwi Farms user posted a handwritten note outside a friend’s house where Sorrenti was staying in Belfast. Unsurprisingly, Greene called for the site to be shut down.įirst, Sorrenti was doxed and swatted in her own home.
Given the site’s obsession with stalking random trans people on the internet, the claim is perhaps dubious.
The person who took responsibility for the swatting claimed to be a Kiwi Farms user, saying they were upset with Greene’s stance on gender affirming care for trans youth. The harassment extends beyond online stalking last month, Republican Congress member Marjorie Taylor Greene was swatted, meaning someone sent a fake emergency report to the police alleging to be at a target’s address, so that police show up and arrest the target. Some targets have had their addresses or phone numbers posted on the forum other targets have seen their friends and family doxed as well. Most often, a subgroup of users will dedicate much time to digging up personal identifying information. The site is an old-school message board, where any user with an account can make a post on one of the board’s many threads, each featuring a different target.
Of particular interest to many of the site’s users have been trans people, who they have labeled “troons,” a derogatory portmanteau of “tranny” and “goon.” Probably the best way to describe the site’s users is terminally online people from a wide range of political ideologies, from far right and anti-trans feminist types to edgy lefties obsessed with consuming internet drama. Kiwi Farms is an extensive message board platform dedicated to documenting and mocking a wide array of people on the internet, from influencers to journalists, to random individuals Kiwi Farms users happen to become fixated on.
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