What the Kiwi Farms case tells us about the justice system
The time it took Cloudflare, the US company that provided online DDoS protection to Kiwi Farms, to eventually take down the loony right online forum, is disgraceful, and is worth a deeper examination.
Let’s start at the beginning: what is Kiwi Farms? An online forum dedicated to harassing anybody considered on the left, and very often from the LGTBIQ+ community. In many cases, its members are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to make life hell for their targets, going so far as doxxing (disclosing personal data, addresses, etc.) or even making false complaints to trigger emergency actions by the police (swatting), and issuing death threats. As a result, at least three people are believed to have committed suicide.
Like any other site exposed to possible cyberattacks, Kiwi Farms had contracted Cloudflare’s security services to prevent denial-of-service attacks, without which it simply could not remain active. Cloudflare’s position in this regard is well known: although it has the ability by default, simply by ceasing to provide its services, to censor virtually any page on the network immediately, its co-founder and CEO, Matthew Prince, refuses to do so, arguing that he would only do so on the basis of a court order. His company has previously defended not taking action with no court order against pages such as…
