Cloudflare Finally Drops Anti-Trans Forum Due to 'Specific, Targeted Threats'

pcmag.com:

Cloudflare has finally dropped Kiwi Farms, a forum dedicated to doxxing, harassing, and threatening violence against trans people, amid ongoing backlash against its customer policies.

Kiwi Farms has been around since 2013. The most recent calls(Opens in a new window) for Cloudflare to drop the forum as a customer—which should make it far more difficult for its users to doxx or harass their victims—came as Twitch streamer Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti documented her struggles to keep her family safe after Kiwi Farms users "swatted" her as part of their ongoing campaign against her.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince and Global Head of Public Policy Alissa Starzak said(Opens in a new window) in an Aug. 31 blog post that the company, which provided Kiwi Farms protection against distributed-denial of service (DDoS) and served as its content delivery network (CDN), wouldn't drop the forum as a customer despite knowing that its users were threatening the privacy and safety of many people.

Prince and Starzak said:

Today, more than 20 percent of the web uses Cloudflare's security services. When considering our policies we need to be mindful of the impact we have and precedent we set for the Internet as a whole. Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.

The company also hid comments, replies, and messages on a variety of social platforms calling it to drop Kiwi Farms. This increased scrutiny of Cloudflare's policies coincided with a stark decrease in the company's stock—Google Finance indicates that its share price