Harassment of a streamer: the host CloudFlare under pressure
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Since August 20, the American company Cloudflare has been challenged on social networks: this content delivery network (CDN, for “Content Delivery Network”), used by millions of websites around the world, is the subject of a campaign to push him to block a forum using his services. The latter, baptized “Kiwi Farms”, is at the origin of a wave of harassment targeting Canadian streamer and transgender activist Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, who was forced, in the face of the violence of the attacks against her, to flee her own home.
It all started two weeks ago. On August 5, Keffals, who made himself known on the Twitch platform with video game streams, was the victim of “swatting”. This practice consists of making the police believe that serious events are taking place at the victim’s address, so that the forces of order and more particularly the SWAT (the American GIGN) go there. Keffals thus found herself for no reason held at gunpoint at her home in London, Ontario, and “misgendered” on numerous occasions – the anonymous message having put the police on her trail having deliberately used her former marital status.
After recounting this first ordeal in a video posted August 9 on Youtube, the videographer and her fiancé are the subject of a second attack, their stalkers having managed to identify the hotel in which they took refuge thanks to a simple photo of their cat on a bed. Since then, as Clara Sorrenti recounts in a second video published on August 18, the couple have lived “in a secret place”. She accuses the members of the Kiwi Farms forum, considered by the New YorkMagazine as “the largest community of stalkers on the web », for making his address public – a practice known as “doxing”. She also reveals to be the subject of a hate campaign ” for many months ” and say “to fear in the future an escalation in violence in [s]we place ».
“The largest community of stalkers”
The origins of Kiwi Farms date back to 2007 on 4Chan. The members of this forum specialize in mocking, harassing in packs and pushing Internet users to the limit, in particular transgender people, overweight people or people with Asperger’s syndrome. At least one person targeted by Kiwi Farms committed suicide in 2016, recalled, at the time, the New YorkMagazine. The members of the forum have declined all responsibility and have since continued to harass many people they consider “eccentric”.
Using the hashtags #DropKiwiFarms, #TimesUpCloudFlare and #CloudflareProtectsTerrorists on Twitter, among others, Keffals and his supporters are now calling on CloudFlare to stop offering its services to Kiwi Farms. According to its own rules of use, as it recalls Vicethe company prohibits, in fact, “any content making sensitive personal information public, inciting the use of violence”.
My family has been targeted and threats have been made against them explicitly because of the campaign I started to… https://t.co/zyvbtJ2R1G
For the time being, CloudFlare has still not reacted officially, contenting itself with restricting the ability of Internet users to respond to messages posted on the official Twitter account of the company. Historically, the company has always claimed its neutrality, arguing that it is not for it to comment on the dangerousness or validity of what its users post on the Internet.
However, a Stanford University study shows that the company plays a particular role in disseminating misinformation and hate online : while one website in five uses its hosting services, this proportion jumps to one site in three when only sites known to be toxic are considered, according to the researchers. In the case of Kiwi Farms, the forum is not hosted by CloudFlare, recalls the Axios site, but he still benefits from some of his services.
Like major social networks like Facebook or Twitter, which have tried to maintain a similar “neutral” position, before changing it in recent years, CloudFlare has already made the choice to act. In 2017, the company deleted the account of the neo-Nazi site “Daily Stormer” after the murder of an anti-racist protester during a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Keffals is far from the only streamer to be targeted in this way. In an article from New York Times, the American Brooke Bond recounts the death threats to which she and her family may have been subjected, for trivial reasons. In France, a man was sentenced in May 2022 to one year in prison for harassing videographer Maghla. More recently, it was the streamer AVAMind who, live on Twitch, made her subscribers listen to a particularly violent message left by an Internet user.
Now 3 years that I produce content on Twitch and until recently I was rather quiet & respected by… https://t.co/QdQsUGqTBO
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