Kiwi Farms, a forum for online harassment campaigns, has managed to stay online after being dropped by Cloudflare, as posters congregate on Telegram and Discord
If you or someone you care about may be at risk of suicide, call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline … Tweets: @ekp , @motherjones , @motherjones , @taylorlorenz , @briannawu , @shane_burley1 , @stealthygeek , @alibreland , and @motherjones Tweets: Ellen K. Pao / @ekp : Thoughtful piece on the lasting harms and influence of Kiwi Farms with insights from @BriannaWu and @lizthegrey reported by one of the few reporters who actually understands the full impact of social media @alibreland https://www.motherjones.com/ ... @motherjones : Users mailed people feces. They got people fired from jobs. They SWATed their homes. How one of the most hateful places on the internet operated with near impunity for a decade—and won't seem to go away https://www.motherjones.com/ ... @motherjones : Kiwi Farms' victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users. After years of harassment from Kiwi Farms trolls, Chloe Sagal lit herself on fire. So after efforts to shut it down, why won't it die? https://www.motherjones.com/ ... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : Really excellent reporting by @alibreland on kiwi farms https://www.motherjones.com/ ... Brianna Wu / @briannawu : It was an honor to speak with @alibreland for this important piece about Kiwi Farms. Months of work went into this. Thank you, @MotherJones for supporting this kind of deeply reported journalism. https://www.motherjones.com/ ... Shane Burley / @shane_burley1 : I'm doing research on the far-right, Kiwi Farms was the one I worried about my safety the most when writing about it. They'll go after you in creative and, often, permanent ways. https://twitter.com/... Patrick S. Tomlinson / @stealthygeek : Didn't even need to read past the headline to know which website this story was about. It is a cancer on society, and it needs to be removed: https://www.motherjones.com/ ... #dropkiwifarms Ali Breland / @alibreland : You've maybe heard of Kiwi Farms, one of the most destructive sites online, but what exactly was it? I spent years talking to victims and their friends and family, investigating how it destroyed people's lives and why it's still not dead yet https://www.motherjones.com/ ... @motherjones : Most websites don't have a user post a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms did. https://www.motherjones.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Cloudflare has been here before: when it quit servicing 8chan in 2019, that site limped along by switching domain registrars to Epik, which was itself then hobbled by one of its own vendors (the 8chan precedent). Kiwi Farms surviving the same kind of exit shows the playbook produces displacement, not deletion.
The forum's persistence also runs against an organized opposition — internet sleuths, trans engineers, and activists have waged what the Washington Post described as an endless battle to banish it from the internet entirely (that ongoing campaign) — while the broader genre of complaint and gossip forums, from Tattle Life to reputation-destroying "complaint sites" that platforms like Google rarely touch, keeps supplying the template.
First-order effects
- Losing Cloudflare no longer means going dark: Kiwi Farms remains reachable, so the immediate effect falls on the activists' campaign, which has to target new infrastructure instead of declaring victory.
- The forum's posters have reconstituted themselves inside Telegram and Discord, putting those two consumer chat platforms in direct contact with a harassment community built around doxxing and swatting.
Second-order effects
- Every infrastructure provider in the chain — registrars, hosts, DDoS-protection vendors — now faces pressure to take a position on Kiwi Farms, since the Cloudflare drop demonstrated that removing one layer just moves the burden to the next vendor.
- Telegram and Discord inherit a moderation problem they did not ask for: coordinated abuse migrating off the open web into their walled channels, where outsiders — including journalists and targets' allies — can observe far less.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — 8chan to Epik, Kiwi Farms to Telegram and Discord — infrastructure-layer deplatforming becomes a dispersal mechanism, fragmenting harassment communities across smaller, harder-to-police services rather than eliminating them.
- That dispersion strengthens the case for treating online harassment as a persistent cross-platform problem rather than a per-site one, echoing coverage of abuse spilling from forums into the physical world and of complaint-site reputational destruction that mainstream platforms decline to intervene in.
The trend: Deplatforming at the infrastructure layer is displacing harassment forums rather than erasing them, pushing these communities toward encrypted or closed chat platforms where moderation and visibility are both weaker.