Cloudflare belatedly banning Kiwi Farms demonstrates the “stochastic terrorism loophole”, offering groups cover as long as no one explicitly calls for murder
On platforms and the stochastic terrorism loophole — I. — Kiwi Farms is a nearly 10-year-old web forum …
That distinction matters because later coverage found Kiwi Farms had remained online after Cloudflare’s removal, while posters also gathered on Telegram and Discord. The case therefore separates a provider’s ability to withdraw service from its ability to prevent a community from relocating.
First-order effects
Cloudflare’s ban removes its services from Kiwi Farms after the company had argued that withholding them over “despicable” content was the wrong policy, making acute threats the operative trigger for intervention.
Kiwi Farms must replace the infrastructure Cloudflare had supplied, but the later record shows the forum and its user community were not eliminated by that removal.
Second-order effects
The forum’s continued presence and migration to Telegram and Discord show that enforcement by one infrastructure provider can shift harassment activity across services rather than stop it.
Cloudflare’s emergency-based rationale gives similar providers a narrow precedent for acting when threats become immediate, while leaving sustained harassment short of that threshold less clearly addressed.
Third-order effects
If providers consistently require an explicit or immediate threat before withdrawing service, groups whose campaigns create danger indirectly retain room to operate within what the article calls the stochastic-terrorism loophole.
The Kiwi Farms episode points to moderation and infrastructure policy being tested not only on whether providers act, but on whether their intervention standards account for cumulative, decentralized harassment.
The trend: Infrastructure providers are being pushed to define responsibility for harm that emerges through coordinated harassment rather than explicit calls for violence.
Josh Moon, the owners of Kiwifarms, admits defeat. Keffals, her team (many of whom will stay anonymous and will never get any thanks), the trans community, and it's allies took down the worst site on the internet. There truly is nothing better in this world than Nazis crying. htt…
Kiwi Farms tried once again to go online, this time using a Chinese domain. Now the servers cannot even be reached. When I said it is dead, I meant it. They will continue to stay on life support jumping domain to domain with a worse iteration of the site each time. We won. https:…
Among the very many horrific aspects of this awful story, is the manner in which Clara's harassers managed to find her. The most innocuous thing you put online can be used to track you down. Hope the community in the north are looking after her https://twitter.com/...
I don't think we'll really understand the full implications of the death of kiwifarms for quite a long time. A lot of people have one less knot of entirety in their stomach today though, and a lot of people's lives just got a lot better.
I wrote about Kiwi Farms, Cloudflare, and the “stochastic terrorism loophole” that lets right-wing extremists avoid content moderation https://www.platformer.news/ ... https://twitter.com/...
“If your customers are plotting violence — violence that may in fact be possible only because of the services you provide — the right thing to do isn't to ask Congress to pass a law telling you what to do. It's to stop providing those services.” https://twitter.com/...
NEW: Trans activist and Twitch streamer @keffals tells us how she shut down one of the internet's most notorious websites. Reporting from Belfast w/@richanaik @robdreilly https://cnn.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Thinking about this smart passage by @CaseyNewton w/r/t CA bill AB 587, which mandates that online platforms share their detailed rules/methods in the name of “transparency” https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Well said, @CaseyNewton, well said. (and very similar to the arguments I & co-authors have advanced at https://nocloudflare.com/ for why Cloudflare's “too big to fail” argument is bullshit) https://twitter.com/...
The Kiwi Farms stuff still doesn't feel real. As someone who was targeted by the community for years I can't believe what @keffals and everyone who worked toward this for so long has accomplished. Such an incredible feat and reminder of the power of collective action.