The suspect in Marjorie Taylor Greene's "swatting" incident said he was a Kiwi Farms member. The online forum has been used to harass trans people.
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Trans activists have long campaigned against Kiwi Farms, a trolling website that the New York Magazine once referred to as "the web's biggest community of stalkers." But, on Wednesday, an unlikely ally joined the fight to get the famously transphobic forum taken offline.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Georgia Republican, joined the chorus of people calling for action against Kiwi Farms after she was targeted in a "swatting" incident linked to the website by police.
"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON," said Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti, a Twitch streamer and leader of the #DropKiwiFarms campaign, in a tweet expressing disbelief at the campaign's newest potential recruit.
—keffals #DropKiwifarms (@keffals) August 24, 2022
The hateful online forum has created strange bedfellows, a bizarre alliance between a controversial conservative lawmaker and transgender online activists.
But what exactly is Kiwi Farms, and why is it in the news?
Kiwi Farms is an online forum and image-sharing website dedicated to the trolling and harassment of people who the users deem to be "eccentric" and "voluntarily making fools of themselves," according to the website's self-description.
It initially launched in 2009 as an imageboard (the CWCki forum) to troll Christine Weston Chandler, who is also known as "Chris Chan" or "Sonichu" online, Insider's Charlotte Colombo reported.
But the forum rebranded as Kiwi Farms in February 2015, per KnowYourMeme, marking a shift in the website's focus. The scope of users' harassment widened to all "lolcows" — a portmanteau of "lol" and "cows," which has become a niche meme used to describe anyone who can be "milked" for laughs.
Many of the people targeted are transgender and neurodivergent individuals, who Kiwi Farms users regularly refer to using offensive slurs and their dead names — the birth name of a trans person who has changed their name as part of their gender transition.
Last week, Insider reported on the use of Kiwi Farms in the harassment of the armed, trans alpaca ranchers of Custer County, Colorado.
Specific harassment campaigns have been so relentless and vicious that Kiwi Farms has been linked to three deaths by suicide, Insider reported.
Following the June 2021 death by suicide of Near, a software developer who Kiwi Farms users had targeted, DreamHost gave the website owner — Joshua Moon — notice that it would no longer offer domain registration services, per Vice News. The website temporarily began using a Russian server before moving to an American server.
Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that provides DDoS protection services to several websites, doesn't host Kiwi Farms, but Axios reported that it offers several services that keep the website online.
Now, activists want Cloudfare to cut services to the trolling website.
In August of this year, transgender activist and Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti — also known as "Keffals" — said she had to go into hiding after a months-long doxxing campaign against her on Kiwi Farms escalated into a terrifying "swatting" incident.
Swatting is the act of sending police to an unsuspecting victim's home under false pretenses. It gets its name from the special weapons and tactics (SWAT) division of police — the sort of police units usually called in to deal with active shooters and similar situations.
Keffals/YouTube
In a YouTube video, Sorrenti explained how she was targeted in a swatting incident on August 5. Police in London, Ontario, arrived at her home and accused her of sending violent emails to local politicians. She was arrested, and her electronic devices were seized, per Insider's Lindsay Dodgson, but local police confirmed that she was later released without charges.
Following the incident, Sorrenti, her fiancé, and their cat moved into a local hotel. Still, she said she was once again doxxed when Kiwi Farms were able to identify the hotel from a photo of the bedding. She also said that she received five pizzas that she did not order to her hotel room, ordered using her dead name, Insider's Rebecca Cohen reported.
Keffals has now escaped to an undisclosed location in Europe to avoid harassment, she announced on social media.
And in response to the harassment, she spearheaded the #DropKiwiFarms campaign. The campaign demands that Cloudflare cut services to Kiwi Farms, just as it did with the neo-nazi Daily Stormer website in 2017.
On Wednesday morning, Greene was targeted in a "swatting" incident.
Police officers in Rome, Georgia, responded to a call saying that a male had been shot five times in a bathtub. They arrived at an address in Floyd County, the home of Greene, who met the officers at the door. Greene reassured officers that there was no issue, per a police report shared by the Daily Dot.
Police later received a follow-up call from the suspect using a computer-generated voice who said they were trying to swat her in connection with her stance on "transgender youth's rights," per the police report.
Last week, Greene introduced a bill to bar gender-affirming care for trans minors. The "Protect Children's Innocence Act" would ban numerous medical procedures that treat gender dysphoria in transgender minors.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The suspect claimed they were a Kiwi Farms user, stating their username was "AltisticRight."
Greene said investigators aren't certain that the suspect is who they claimed they are but nonetheless expressed concern that such a website exists.
Speaking to Newsmax on Wednesday, she said: "That website needs to be taken down. There should be no business or any kind of service where you can target your enemy. That's absolutely absurd."
Insider contacted Greene, Keffals, and Cloudflare for comments but did not immediately receive a response.
