How do you like to use the internet? To watch videos of puppies and kittens? Or posting pictures of your family and friends? Maybe to satisfy your shopping addiction on Amazon? Maybe your internet use has not been so innocent. Many use the internet to get a thrill or get their anger out. Online harassment is not uncommon, so much so that there are websites built to support it. Kiwi Farms, for example, is a forum website where users are encouraged to harass online personalities and communities. Today’s GKIS article details the targeted harassment done by Kiwi Farms users and how the website facilitates this behavior. If you’re concerned your kids may be victimized by harassment or overstep and do the harassing themselves, check out our Screen Safety Toolkit. With this online course and resource guide, you can learn how to protect your family online.
The Start of Kiwi Farms
Joshua Conner Moon, a former administrator of the 8chan message board, started Kiwi Farms in 2013. It was first established as a forum website to troll and harass a webcomic creator. Before the term “Kiwi Farms” was coined in 2014, Kiwi Farms was known as “CWCki Forums.”
Organized Harassment
The Kiwi Farms website targets a wide range of victims, including Internet celebrities, minorities, women, neurodivergent individuals, LGBTQ people, members of the far right, and people who Kiwi Farms users believe to be “mentally ill” or “sexually deviant.” Both Moon and the Kiwi Farms user base have been labeled as anti-Semitic.[1]
swatting (reporting crimes at their addresses to have police dispatched to their homes)
real-life attacks
People Who Have Fallen Victim
U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed in an interview with NewsMax on August 24, 2022 that she had been swatted twice by someone posing as a Kiwi Farms moderator “AltisticRight.” She urged for the website to be taken down. In reaction, Cloudflare shut off a feature on the website that lets users modify error messages.
Clara Sorrenti, a transgender advocate and Twitch broadcaster who goes by the handle “Keffals,” was doxxed on Kiwi Farms as well. Users of the website shared both her personal information and those of her friends and relatives, including addresses and phone numbers. Users also threatened her life and leaked sexually explicit images of her. In August 2022, after someone hijacked her identity and sent false emails to local lawmakers threatening widespread violence, she was later swatted, imprisoned for more than ten hours, and arrested. She was ultimately exonerated of all charges, and authorities determined that the incident was a swatting effort.
Users also shared the address of a stranger who lives in the same city and has the same last name as Sorrenti. Police were subsequently dispatched to his home. Sorrenti claimed that she left her house and checked into a hotel for her protection following the swatting event. After she uploaded a picture of her cat lying on a hotel bed, Kiwi Farms members recognized the establishment from the bedsheets and sent several pizza orders to it using her dead name.
Later, Sorrenti left the country after her whereabouts were discovered, allegedly by someone who had hacked her Uber account. Sorrenti says that she intends to file a lawsuit and that the occurrences were being investigated as criminal harassment.
Suicide
A hate campaign against transgender game creator Chloe Sagal was started in 2013 by Kiwi Farm users. Sagal is well-known for creating the well-liked, independent horror game Homesick. After Sagal started raising funds for gender reassignment surgery, they began to attack her. Users hounded and harassed Sagal for years after they started a post specifically to target her. Sagal lit herself on fire in 2018 in a park in Portland and died at 31 years old.[3]
According to images of chat boards and videos published by DropKiwiFarms.net, an initiative was passed to shut down the website after Moon posted a live YouTube video celebrating Sagal’s passing while other Kiwi Farms users laughed and made fun of the game developer.
The Short End of Kiwi Farms
After the harassment effort by users of Kiwi Farms against Sorrenti, a movement to persuade Cloudflare to stop hosting the site was launched in August 2022. Cloudflare is a company that provides hosting and online security services. This, according to NBC News, was done to allow Kiwi Farms to be the target of “debilitating virtual attacks.”[2]
Although Cloudflare first defended its choice to continue working with Kiwi Farms, the company formally banned the website from utilizing its services on September 3, 2022. However, on September 6, VanwaTech supplied content delivery network services to the website, returning it online according to The Daily Dot.[4]
How to Protect Your Child
Unfortunately, many parts of the internet are unregulated. And when children have easy access to it, they can fall victim to being harassed online or fall down a dark path of harassing people themselves. Luckily, Dr. Bennett can help you protect yourself and your family from online harassment.
One helpful tip for parents is to make it a habit to hold GKIS Family Meetings with a teaching agenda that covers important online issues that your children will face. This provides opportunities for mutual education and skill building, and it also builds a close family alliance. Get ideas for your discussion with our GKIS Blog and learn parenting strategies with Dr. Bennett’s Screen Time in the Mean Time Parenting Guide.
Thanks to CSUCI intern, Liliana Esquivel, for detailing the targeted harassment done by Kiwi Farms users and how the website facilitates this behavior.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
Not everything you read online is real, nor is everyone you meet. You have been catfished when you meet someone online who created a fake profile to deceive you. Catfishing varies in severity, from posting younger pictures of oneself to stealing another’s identity. Most commonly experienced in dating websites or social media, catfishing provokes more skepticism and fear when it comes to meeting people online.
It started on Tinder…
Being a victim of catfishing can happen to anyone. With more teens joining social media, they are exposed to not only same-age peers but also adults with bad intentions.
For example, my friend Sam had been online dating since her sophomore year of high school. She recently met a guy on Tinder and fell head over heels for him. Soon after meeting each other online, they texted every day. At first, she suggested they FaceTime, but he always came up with some excuse to text only. Sam didn’t think much of it and continued to text with him. When she suggested they meet in person, he ghosted her and then messaged her randomly, ignoring her suggestion. She ignored the red flags.
While talking to a friend about her concerns, her friend shared that she was having a similar experience with her online boyfriend. When they compared notes and photos, they realized it was the same guy using different names and accounts. Since then, Sam has had difficulty trusting anybody online.
Adults and kids can be victims.
The popular MTV show “Catfish: The TV Show,” gives the audience a deeper look into the world of catfishing. During each episode, the host helps a victim uncover the truth behind a catfishing incident. Each episode illustrates the complex reasons people create deceptive online identities to make up for deficits in their non-virtual lives, such as:
insecurity about their looks, so they steal someone else’s identity who is better looking – like wearing a virtual mask.
pretending to be a different gender, perhaps experimenting before coming out of the closet.
cyberstalking or seeking revenge.
It’s not just adults that are deceived by catfishing. In the Lifetime TV show, “I Catfished My Kid,” parents try to teach their teens a lesson about the dangers of talking to strangers online. In the pilot, two Ventura County teens were duped by an adult producer into thinking they were interacting with a peer. When he asked each victim to meet him in the park to watch his band practice, one of the teens complied. On the show, we see her walk to the park and then be confronted by her parents and the host of the show.
Dr. Bennett received production credit on this pilot and helped with the emotional support on set. She describes feeling uncomfortable with the plot of deceiving a teen. However, to the benefit of millions of viewers, the show is an opportunity to teach kids how easy it is to be catfished.
Why do we fall for it?
Dr. Bennett believes that texting and online dating are some of the worst things to ever happen to singles. Although they offer immediate access to possible friends and dates, she says it also exposes our psychological vulnerabilities to exploitive others.
For instance, Dr. B describes a phenomenon she’s seen in practice where the screen between us and our new partner allows us to confabulate a false truth, that our new dating partner is better than they actually are. Confabulation is the act of unconsciously creating imaginary facts to fill in for a loss of memory.
In other words, with their dream dating profile in mind, online daters sometimes start by identifying a partner that loosely fits their criteria. Because they are so hopeful, they unconsciously convince themselves that their date is their dream partner. A simple “I look forward to meeting you” text becomes a sign of affection, romance, and fidelity. They create a dream person in their heads before the date has even revealed their true selves.
Dr. Bennett also believes that online dating can trigger our hunting and gathering instincts. Too often, she sees people “keep an eye out” for a better partner, even when they are committed to their current one. By always looking for the next best thing, singles sabotage the relationship they’re in. The thrill of the chase and the novelty of a new person can overshadow real partnership.
She also notes that healthy daters find partners and quickly move off dating sites, whereas predators stay. Dr. B theorizes that is the reason there are more creeps on dating sites than in the general population. Online dating can help you find love, but it can also open one up to exploitation, financial coercion, or online dating fraud. Although some dating sites verify users through other social media profiles and have safety tips, daters must beware.
If you visit websites, play video games, or are on social media, it may be helpful to you to know the red flags that. you may be being catfished.
Red flags that you are being catfished if the person:
is too good to be true
demands too much contact or acts possessive
is overly elaborative
attempts to pull you in with dramatic stories of victimhood or emotional distress
makes too many promises
is only available to talk during certain days and times
-gets too affectionate too fast
Thank you to GKIS intern, Nubia Bandek, for telling us all about catfishing. The hookup culture, which makes teens vulnerable to catfishing, is more prominent among teens than parents realize. Check out the GKIS article, Is Your Teen Hooking Up? for tips on how to have important conversations with your tweens and teens.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
[1.] Couch, D., Liamputtong, P., & Pitts, M. (2012). What are the real and perceived risks and dangers of online dating? Perspectives from online daters. Health, Risk & Society,14(7–8), 697–714.https://doi-org.summit.csuci.edu/10.1080/13698575.2012.720964
[2.] Menkin, J. A., Robles, T. F., Wiley, J. F., & Gonzaga, G. C. (2015). Online dating across the life span: Users’relationship goals. Psychology and Aging, 30(4), 987–993. https://doi-org.summit.csuci.edu/10.1037/a0039722.supp (Supplemental)
