2.2. The Kiwi Farms Disruption
KIWI FARMS had been growing steadily over a decade (see Figure 1) and had been under Cloudflare’s DDoS protection for some years.[2] An increase of roughly 50% in forum activity happened during the COVID-19 lockdown starting in March 2020, presumably as people were spending more time online. Prior interventions have resulted in the forum getting banned from Google Adsense, and from Mastercard, Visa and PayPal in 2016; from hundreds of VPS providers between 2014–2019 [55]; and from selling merchandise on the print-on-demand marketplace Redbubble in 2016. XenForo, a close-source forum platform, revoked its license in late 2021 [56]. DreamHost stopped its domain registration in July 2021 after a software developer killed himself after being harassed by the site’s users. This did not disrupt the forum as it was given 14 days to seek another registrar [57]. While these interventions may have had negative effects on its profit and loss account, they did not impact its activity overall. The only significant disruption in the forum’s history was between 22 January and 9 February 2017 (19 days), when the forum’s owner suspended it himself due to his family being harassed [58].[3]