An Australian company found to have helped keep the notorious forum Kiwi Farms accessible online has been ordered to pay more than $400,000 in damages after a successful defamation action in the Victorian supreme court.
The case is just the latest instalment in a long-running saga that has pitted activists against a website that will not stay down, raising sticky questions about who is responsible for harmful online speech.
For more than a decade, Kiwi Farms has had a well-documented history of sparking campaigns of relentless doxing, often targeting LBGTQ+ people. While it has flickered on and off, it remains online for now.
Liz Fong-Jones, a longtime crusader against the site, brought the action over what she asserted in court documents was an “abusive, transphobic, defamatory” thread targeting her on the forum since August last year.
In hundreds of posts, the Kiwi Farm’s users discussed information about her work, her partner and her family. They shared “vile and baseless” allegations that she was a rapist and a liar and that she had molested and threatened subordinates, which the judge found caused serious harm to her “very good” reputation.
Messages were sent to work colleagues and posted under her employer’s online videos.
In September 2022, a picnic with supporters she hosted in Sydney’s Hyde Park was surreptitiously photographed and pictures of participants were posted on the forum too.
Run by Joshua Moon, one of Kiwi Farms’s main activities is the sustained exposure of people the site deems worthy of derision – as the site describes it, “lolcows” that are “milked” for entertainment.
The case claimed that a Brisbane-based company, Flow Chemical, and its sole director, Vincent Zhen, were “instrumental” to its publication and for keeping it accessible, even though they were not the authors of the defamatory Kiwi Farms thread.
Because the matter was undefended, an interlocutory judgment was made against Flow Chemical and Zhen in July and Fong-Jones was awarded damages of $445,000 plus costs this week.
The #DropKiwiFarms movement
A former Google engineer and activist who has advocated for transgender rights, Fong-Jones has long been a target online – not only on Kiwi Farms, but on other infamous message board sites and alt-right blogs. This attention spiked in 2017 after internal discussions at Google over gender differences were leaked online.
In the years since, the abuse had slowed. But in 2022, Clara Sorrenti, a Canadian livestreamer and transgender activist known as Keffals, became Kiwi Farms’ latest fixation. She fled to Europe in August last year for safety. Fong-Jones told Guardian Australia she could not sit on her hands.
She joined the #DropKiwiFarms movement which lobbied Cloudflare – a cloud service provider that protects web traffic – to stop service to the site. Cloudflare rejected these calls, but by September 2022, the mood had changed.
In a blog post, its chief executive, Matthew Prince, claimed targeted threats had grown to the point that he believed there was “an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life”, and Kiwi Farms was no longer protected.
Cloudflare was only the shield Kiwi Farms was hiding behind. Moon tried to keep the site alive, jumping from service to service. A statement on the site claimed it was not a place that condoned “criminal behavior”.
Liz and other activists continued to go on the offensive. Each time Kiwi Farms popped back up, they lobbied the providers to drop it.
A team grew. There was Clay*, a former Kiwi Farms user himself, who could translate the site’s insider language, and Katherine Lorelei, who found she had skills in communicating and maintaining morale over the many months it would take to try and keep the site offline.
“Even before the Cloudflare victory happened, we knew this was going to be a long engagement,” Lorelei said. And a little known Australian connection – Flow Chemical – was to offer a new angle.
The Australian connection
Digging into the infrastructure behind Kiwi Farms when it was accessible online, Fong-Jones and her team found there were blocks of IP addresses that appeared to be obtained from the Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), which administers IP addresses for the Asia-Pacific.
Flow Chemical is the registered owner of these IP blocks, according to court documents, “a subset of one which allows 1776 Solutions LLC to host the Kiwi Farms website”. Its sole director, business records show, is a Brisbane man named Vincent Zhen.
For a while, it was just another weird fact about the site. “No one really had any idea whether this was a red herring,” Fong-Jones said. “No one thought about the implications of this as far as Australian law [was concerned].”
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Fong-Jones, an American, spends part of each year in Australia and this connection meant she also had recourse to the local legal system. At first Fong-Jones tried getting action against Kiwi Farms and Flow Chemical via Australian authorities, including via the eSafety Commissioner.
The agency attempted to contact Kiwi Farms in May 2022 with takedown notices for Class 1 material – a category of illegal and restricted online content – but the site ignored the request, telling eSafety to shove its “‘fines’ up your arse”, according to documents obtained under FoI.
A spokesperson for eSafety told Guardian Australia the commissioner has no power to seize IP addresses or servers. As there was no evidence Flow Chemical directly hosted Kiwi Farms discussion forums where the thread was posted, the spokesperson said it had no power to issue a notice to the company.
Then Fong-Jones started to look into her private rights of action, bringing the defamation case in May this year.
For her, the Australian lawsuit had motivations both strategic and personal. “The defamation, the threats to my life, the attempt to get me fired, they’ve gotten so extreme that it’s important at this point to vindicate my reputation,” she said. “To show that there are consequences for engaging in this activity, specifically against me.”
Defamation law ‘in the internet age’
Both Zhen and the company were found to have attempted to avoid service and did not accept a reasonable settlement offer, according to the judgment, and ultimately did not defend the case.
Holding the owner of IP addresses liable for defamation reaches deep into the infrastructure of the internet and is a disputed area of law. But David Rolph, a defamation expert at the University of Sydney law school, said that because the case was undefended, arguments about whether it constituted “publication” by this form of internet intermediary remained unsettled.
“It’s open in future cases for people in similar positions to argue the point that they’re not publishers or not liable for publication,” he said. “This case … points to the difficulty of defamation law adapting into the internet age.”
The pressuring of companies that provide online infrastructure to drop Kiwi Farms has also been criticised by groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which recently warned “site-blocking, whatever form it takes, almost inevitably cuts off legal as well as illegal speech”.
Katherine Alejandra Cross, who studies online harassment, waded into this minefield in a recent Wired piece.
“Arguing that organizations like Cloudflare are illegitimate targets for grassroots activism feels arbitrary and mostly disconnected from the ongoing battles in the rest of the world,” she wrote. “Authoritarian censors were doing their fell work long before Kiwi Farms’ victims began to fight back.”
Fong-Jones’ crusade against Kiwi Farms has been slow and taxing – both financially and emotionally. While the damages and costs awarded from the case might help pay for things like personal protection, she said, it doesn’t make up for the years of harassment.
Following the judgment, Lorelei said she was looking forward to this weight being lifted from Fong-Jones’ shoulders. “It is not an easy thing to do. I am very proud of her.” As for what next, Lorelei said they had “plans upon plans”.
“It is a little bit of whack-a-mole,” Fong-Jones said. “But anytime that the site is not actively harassing people, people can breathe, breathe a sigh of relief.”
Zhen did not respond to a request for comment.