On the night of 5 August, Clara Sorrenti was at her home in Canada, streaming on Twitch TV, a live-streaming platform, when police kicked down her front door and arrested her at gunpoint.
She was later released after an apology from the Toronto police chief. Her crime? Being a trans person streaming and creating content on the popular platform.
Clara" Keffals" Sorrenti is a trans live streamer who streams her political views as well as video games on Twitch.
Just by using her social media posts and live videos, someone had found her address and called the police, saying that she had threatened to kill multiple people. This was the reason behind her wrongful arrest.
Clara's story isn't the first incident of a streamer getting "doxxed" and "swatted", but her story escalated much further in a matter of hours.
But first, let's clear up what "swatting" and "doxxing" are for those who don't know.
Doxxing and Swatting
Doxxing refers to finding the personal details of someone you know online and making them public. These could be their real names, their phone numbers, their e-mail IDs, their home address, their office address, or any other clear personal identifiers.
This is a screengrab Keffals shared, showing how an online forum found and doxxed her, before the swatting incident. Soon after this, many others shared similar address details, both belonging to Clara, and her family.
Screengrabs from Kiwi Farms shared by Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti. Sensitive details have been blacked out.
"Swatting" takes doxxing further and uses a person's home address to call the police and falsely report a crime at their residence. This "crime" that they report could be anything from an armed and dangerous person to murder or even an act of terror.
The police act on it swiftly and send in SWAT teams that are trained to handle these situations with deadly force, to the home of a person who's usually live on a platform like Youtube or Twitch.
Clara, who goes by the online name Keffals, is just the latest of several incidents of targeted persecution and harassment against LGBT content creators over the past 10+ years.
In the worst-case scenario, this has led to the deaths of people who were being harassed or who got swatted.
In 2017, The Washington Post reported about the death of a 28-year-old man, Andrew Finch, after he was swatted by another player following a argument over the multiplayer first-person shooter game Call of Duty.
The player responsible for the swatting was sentenced to 15 months in prison and the man who made the call at his request, Tyler Barriss, received 20 years.
In fact, weaponizing information about a person has most recently been used to even target a representative of a state in the US.
Twitch TV and Hate Raids
A "raid" on Twitch is when a streamer takes their viewers and followers to another streamer's channel to show their support, usually when they're broadcasting live.
This can help bring large numbers of viewers to streamers who have very few viewers. For example: If I was streaming and had 500-1000 viewers and raided a friend who had just 1-3 people watching, most of my 500-1000 viewers would automatically be taken to their channel and their live stream.
But this same raid mechanic has been used since at least 2021 to target and harass streamers with the keywords/tags LGBT, Trans, Nonbinary, Queer, and so on.
Several hundred people flood a streamer's chat and instead of support, they spam hateful messages, racial slurs, death threats, and even try to incite the streamer to "kill themselves".
Why though? Well, simply because they're under the LGBT tags or even #BlackLivesMatter or #AfricanAmerican categories.
In August 2021, many LGBT streamers like RekItRaven were subjected to these hate raids. The harassment usually starts with transphobic, homophobic, racist messages, and in more severe cases devolves into full-blown death threats.
Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti's case is a symptom of the disease that is hate raids, doxxing, and swatting. In August 2022, the hate raids and comments quickly escalated into her being doxxed and swatted four times.
Kiwi Farms and Other Hate Forums
Kiwi Farms is known on the internet for being a forum that targets and actively encourages the harassment and persecution of people they deem "different". This includes trans people, people of colour, and basically anyone they deem "weird or eccentric", according to their own website description.
For example, Clara screenshots were shared with us that showed how members of Kiwi Farms had used her social media posts to identify where she lived.
I'll save you the horror of poring through their forums.
Screengrabs from Kiwi Farms shared by Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti. Sensitive details have been blacked out.
In the posts on Kiwi Farms, the users also constantly refer to Clara "Keffals" Sorrentis by her 'deadname' as the LGBT community calls it, i.e., the name assigned to Clara at birth. They refer to Clara as "he" before laughing about "accidentally doxxing and swatting" Clara's relatives.
In further messages, they actively encourage Clara to take her own life.
Screengrabs from Kiwi Farms shared by Clara "Keffals" Sorrenti. Sensitive details have been blacked out.
The users also post about encouraging people to "join the 41%" which is a reference to the attempted suicide rate of transgender people, which stands at 41%. Below are some of the violent threats and messages on the forum.
One prominent female streamer, spoke about the hate raids she'd received, on the condition of anonymity.
"There was one hate raid where it was just repeated messages, where it was spamming my chat. It does get in your psyche a bit because they know it bothers you, so they’re going to keep doing it until you stop streaming — which has happened with a bunch of Twitch streamers. They’ve just completely stopped streaming because of it."
On the topic of the harassment and fear faced by streamers using the LGBT/nonbinary/genderqueer tags, world record holding streamer Jadeite says:
"I haven't felt unsafe using the LGBT tag, however, the nonbinary tag scares me because of the current debate on gender. When there is a rash of hate raids, I turn the tag off for a week or two, but it always comes back on when I feel safe again."Jadeite, World Record Speedrunner, Deadly Premonition
Twitch implemented two-factor authentication and mobile number verification as a requirement for users on the platform, to counter the hate raids. However, it's far from adequate.
Jadeite adds, "The new verification rules for chat help, but at that point it was too late. Those could have been implemented a long long time ago. This has been happening for far longer than is reported."
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Clara has moved residences and even moved countries to avoid the worst of the harassment. She says she won't bend in the face of threats and harassment. She's now initiated legal action to fight back.
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