Network infrastructure giant Cloudflare faces pressure from activists to stop providing services to a nearly decade-old website where anonymous users organize the harassment and "doxing" of transgender people, in some cases with the goal of driving them to suicide, Axios' Scott Rosenberg reports.

The big picture: Many technology providers prefer not to stand as judge of their own customers' behavior or content, but the Trump-era rise of the far right has repeatedly forced Cloudflare and others companies into that position.

• In 2017, Cloudflare cut off service to the Nazi Stormfront organization and its Daily Stormer website in the aftermath of the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. However, in a blog post following the move, CEO Matthew Prince expressed deep reluctance to censor content and a desire to avoid playing a similar role in the future.
• Today, red states are passing new laws that limit the rights of transgender people and deepen a climate of fear. Meanwhile, a number of right-wing sites and activists have been targeting drag queens, transgender people and medical providers who provide gender-affirming health care.

Catch up quick: The site, Kiwi Farms, was described in a 2016 New York Magazine profile as "the web's biggest community of stalkers."

• Kiwi Farms spun off from the notorious anonymous-trolling forum 4chan in 2014. Its users claim their site is about laughing at people they call "lolcows."
• But the targets of their abuse are typically transgender or neurodivergent people.
• The range of harassment, according to many of those targets, extends to publishing personal information, efforts to get individuals fired from their jobs, and "swatting" incidents where local police are told a crime is underway at their home addresses. These campaigns in some cases have been sustained over months or years.

The end point of these efforts, in many cases, is to persuade targets that the only way to end their abuse — and that of their families — is to kill themselves.

• Several trans and nonbinary people have taken their lives amid Kiwi Farms-led campaigns, including prominent emulator programmer Near, who blamed the site for spawning unendurable levels of harassment.

The latest wave of attention to the site and its users followed an incident earlier this month in which prominent Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti (who goes by Keffals online) was "swatted," prompting her to go into hiding and sparking the new campaign aimed at Cloudflare's services to Kiwi Farms.

• "Multiple people have died because of this website," Keffals told Axios. "So many lives have been ruined, and unless people stand up and do something about it, many more will as well."

How it works: Cloudflare doesn't host Kiwi Farms, but it provides a number of services that help keep the site online and distribute its content efficiently.

• Liz Fong-Jones, a former Google engineer and cloud computing expert who has been targeted by Kiwi Farms users, said in a Twitch webcast that the campaign hoped Cloudflare would "do the right thing" — and that, without the cost efficiencies its services provide, Kiwi Farms would be unsustainable as a business.

What's happening: Kiwi Farms' web presence has flickered off and on this week, but there's been no clear sign that Cloudflare has withdrawn its service as we send this newsletter, and the company has not responded to requests for comment.

• A posting from the site's operator, Joshua "Null" Moon, said he was "looking at what my other options are" and argued that the site's critics "falsely equate information with harassment, speech with violence, and discussion with stalking."

The intrigue: Kiwi Farms' name emerged in a different context Wednesday after an incident in which Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) was "swatted" at home and a caller to the police claimed responsibility and claimed to be a Kiwi Farms user.

• The anonymity of everyone on the site means it's effectively impossible to verify such claims, raising unresolvable questions of intent and suspicions of "false flag" behavior from all sides.

If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 — or you can text message or call 988.

Box CEO Aaron Levie says his company is seeing strong business, even as his customers struggle to deal with inflation, supply-chain challenges and an uncertain path back to traditional office life.

• "Every enterprise on the planet is dealing with some mix of macroeconomic or business-specific challenges," Levie told Axios in an interview following the company's quarterly earnings report Wednesday.

Driving the news: Box, which provides cloud storage and business collaboration tools, reported sales and earnings ahead of prior expectations and raised its outlook for the year. Based on its forecast for the coming quarter, Box has reached a $1 billion run rate, Levie noted.

• Box, Levie said, can help companies that are looking to drive growth even as they cut costs.

Between the lines: Levie said that businesses that depend directly on consumer spending are facing the most pressure. "As consumers deal with inflation. they have less money to spend," he said.

• By contrast, he said that business remains "fairly robust" in sectors such as financial services, manufacturing tech and government.

For its own part, Box is moving forward with its hiring plans for this year, but Levie noted that the company was already heavily focused on improving profits following an activist shareholder campaign. "We are incredibly selective with our investments on headcount," he said.

Meanwhile, other tech companies posting quarterly results on Wednesday were less optimistic, with Salesforce cutting its outlook and Nvidia missing expectations amid what CEO Jensen Huang called a "challenging" gaming environment.

1. Apple on Wednesday invited reporters to a Sept. 7 event at its Cupertino, California, headquarters where the company is widely expected to debut the latest crop of iPhones along with new Apple Watch models and potentially other devices as well.

• Why it matters: The success of the iPhone is not only key to Apple's business, but vital for a variety of firms that supply the device's components — and also for U.S. wireless providers such as AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon. Having the event a week earlier than in recent years could mean more third-quarter business for all concerned.

2. Meta and Twitter took down a series of accounts that were pushing pro-U.S. and pro-Western themes to Middle Eastern and Central Asian audiences.

• The intrigue: Typically, such campaigns of "coordinated inauthentic behavior," as Meta calls them, have aimed at undermining democracy and boosting authoritarian governments, with most influence operation campaigns linked to Russia, China and Iran.

On Tap

• VMware and Affirm report earnings.

ICYMI

• Amazon is shutting down Amazon Care, its telehealth service. (CNBC)
• Pinterest confirmed it is under investigation in California over civil rights issues. Former employee Ifeoma Ozoma has been contacted as a potential witness. (Protocol)
• Twitter whistleblower Peiter "Mudge" Zatko will testify Sept. 13 before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Reuters)

Check out this Zillow listing for the White House — and a tip of the hat to Biden tech competition adviser Tim Wu for the tweet pointing it out.