Well I guess there is now limited ways for someone to evaluate for themselves on whether KF was posting horrific content without significant moderation. Guess we at least have Taylor Lorenz to tell us exactly what is going on here in a full and unbiased way.
Someone here at HN at least posted this link which told more of the story than I have seen anywhere else. Also search the HN archives (for now at least it seems) for interesting discussions on KF prior to these latest events.
They still have an hidden service online [0], an ipv6 only mirror [1] and they are working on restoring it "as normal" [2]. In any case they stated a backup of the site will be publicly available if they give up [3].
I find interesting they took the archived copy down instead of keeping it publicly available since it was the only way to prove what kiwifarms has done instead of having as only source "trust me bro".
Either way I don't think it matters since nobody actually bothered to link or prove any of their claims so I don't think it really changes much.
Thanks for spreading this some more. Funny enough, I got that link from reading an archived version of Keffals' thread on KF while trying to get a bead on the situation myself. At best, KF threads are a simple public record of a person's online presence, (that they themselves posted publicly initially) content which I believe should absolutely be online. At worst, the popularity of threads about trans/autistic people on KF amounts to an incentive to provoke the "lolcow" into providing more "milk", which I would say is definitely a form of harassment.
Perhaps this will lead to a successor site with a similar "mission" that consists only of what would be a thread OP on KF, without the thousands of pages that follow wherein people say the n-word as many times as they can.
There’s no way there won’t be another site of the terminally online obsessively documenting the terminally online.
There is clearly massive demand for content about people like Chris Chan and Keffals, and these people have a way of constantly generating new controversy and attention (this obviously doesn’t justify harassment or IRL threats). If the drug war taught us anything it’s that demand can’t be squashed by playing wack-a-mole and then putting your fingers in your ears until it pops back up again next week.
It feels deeply disingenuous to claim that all KF is doing is "cataloging someone's online life" while refusing to talk about constant SWAT-ing, the cheering of their victims committing suicide, and the constant IRL harassment they organize against their victims.
After Byuu, the emulator dev of bsnes, higan and more was harassed into suicide [1], harassment almost exclusively organized on KF, I've lost patience for weak defenses of a site that causes threats to folk's lives.
What I don't understand is why this is done by private corporations instead of the government. Stalking is a crime, harassment is a crime, SWAT-ing is a crime.
I don't want to live in a society where law enforcement is left to big tech vigilantism. There's a reason that governments are granted a monopoly on violence, they have democratic legitimacy and accountability that other entities do not.
> What I don't understand is why this is done by private corporations instead of the government. Stalking is a crime, harassment is a crime, SWAT-ing is a crime.
Because law enforcement (at least in the US) is woefully bad at their jobs and don't care. I have first-hand experience with this when I had a close friend who was being harrassed by someone local (we knew who it was) and LEO refused to lift a finger. I've talked about it multiple times before on HN [0][1][2][3] but even with this guy graduating to physical actions (keying the friend's car, following/stalking them) the police did nothing.
So if our only options are "Have the police do nothing" or "Have a private corp decide to not do business with a company anymore" then I know which one I'm picking, which one will actually help reduce harm. Even if they spin up under a new name they will lose users along the way. Deplatforming works.
The problem is you’re not solving anything with these antics. KF still exists and will continue to exist. It’s just book burning for the sake of feeling better with absolutely nothing to show for it. In this case not even the satisfaction of seeing a burned book.
People desperately want the world to be different, and it isn’t. It isn’t, and it won’t change massively within your singular life. So you can grandstand and congratulate yourselves on “winning” with the IA and CF decisions, but KF is still online and all you’ve done is make more people aware of their existence.
Furthermore, this idea of banning objectionable content ultimately ends in tyranny as the only way for you to possibly succeed on your mission is to add fundamental filters to the internet. No thanks.
The idea that we must provide a platform for people to actively organize harassment campaigns designed to kill people in order to avoid "tyranny" is beyond absurd.
By claiming censorship, it's implied that they deserve a platform, and to not have that taken away from them. You can't censor someone without a platform.
You know about the Spanish Inquisition, right? Have you heard what Catholics say about it? They say that according to their records it wasn't that bad[0] and that the numbers are deliberately inflated by anti-Catholic sentiment.
It would be great if there were some other record keeper so we could ensure the church didn't "lose" any records that made them look bad.
But I'm sure you would have stopped any 3rd party back then who was setting out to transcribe the inquisitions' trials. After all, they were just giving the church yet another platform to spread their intolerance.
That's like saying pushing an object implies that it has a right to stand still. Censorship is simply when something is suppressed or prohibited. Whether or not you think the censorship is merited is a matter of opinion, not inherit to the word's definition.
IA isn't a "platform". Claiming censorship does not mean deserving of a platform. Reality is they already have a platform, and will continue to do so, now in even more anonymous methods. Preventing users from being held responsible.
The best that could have been done is if CF continued to proxy it, and answered discovery and court orders, that way users could be unmasked and prosecuted. But now they got away free.
The IA can easily switch visibility of sites in the archive on or off and the most common case is when somebody changes their robots.txt settings. No data is lost. You don't really believe they would be unwilling to comply with a subpoena for information from a prosecutor investigating Kiwi Farms, or an attorney seeking damages in a civil suit, or whatever, do you?
You’re missing the point I was trying to make. What you’re trying to achieve is literally impossible without tyranny. You will not ever eject KF from the internet as we know it today. You will not ever succeed in this goal.
But what you may ultimately accomplish is ushering in tyranny and government regulation of the internet in the name of censoring objectionable content.
Not only still online, but now their previous actions have been covered up for them! One could argue IA is pro-kf, why else would an archive intentionally destroy evidence?
Obviously no-one can predict the future, but a reasonable assumption (I think) is that a future AI will be able to de-anonymize supposedly anonymous posters to Kiwi Farms. If someone is posting terrible opinion to Kiwi Farms, why should they be protected by archive.org from reaping what they sow?
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Archive.org now provided more shade.
What I don't know is if Kiwi Farms _requested_ to be removed from Archive.org. As a publicity stunt, I could see a request for removal and then a wailing that they've been removed.
There was a minor kerfuffle with Snopes and a fact check of theirs which embarrased them. They later revised their fact check to no longer be embarassing. Problem was, archive.org still maintained the original. You can no longer find the original article from 2018 on archive.org. I'm sure that the only people who wanted the embarassing fact check removed were Snopes themselves. Archive.org was apparently happy to help them revise their history, by limiting how far back you can see anything in their library from Snopes.com.
A lot of these claims are contested though; that's the point; it's been discussed a million times already, but if you look at the actual thread on KF (which is now hard to do, it seems) there really wasn't all that much going on until they suddenly killed themselves with a statement "it was due to KiwiFarms".
Not only is there a suicide note, but their employer confirmed their passing. This defense is one that is parroted almost exclusively by the KF users responsible for Near's death to deflect blame. The burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that there is some conspiracy afoot to fake a suicide.
You mentioned that all Kiwi Farms does is "showcase the horrible activities of horrible people." Setting aside the absurdity of this statement, does this apply to Near in your opinion?
Is it ethical to keep snapshots of pages doxing people? Or dumps of bank account numbers? There's no way to both preserve that content publicly and also protect the victims.
There were no dumps of bank account numbers. As far as I saw, Kiwi Farms users posted only publicly-available info about thread subjects. In my opinion, certain categories of public yet personally-identifying information should be covered by US law in a way similar to HIPAA. However, that is not currently the case.
Also, info like someone's phone number and home address are only a click away once you have their full name and approximate age/geographic location, at least for people haven't taken extraordinary steps to limit discoverability on Spokeo or White Pages. People post full names and locations to Twitter all the time. They call it "unmasking" when it's someone the ruling consensus dislikes, while they know the info will be used to look up the "dox." This is not Twitter or Kiwi Farms' fault. It is the result of flaws in our legal system which allow sites like Spokeo and White pages to operate.
It's easily verifiable that bank details were shared on KF. It's also easily verifiable to see that non-public information about folks was posted, especially when real details were posted about folks commonly known by their pseudonyms online.
Whether it's legal or not is unimportant. My question is for the internet archive: is it ethical for them to knowingly rehost dumps of PII? Just because it's public doesn't mean it's right for them to treat it like any other page. The goal of the KF users is to harass by putting that information out there: if IA rehosts that intentionally, they're making an active choice to further the goals of KF users.
>It's easily verifiable that bank details were shared on KF.
I see you've backed off from "bank account numbers" to "bank account details," perhaps after Googling the same Twitter screenshots I just found in an attempt to verify your claim. Those screenshots show a user describing a hacked bank account's balance and recent purchases. That's pretty bad; hacking into bank accounts is very illegal. The individual who broke into the account very likely committed a crime. Regardless, the screenshots don't show any credentials or account numbers. I'm not sure if posting someone's bank balance is illegal, but I'm guessing it isn't; maybe it depends on how it was obtained... don't know, not a lawyer.
Of course, the screenshot is totally unverifiable now that KF is wiped from the Internet Archives, which is the point of the submitted link.
> "Short version: [Kiwi Farms is] A very edgy forum ... where users cruelly gossip and post public information on niche online oddities (lolcows) that thrive on the attention KF gives them." [Emphasis mine.]
This piece of egregious victim-blaming should have been your cue to ignore this article. If it wasn't, the victim-blaming in the rest of the article (such as "She probably genuinely enjoys it. Or she has a death drive, a martyr complex.") should have cued you in.
There's a lot more people who were targeted by KF than Keffals. The majority were ordinary people who were part of a minority and had just enough of a platform to be on their radar (or were related to/had a similar name to someone who was). "They put themselves out there, online", but that doesn't mean they "have no one to blame but themself" for the harassment and death threats they received. They didn't do anything wrong. The fault lies fully on the users of Kiwi Farms and those who created and supported a community that allowed them to organize and coordinate their harassment.
I hope in 10 years we could compare the state of the internet with today and see what else has slowly became the norm. It feels like we are moving toward a tech tyranny bit by bit. Every day we wake up and things are change a very little bit and we assume this is how it has always been or it is supposed to be.
Note that I do not defend any ill action that anyone on KF has done. What I am trying to point out is how the Internet is becoming a playground for few big tech to do as they see fit. Maybe our regulation/laws didn't catch up, or that they are inefficient, and that opens the space for tech staff/CEOs to make judgement calls and execute the judgment.
This is ridiculous and has been a cascade of awful precedents for the Internet. This is legitimately an extremely bad sign of what's to come for the Internet's future.
Popular endorsement of harassment to the point of suicide seems like a worse sign, personally.
When it comes to threats to freedom of expression, I'm much more concerned about the religious right's abuse of government authority to censor education, ban books, and suppress the vote, than I am about private institutions taking steps to protect human life.
Private institutions have every right to stand behind whoever they choose. As a user, I have no intention of using Cloudflare because (even as a queer individual) I don't feel safe using a platform that would censor me if enough people were mad enough. I would much rather choose a platform that stands by their TOS as-written, instead of stepping in to arbitrate on a case-by-case basis.
Cloudflare has ever right to open Pandora's Box, but I want nothing to do with it. Much like Namecheap's fumble earlier this year, the way they handled this situation showed their true colors, and made it evident that I don't want to ever do business with them.
You'd think that, but historically this has only encouraged niche businesses to crop up catering to that crowd. Look at Epik (or Vultr) for example, businesses that exist solely to counter this kind of threat. Yes, they still reserve the right to remove abusive users, but that's defined by legal statutes and technical limitations rather than 'icky feelings'. Both services have a surprisingly solid track-record servicing the roughest of customers.
Failing all that, KiwiFarms doesn't need a business to stay afloat. The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network. To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website. Websites don't harass people, people do.
At the end of the day, businesses gotta eat. They're not a charity or a benevolent public force. If your user generated content impacts their bottom line, you're gonna get kicked to the curb.
>The endgame for all of these so-called 'abusive platforms' is retreating to I2P/Tor, or another internet-adjacent network
I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor. Both CDNs are primarily concerned about business risk with hosting content and calls to action that could be found illegal.
Epik hosted 8chan in the interim after Cloudflare dropped them. This cause Epik's hosting provider to drop them, and since Epik doesn't own their datacenters they had to abide by their hardware provider's decision: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/5/20754943/8chan-epik-offlin...
I'll still eat some crow, though; I forgot the entire business was owned by Rob Monster (a veritable idiot by most definitions of the word), and I completely forgot that they even provided hosting in the first place.
> I'm pretty positive Cloudflare and IA do not care about a moral crusade to stop Kiwifarms, and would not care if they went to Tor.
I'm certain they don't. That's the problem, though; this moral panic response to KiwiFarms has achieved nothing. Cloudflare knows that this is a zero-sum game, but they bent anyways. As businesses, their choices make plenty of sense. I disagree with businesses all the time though (check the comment history), and frankly I think Cloudflare made the wrong decision here. In my opinion, their actions here will be more destructive to queer populations in the long-run.
It doesn't stop Nazis from existing though (or even knowing about, visiting and supporting the site). If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate. The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either.
I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
> If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate.
Yes because the police were doing such a great job at monitoring and responding to threats from KF. Wake up, this is such a weak argument that has no basis in reality. We hear these same tired arguments over and over that are not backed up with facts (or, you know, arrests).
> The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either.
Yes they are.
> I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
What part do you not "believe" in? Deplatforming absolutely works. These rats might scurry to another platform/provider but each time fewer and fewer jump through all the hoops. You are letting perfect be the enemy of good.
> It doesn't stop Nazis from existing though (or even knowing about, visiting and supporting the site).
This approach is making perfect the enemy of good. There is no perfect way to solve this problem.
> If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate.
It's still a website, it's still accessible. That part hasn't gone away. If the contention is that launching TOR somehow means it's "harder to monitor" then I have some news for you: Lots of monitoring of darkweb stuff goes on every day.
Deplatforming is analogous to quarantining a person with an infectious disease. It works. The FBI can still monitor whatever's left of KF on Tor or Discord.
If you think of beliefs as infectious diseases, you're not respecting the autonomy of other people.
If I need to be prevented from knowing what the monsters say in order to avoid turning into a monster myself, then I promise you, we've lost. The monsters are going to eat us all.
You've got plenty of autonomy left to visit them in whatever darkweb hellhole they decide to exist in and learn what the monsters are saying. We don't need to allow places in the public square for these people.
Yes, I can probably for myself still find out what they are saying. But this is about KF being removed from an archive site. Making it harder to prove what they are saying, and easier to lie about what they are saying. Who benefits from that?
>You'd think that, but historically this has only encouraged niche businesses to crop up catering to that crowd. Look at Epik (or Vultr) for example, businesses that exist solely to counter this kind of threat.
And Cloudflare had no problem hosting Kiwi Farms and Daily Stormer until they crossed a line. Cloudflare's history doesn't exactly paint it as bleeding-heart liberal who can't deal with 'icky feelings.' I'm sure Epik and Vultr have their lines as well, it just happens that none of their customers have crossed it yet.
>To stop KiwiFarms from existing, you need to literally silence the people using it, not just shut down their clearnet website.
Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
>Websites don't harass people, people do.
Guns don't kill people, people do. Except people with guns can kill a lot more people faster. That's why guns are a thing.
Whether or not you want to be a free speech absolutist, you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters. If it didn't, no one would be up in arms about deplatforming. Yes, it's literally and technically true that a website can't harass people, but having a platform meant to organize and facilitate harassment is a force multiplier for the people doing said embarrassment. Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters, even if it is a person pulling the trigger.
> I'm sure Epik and Vultr have their lines as well, it just happens that none of their customers have crossed it yet.
Indeed they do, which makes me a happy customer. Knowing how inflammatory their other customers are, it brings me great comfort in knowing that their free speech is honored as much as mine. If either of them pulled a "Cloudflare moment" at the same scale, I'd probably start looking for other hosting providers.
> Slowing them down is still a valid goal.
...did we do that, though? The past 2 months have done nothing but put KiwiFarms in the spotlight. Instead of privately petitioning Cloudflare to change their policy, we drew battle lines and took to Twitter. All KiwiFarms ever wanted was attention, and we gave them more attention than they could have ever hoped for. Do people seriously think they're going to struggle to bounce back after an attack like this? Giving online organizations a platform has been a huge mistake in the past, like treating "Anonymous" as anything other than the default name for 4chan posters.
> you have to concede that the platform and its reach matters
Absolutely. That's why I'm afraid that attacking the platform now will cause it to become harder to attack. It's already increased it's reach, the recent media hubbub has ensured that everyone knows about KiwiFarms. I guess the Streisand effect is lost on modern internet users...
> Without the website, the people couldn't harass as well as they could with it.
Right. Now imagine how much worse things would get if there wasn't a website, but a Tor hidden service. Or a closed Matrix homeserver. Or an IPFS bulletin board. The sky is the limit, and I'd go as far as to argue that they were the least harmless on the surface web. Only time will tell, though.
> And the size, reach and convenience of the network matters in that regard, just as the capacity, rate of fire and caliber of a gun matters
Well... no. This is something that has been proven time and time again in America; banning certain types of guns doesn't work. Banning an AK doesn't stop someone from chopping their Glock 17 and clearing a room at half the price. Gun legislation doesn't correlate with a reduction in firearm violence. The capacity, rate of fire and caliber never mattered, just the fact that the gun existed in the first place. If we're not going to ban guns outright, what's the point in picking-and-choosing which ones are-and-aren't perceived as harmful?
Obviously it's a reductive argument, but the same thing goes for free speech. By choosing to draw the line somewhere, we're giving other people the go-ahead to draw different lines. We're giving world governments the tools they need to oppress LGBT users. We're drawing the blueprints for a new era of information suppression, and nobody seems to care since both sides have started beating the "muh terrorism" and "think of the children!" drums, respectively. And when has that ended well for internet freedom in the past?
i had ZERO clue what kiwifarms was before all this.. now that I know how much they try to keep me from seeing it, I have made it a point to look at for the forseeable future.
I do not subscribe to bullying or doxxing or anything like that, but now kiwifarms will get a fair chance at showing me what they are about, they had zero chance before, as I did not know they exist.
A website was bullied off the internet because it showcased the horrible activities of horrible people. I'm far more concerned that a handful of Twitter users can memoryhole an entire community.
You say that as if the people running KF didn’t know what the site was for. And a publicly known reason for that website’s existence is because bullies need a place to coordinate harassment.
Having the power to shut that place and therefore behavior down but choosing not to means they were complicit. Deplatforming works, the influx of new bullies shrinks when you make their place less public.
That was unequivocally not a publicly known reason. There were thousands upon thousands of “lolcows” documented in kiwifarms and the sites culture strongly emphasized not “disturbing the grazing lolcows” or “taking things IRL.” That much was obvious for me as somebody who only visited the site a few times a year out of curiosity.
That may be obvious to you. Have you tried asking some of the people documented there what they think about the site's culture, and how well it discourages harassment against them?
I’ve been on the internet long enough to know what harassment is, and I went on Kiwi Farms enough to know the site culture. There will always be people laughing at other people on the internet and I would prefer it stays that way.
The removal in question is an archive. A read-only snapshot cannot be used to coordinate anything. But it can be used to view the documentation they have collected.
Therefore it would seem that this particular removal is motivated by erasing the documentation and performing a cover up.
KF has, at most, 3 deaths debatably attributable to them.
A dozen children died because of the Tide Pod challenge-- and that's just one campaign. We could talk about planking falls, cinnamon poisonings and more if you like. That's before we get to the rise in runaways and child exploitation directly attributable to the "legitimate" platforms. Kids are being solicited on Roblox FFS.
How does a community of bullies deliberately targeting (internet celebrities) have a lower kill count and merit higher priority than a handful of individuals conspicuously encouraging ignorant children to engage in lethal acitivities?
Sure, words can't hurt you, but coordinated harassment campaigns can, and, for the mentally feeble, like CWC, words can coax you, over enough time, to act in your worst interests.
Do you think the parents whose child was on the cover of Nat Geo count as a "public internet persona"? Do you think it's right that people should be forced to go into hiding and avoid something as basic as a magazine interview for fear of becoming a target on these sites?
What you're advocating is complete self-censorship for people with views these websites consider targets.
Being on the cover of a major magazine (with an accompanying article) absolutely makes you a public person, and you can't expect people not to criticize your family for doing something that is still controversial.
Right. Also, we're glossing over the fact that it's not just bullying, but swatting, threatening phone calls, contacting employers to seek termination, email spam, sending unpaid-for pizzas, etc. It's not just words.
So the logical response is going to service providers and business partners to get them deplatformed?
>It's not just bullying
Which is already able to be dealt with as harassment, and is defanged in this case in the judicial system most likely under assumption of risk doctrine as a public figure.
>It's swatting
Already illegal, and has metadata trail through which filing a false report can be dealt with.
>threatening phone calls
Jesus. So block or screen them. Should I go running to the police because I'm harassed by marketers all the time? Furthermore, LE has the metadata to deal with that too, and if they tell you they don't, they're lying.
>contacting employers to seek termination
Twitter does a lot of that too. Sucks when the shoe is on the other foot, doesn't it?
>email spam
Should be a capital offense with death penalty viable, but alas, it's email. Ignore it. Or have fun with it, see how big your collection can get. Start seeing how many times things get repeated. Start doing data analysis on it.
>sending unpaid-for pizzas
Correct response: I'm sorry, but I did not order any. I have a bit of a problem with people online trying to troll me. Here's my contact info, here's a codeword/auth mechanism that can be used to authenticate something came from me in the future. Done. Would recommend actually vetting the establishment in question, and if you know you are bringing this to your locality, be responsible and proactively front-run it by going and talking to local places that deliver to you.
>It's not just words.
It totally is. In point of fact, freedom to communicate without someone else deplatforming you is so important, we call it freedom of speech. Nobody else is forcing the person in question to continue feeding the trolls, and it is a poignant point of fact that if they are disturbed by the observations these people are making, it may be worth taking a moment to reorient around their own actions, and to be a bit more self-conscious on what it is they do that may be setting off others in such a way as it does.
But no, continue to regale us all about how there is no other more reasonable, local, and less harmful way to deal with something like this than blasting the Internet, and encouraging the weaponization of the infrastructure at the core of technological advancement for the last 50 or so years.
Whenever I read stories of big tech making decision to destroy some digital asset by taking decisions like this or banning people from their accounts (read gmail, google drive, etc.) It makes me shiver. They can put a brick wall in front of anyone's life/business.
Absolutely. When there is a due process and it is done with the accordance of law that we are all supposed to abide. Not by unilateral decision of a tech CEO/Staff.
I'm not comfortable with people being forced at metaphorical gunpoint to host or deliver objectionable content, and that appears to be what you're proposing here. If we want governments to mandate due process standards, they can be the ones to host that content as a provider-of-last-resort.
Do you believe that being on the Internet Archive is a god-given right and that only a judge should be able to tell IA to delete the work that IA chooses to do on their own?
If you're a shithead in a club, you get kicked out. If you're a shithead with your family, you get kicked out. If you're a shithead on the internet, you also get kicked out.
I do not believe any shithead should be given a pass. My comment was mostly about who decides who is a shithead. If tomorrow someone famous/outreaching enough on twitter/etc. decides that I am a shithead, should google close my account?
If you were to host your own forum, and people began using it to dox trans individuals with the explicit goal of harassing them, how would you react and what action(s), if any, would you take?
You are demonstrating a clear failure to understand not only the magnitude of what occurs, and can occur, when someone is doxx'd, but also KiwiFarms' history as a party to specific incidents of suicide and external harassment as a result of said doxx'ing on that site.
Doxxing is not illegal, if posting publicly available info can even be called that. The only suicide that was actually blamed on the site by the victim, is someone nobody can show any official or direct evidence of's death. The second of the 3 alleged deaths, literally blamed the mental health system and becoming homeless the day before.. no mentions of kiwifarms.. It was online "allies" after the fact that made the link among efforts to get the site shut down in the past. All of the claims largely cases of "if you say something enough times people will start repeating it"
This whole mess has some real rabbit holes, but anyone who does a little research will find a lot of the claims used to drum up hysteria are quite wanting in the way of facts or proof.
This is true, in some jurisdictions, in the same sense that it is true that homicide is not illegal.
Doxxing with particular intent is illegal in those jurisdictions; e. g., California where Penal Code § 653.2 was adopted specifically to address harassment by doxxing.
There are exceptions but the point still mostly stands. Secondly, "with intent" the rules of the site explicitly forbid harassing or interacting so that's going to be quite a claim, even in those rare exceptions, to make let alone prove. Plus, a lot of what we are talking about isn't likely to qualify anyway since most of it is simply posting publicly available information, usually from the person themselves and still available from their accounts/SM etc.
> the rules of the site explicitly forbid harassing or interacting so that's going to be quite a claim
Not really; showing that rules like that are conscious fig leaves and actually indicators of knowledge and intent is... not at all uncommon. Lots of sites taken down by law enforcement for deliberate facilitation of prostitution or human trafficking had “don’t use this platform for prostitution/trafficking” rules, too.
Not really. Those rules are and have been enforced quite strictly. In order to show intent you're going to have to do a lot better than just saying they posted it so it's their fault. And again, we are mostly talking about public info that the person themselves has openly posted online. That's not private information no matter how you look at it.
On the one hand, we have freely shared information. On the other hand, meta information obtained by digital stalking (or, in some cases, literal stalking). The later is absolutely not ok.
I agree regarding the freely available information (which often involved self-made drama). There is nothing bad about archiving it per se.
With one interjection: some of this information is decades-old.
While the right to forget does not exist on the internet, if people reflected on things, admitted they made mistakes and changed their perspective, it should be possible for any sensible webmaster/reader, to allow some kind of redemption.
This was exactly the case with byuu - he realized past mistakes, openly admitted and wanted a somewhat fresh start. But KW's webmaster did not allow it. At this point I percieved KF as openly cruel and kind of showing their true colors.
From what I've seen it wasn't as straightforward as that. The operator, Null, shared the email exchange and there seems to have been less than 24 hours between Byuu's first message and his last.
Null's last message was this, after which he went to bed (apparently, idk the timezones involved in this). It doesn't seem like a "no".
> I feel like you're being genuine. There's a fear here that you're just trying to prank me to show people "look, Josh just wants money", but it's one of the small subsets of concerns at play here.
>
> So hear me out: Send me your resume, I'll make you a counter offer.
The closest I've seen to this in real life is people pawing through 1/6 photos to identify criminals and report them to the police. I don't hang out on antifa forums tho, care to enlighten us where that's happening?
>>>decides that I am a shithead, should google close my account?
Google (and facebook, twitter, paypal, etc) does that with regularity today, every once in awhile someone with reach in the tech community has it happen to them, some programmer or researcher, etc and it makes the news here but political commentators are banned every day off google sites because some one with enough influence on twitter targeted them for being a "shithead" in their view.
Yeah ? In the same way that if you're in my home and someone comes to me telling me you're being a shithead, and there's verifiable proof that you're being a shithead at the very moment, you're going out.
That's the problem though. Legal gears move slowly, and you know that Kiwifarms would've kept destroying people's lives and driving people to suicide until they got shut down. I would've preferred actual legal action rather than companies dropping KF because they're bad for business, but the end goal of getting them shut down is the same.
Who's lives and what deaths? Most of the (3) people claimed to have died, didn't claim anything of the sort. (in fact the one that activists like to bring up most, who is actually dead, literally blamed the mental health system and being made homeless the day before) The one person who did blame them seems to have died without leaving any proof for official records of both the Japanese or American governments. Just the word of a friend and a former (as in even before death) employer.
What legal actions could anybody went after? They don't allow illegal activities and don't even allow interaction from the site. Even talking about it is banned. Why do you think so many attempts to take them down have failed. They follow the law and openly work with it if something illegal does happen... Including the FBI.
My feelings are irrelevant to my arguing. No, or at least not unless there was a good reason... More importantly, doxxing isn't illegal and is done by major media and orgs. Not to mention it seems like ~95% of what is being called doxxing here is posting publicly available (usually posted the the person themselves) info.
And in the context of KF, harassment and even interacting is against the rules. Attempting to do anything illegal, making threats or swatting etc are literal instant bans with your info being handed over to law on request.
>No, or at least not unless there was a good reason...
There was a follow-up: Why? KiwiFarms clearly allows this doxxing to occur on a daily basis, and I know that you know this. While it's not illegal, if you don't feel that doxxing is generally OK, why do you feel that it's OK for KF users to continue to go to the extent that they do?
>More importantly, doxxing isn't illegal and is done by major media and orgs
Two wrongs do not make a right.
>Not to mention it seems like ~95% of what is being called doxxing here is posting publicly available (usually posted the the person themselves) info.
There is a significant difference there. A lot of the information that is publicly available is information that has to be compiled. Someone has to go to the effort to look through all of the nooks and crannies to obtain what they want. KiwiFarms saves time and compiles general publicly available data that might be "difficult" to obtain to some degree, often times alongside otherwise private photos and information that individuals might not want widely disseminated, even if they did share it. This compiled data can make it easier and more likely for bad actors to do harm than if they had to go to greater lengths to obtain that info.
The fact that massive, multi-page forums threads can exist with tons of users providing all of this data and talking about these people is enough to cause mental damage to the targets of these threads. Actions need not be direct nor illegal to be harmful, and you know just as well as I do that there have been plenty of examples of people claiming harm from the existence of such threads.
Even if the behavior is not allowed and banned, the environment is still rife to encourage it. The further you allow people to go, legal or not, the more comfortable they're going to get with the boundaries that they push. This is evidenced by the historical instances of swatting and direct harassment that have stemmed from KF despite it's own rules against it, even apparently as recently as a few weeks ago.
>My feelings are irrelevant to my arguing.
That might be the case, but arguing in support of KF here is essentially arguing in support of what I just described above.
If somebody breaks into your house, you should wait for due process with accordance of law. Homeowners shouldn't make unilateral decisions about who is and is not legally allowed in their home.
except in this case, the owner of the "house" (website) is fine with the visitors. Instead, another organization (the HOA?) wants to kick out the owner because they don't like the visitors that he's inviting.
Point is, "the law" moves slower than emergencies unfold. Individuals and corporations have the right to enact and enforce their own rules on their own property, within reason.
There is no process to be had here though. Harassing is and always was against the site rules (as is interacting at all really) and "doxxing" (let alone post publicly available info) isn't illegal.
This is what is so scary about the hysterical fictional narrative misinforming so many. people generally don't have the first clue about the stakes and what really happened.
They weren't being hosted by CF, they were getting protection against illegal DDoS attacks. CF DDoS protection is an infrastructure service. Infrastructure level services picking and choosing who is allowed and not allowed, is a very dangerous thing. Such action quickly risk unraveling the entire net.
>CF DDoS protection is an infrastructure service. Infrastructure level services picking and choosing who is allowed and not allowed, is a very dangerous thing. Such action quickly risk unraveling the entire net.
How old are you? Surely you're aware that this has been an option for all infrastructure level services since the inception of the world wide web? And that this is by no means the first (there have been thousands upon thousands of decisions made like this, large and small), nor the last, time this will happen? And that in the 30+ years of the web's existence these kinds of infrastructure level services have been executing these options, the "entire net" has yet to "unravel" and sites like KF and 8chan, et al continue to find homes on the internet?
Tangential question: When the Wayback machine retroactively excludes a site's content – e.g. a site owner adds a robots.txt that specifies exclusion — the data isn't deleted, right? Just flagged to prevent being found in search again. In other words, if exclusion of KF turns out to be an unnecessary or unwanted (or if researchers want to study the KF data in the future), it's just flipping the flag, right?
Here's an example of a site that was retroactively excluded by webmaster request, but was later (forced?) to remain in the searchable archive:
edit: to answer my own question, seems like retroactive exclusion has, at least since 2007, not been interpreted to be a mandate for actual data removal:
> Hello, I want all old content from immortal ia.com REMOVED permanently from The Wayback Machine. So I read the exclusion policy, placed up a robots.txt file and requested the Alexa bot go to my website. Then checking The Wayback Machine, I got a notice that the site was blocked by the robots.txt file. But after I removed the robots.txt file, the archived pages reappeared. Is there a way to permanently purge all old pages of a website so that they will NEVER reappear in The Wayback Machine? Am I obligated to keep the robots.txt file in place forever?
I worked with people at the Internet Archive before. The data is never deleted. Blocking happens, but these folks take data preservation extremely seriously, and there's an exact 0% chance that the data is actually gone in any way.
If anything, the reason there's such a controversy in the first place is that they've gotten far more attention than they wanted. This sort of activity is only possible while skulking in obscurity.
Damnatio memoriae is devastating to a public figure, but it is doing KiwiFarms a huge favor. It lets them scurry away under some new rock and keep going under a new name. The worst thing you could do is probably just shine the brightest spotlight you can find square at their activities.
There is a good reason we erect monuments and museums to atrocities. It's not for ease of rubbernecking, but so that we can learn and avoid them in the future.
This whole campaign has been damning for the folks trying to take down kiwifarms. All of the evidence of their bad past behavior that used to be confined to one obscure site is now plastered all over the internet, and millions of people know about it.
My personal semi-conspiracy theory on this is that the search warrant served on Keffals (no, not a SWAT call, a search warrant) contained some note that they got probable cause from evidence on a kiwifarms thread. Since then, Keffals has been running to countries with no extradition treaties to Canada and trying their hardest to erase that evidence from the internet under the guise of stopping suicides.
She has run to one country, the United Kingdom, which surprisingly doesn't have an extradition treaty with Canada, but which is mentioned specifically as a country that will extradite to Canada on this [https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/emla-eej/bycan-parcan.ht...] Canada government website.
Very few countries, even without an extradition treaty, will refuse to extradite someone over prurient contact with minors. However, there will still be hearings and lots of legal process to fight the extradition - a lot more than if there were a treaty.
the problem is no one wants to look at the truth anymore, they were sold a narrative by a corrupt media and any attempts to inject truth or principle in the conversation are just shut down with screams of "phobe" or "ist" name calling
This doesn’t really hold up to logic, at least as written.
If the note references probable cause from a thread and the evidence is on kf, wouldn’t the authorities already have that evidence or be able to get a search warrant for it? Why would they search someone’s house for it?
Probable cause is not enough evidence to convict someone, but enough to conduct a further search to see if there is enough evidence for a conviction. See here (although this is US-focused, many other states have similar ideas): https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-rights/probable-ca...
Basically, they had the allegations and enough substantiating evidence to go to the point of looking for more evidence, but not to get all the way to an arrest/conviction. A search warrant is the next step.
EDIT: Also, the police have most likely downloaded the information, but you never know.
If you want a real conspiracy theory, recall that original and long-running KF thread subject Christine Weston Chandler was persuaded to incestuously assault her mother by a person named Isabella Janke. Kiwi Farms uncovered Isabella's history with Christine, and extensively documented her online activities to include allegations of extortion, CASM, and animal abuse:
It's silly. If Kiwifarms benefits from and wanted this, try telling it to those people on Twitter, or to admins and moderators on Reddit, where even talking about Kiwifarms could get you banned, much less linking to it.
If you try to convince them, likely you would get an unbelievable amount of negative online attention sent your way. Ironically the same thing they hate Kiwifarms for.
As an aside, I've noticed a common and extremely effective strategy frequently used by the alt right and other fringe ideological groups (not just in American politics but also in Europe and basically everywhere) is to first stir up a big stinky controversy, wait for the predictable social media overreaction, and then to just withdraw and completely refuse to engage, making their critics look like a bunch of lunatics raving at windmills (because the over-reaction is a hundred times much more public than the controversy), while also keeping the critics on their back foot, always reacting rather than acting on their own terms.
In practice: The abstract entity KiwiFarms takes all the shit, very few of the people actually constituting its membership seem to take much flak; meanwhile its critics look completely unhinged, even though they're absolutely right and KF is incredibly reprehensible, they still do their best to undermine the credibility of their own cause by acting and behaving like a frothing at the mouth lynch mob much more interested in power-tripping and revenge than truth and justice.
The strategy is straight out of Sun Tzu on how to deal with a stronger army, and I haven't really seen any examples of anyone handling it well.
I can't see this "withdraw and completely refuse to engage" thing. They're not organized enough to employ any kind of Sun Tzu thing. The "strategy" is chosen by default because they aren't allowed to engage, in most places. Even if you try to just report what they are saying, not even endorsing it, you get removed in most places.
May very well just be selection. The strategy is prevalent because it works, not through the machinations of some machivellian mastermind but because other strategies don't work.
Kiwi Farms has a thread on Taylor Lorenz from WaPo, because of certain erratic behavior. Taylor got her own dirt removed from the internet archive. Taylor has been helping Clara go after Kiwi Farms.
Taylor's uncle is Roger MacDonald, founder of TV News archive:
There is no proof at all that that user hasn't simply abandoned a handle, for others likewise the connection is less than tenuous and besides i.e. Twitter has much worse, proven track record of doing that and worse. Stop the knee-jerk reaction and spreading wilful misinformation.
Yes, yes it was. Kiwifarms users harassed, stalked, and doxxed 3 people (at least) into suicide and ruined many people's lives. How many people has an average site like Hacker News bullied into suicide?
How many has Facebook? Twitter? Back when I was in high school (graduated 2014), three students within my district committed suicide from cyber bullying conducted through these platforms, there wasn't even any bans!
Kiwi-farms seems fairly mundane based on everything I've read about it so far (not that I can even look at the site for myself now). Why is there a double standard here? How the hell did these random twitter users manage to gain the power to pick and choose who gets to be on the internet now?
> How the hell did these random twitter users manage to gain the power to pick and choose who gets to be on the internet now?
This is the part that really worries me. Random Twitter users trying to dictate what _I_ am allowed to read. And Cloudflare and the Internet Archive bends to their will! Highly embarrassing, these people should be taken at anything but face value.
Cloudflare folding is nothing new, but I really expected better of the Internet Archive.
Openly, to any outrage-politicking militant Twitter deathsquad member: you will never stop me from reading what I want to read. I wasn't aware of Kiwi Farms before your ridiculous antics but now you can bank on me reading EVERYTHING I can possibly get my hands on.
Yes. I provided a link you can click on, but you can also go to the Kiwi Farms Wikipedia page that catalogs victims killed and nearly killed by Kiwi Farms harassment campaigns.
Growing up, my teachers/mentors taught me not to cite Wikipedia directly for any academic/journalistic works, mainly because most people didn't actually check the sources that article writers were using and there's the risk that there's heavy biases one way or the other because - anybody can edit articles.
Looking at the Wikipedia article you linked, I don't see any definitive, authoritative sources of information that directly links KiwiFarms and these horrible events other than random tweets posted by people on the internet.
After looking through 5-6 different sources cited in the bottom of the article, I don't even see any references or screenshots of the actual website used in reporting, just journalists taking what other people are saying as fact.
And if you follow the citations the only sources you get are unverifiable tweets. Not a single report considered to check the original threads or do some research on whether the claims are true. Peak journalism all around.
I've never seen this alleged "suicide counter" on the website, though I've only looked at it closely in the past couple weeks.
The site owner posted this rebuttal to assignment of blame for these suicides, which I find compelling. For instance, the widow of one victim decried Vice News (one source referenced in the article) for using her death to attack Kiwi Farms:
The "suicide count" in question was in one user's mini-bio (the bit below someone's profile pic where they can put custom text - not sure what that's called). Keffals' claim that it's a site "feature" is deceitful and that multiple users had it is an outright falsehood.
Enough that three people have had their suicides linked to KF. KF isn't a place that you can ignore if you're a target; they will harass you until the day you die, literally.
The people driving the effort to deplatform it were verifiably doxxed, harrassed and threatened, often times in real life, through swatting and in-person harrassment. Some of them were children.
This isn't even witch-hunt style "newspaper will embellish the story", this was published on the forums by the ones harrassing people. The goal of the forums was to provide a space for doxxers to share info on people they didn't like (that they called "lolcows"), and elicit a reaction out of them for i guess entertainment?
KF was a site for snuff movies, except instead of a guy torturing and killing another, it was psychological abuse of the highest degree.
I am trying really hard to not run afoul of HN posting guidelines here, but this is RICH given the accusations against the main instigator of the deplatform efforts
What's the endgame here? Because the site's not going anywhere and everything that's happened has only emboldened their user base. There's likely to be unintended consequences too with even less scrupulous and accountable operators popping up to offer their services to sites like Kiwi Farms. They're not going to have any shortage of customers going forward.
The endgame appears to be the complete elimination of KF and all copies of it.
They might claim that its mere existence psychologically harms marginalized people, but it seems that their real goal is more about power. You get a ton of clout by both appearing as a marginalized person under attack as well as winning victories over enemies. Right now, Keffals and another person are fighting over who gets to take credit for this.
The more long-term goal is to establish a precedent that sites that are "harmful" are simply not allowed to be on the internet. This will serve as an example to any ISP that might consider hosting them or anyone like them in the future. All it will take is someone finding the site, reporting it to Keffals and gang, and the mob flooding their CDNs, data centers, upstreams, and business partners with demands to either deplatform or be deplatformed themselves.
There's currently no defense against the "Layer 8 DDoS".
The goal seems to be to erase all mention of any bad behavior on the part of the people campaigning against kiwifarms. Possibly to erase evidence of criminal activity.
If there's evidence of criminal activity on Keffals (or others) part, the police would have it. KF having a copy doesn't serve any legal benefit. And if the evidence is credible enough, then the police will charge and arrest her, and the evidence will be released during the trial.
Perhaps not, but there doesn't need to be legal benefit. Remember that there is absolutely no "right to erasure" in the USA (and I don't think it ever could exist given our First Amendment). At best, they can sue if there's defamation or copyright infringement.
The same could be said of 8chan doxxers and harassers.
It turns out that when you mess with people's lives, those people fight back. Stop doxxing people and harassing them if you want business partners to host your forums.
You smother their 'community'. It's a last ditch effort that should be used rarely, but this isn't the first time something like this happened, and it won't be the last.
But the site is going anywhere; it's going lots of places, in fact. They can't find a host that will both accept them and can handle the DDoS, so they've been bouncing around between domains and hosts. This is the kind of instability that destroys online communities, which in this case is good.
I think that for sites like this, the best approach would be to archive but not allow access to archives for some arbitrarily long period of time (10 years? 100 years? the point being largely to preserve the contents for the benefit of some hypothetical future scholars of history and culture).
I think it's better if such archived sites are free for all to read, just as the site originally would have been directly on the internet. There's no good reason to hide it.
the more you look into it the more it seems like desperation to allow them to claim whatever they want about the website and not be bothered to show archives to prove it... this comment section alone...
Agreed, it seems like an unprecedented amount of effort being put in to entirely memory hole a website that exposes unsavoury deeds.
Have we seen this happen for any other site? Even Wikileaks itself couldn't be brought down, despite the main man still languishing in prison, and being targeted by government agencies.
Amazes me the number of people who cry foul when something like this occurs. “Waaa censorship! This is evil! The internet is collapsing! Omg!”
1. Archive.org probably has just disallowed access. Not outright purged.
2. Shit drops off the internet literally every day
3. It’s a site full of edgelord incels who have a history of being complete pieces of shit
4. This isn’t a precursor to some horrible dystopian future of corporate control of thoughts!!111 that happened long ago ;)
Seriously though. All the panty twisting “oh noooo” wreaks of disingenuous bullshit under the guise of “but freedoms!”
You don’t have to leave the entirety of the content up to gauge it.
I mean, do you want TWBM to archive and leave up all childporn sites it accidentally crawls or similar? So individuals can gauge if it’s /actually/ bad or if it’s just a handful of twitter users squawking?
This isn't "shit dropping" off of the net.. This was the result of a true harassment campaign that finally resulted in a faux appeal to danger to literally force a completely legal site offline via illegal DDoS attack. (The stated goal of the media cheered campaign) And now an attempt to erase it's history.
You're right that it isn't a precursor to some horrible dystopian future of corporate control.. because it is actually that already! The internet is now broken. Another level of infrastructure (now basic network infrastructure) is open to tantrumers, PR etc veto!
People protesting a company is not "harassment". (Disclaimer: I'm an investor in Cloudflare)
> a faux appeal to danger
Law enforcement has been involved.
> a completely legal site
Yeah, no, at best it's in the black part of a very grey area until the slow US legal system catches up with the case.
> via illegal DDoS attack
Their various hosts dropped them. One of those hosts happened to also do DDoS protection, but that part is irrelevant if they have nowhere to host their website.
My advice to you: Stop browsing this type of forum. The brain rot via propaganda and misinformation is real. KF is not a victim. A bully is not a "victim" when their targets defend themselves.
If you rob me and I get you arrested after reporting you to the police, you're not the victim of a society ostracizing you, you're the perpetrator of crimes society doesn't tolerate. Quit hanging out with perpetrators.
I think kiwi farms should be taken offline because it’s a horrible site. What good is there in taking down the archive of it? Having archives of trump’s tweets was important after his twitter was removed so we could see what was there. There’s a difference between allowing people to use the site/post, and having a record of what was there.
They've extensively documented actual alt-right figures such as neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who they consider one of their "lolcows." They also followed and recorded the activity of accused rapist Christine (formerly Christopher) Weston Chandler, the original "lolcow", though several users interacted with Chris over the years in ways that may have contributed to his/her decline:
They also discovered and documented Isabella Janke, allegedly the person most responsible for convincing Christine to abuse her mother, among other allegations:
This truth of these allegations will likely come out at at Christine's upcoming trial, assuming enough evidence was preserved. Incidentally, Isabella's father Mike Janke has a professional relationship with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince:
By removing records of KF, we cannot prove the acts done on KF. You know, evidence, the thing you need to know if something is true or not. Or the thing you need to prosecute people civilly (or criminally). If I wanted to rightfully go after users of KF, or KF itself, how exactly do you intend to do that when all records are destroyed.
"The guberment will handle it" - they're not, and haven't for years. The only justice to be had here is if people themselves push for it. Alphabet orgs could care less, if not already members of it.
You're being both intellectually dishonest, hyperbolic, and strawmanning at the same time. Content that is illigal is taken down as it is reported. Not all content is illigal, no one has claimed KF for things outside of organized harassment.
>By removing records of KF, we cannot prove the acts done on KF.
You're ignoring (what was that about "intellectual dishonesty"?) the part where this is likely still archived by them, just not publicly accessible. You're also forgetting the countless screenshots and other documentation that exists of KF from prior controversial incidents.
> You're also forgetting the countless screenshots and other documentation that exists of KF from prior controversial incidents.
Screenshots are not a trustworthy medium. Many of the articles published about Kiwi Farms contain significant factual errors and rarely cite sources for the claims they do make.
For example, the CBC recently published an article claiming that the Christchurch shooter "revealed his intentions (on Kiwi Farms) hours before carrying out the attack".
If you read articles from 2019 it was claimed that the gunman posted on 8chan shortly before the massacre. The claim that he posted on Kiwi Farms hours before is completely new and unsubstantiated.
Sure. That's why it's likely that - again, I don't know how this still bears repeating in this comment chain - IA still has the site archived, just not publicly accessible.
I am not claiming it isn't. My point is that 99% of people who haven't heard of Kiwi Farms prior won't be able to validate any claims against a primary resource.
It becomes a very questionable "trust us, they were bad" from sources that are demonstrably flawed.
(I am not saying they aren't bad, but from researching common claims like the owner is a pedophile and the Christchurch shooter posted on Kiwi Farms myself, it's clear that quite a few are exaggerated or not true.)
The site was tried not in a court of law but in the court of public opinion. Removing evidence from the one court where it matters, especially as precedent for similar extralegal trials in the future, is harmful to the open web.
"likely still archived" isnt a convincing argument to compel discovery. Similarly, I'd like to see you convince a judge to allow random screenshots and documents into evidence without being able to prove their source. This isn't the wild west.
How is a reasonable person just coming across this brouhaha to determine what really happened? Apparently we are here to celebrate the primary source being deleted from what is effectively a museum. There is a reason that bookstores will still sell you a copy of Mein Kampf. I have no idea what a “keffal” or a “kiwi farm” is, and apparently now I cannot avail myself of a first-hand source. Screenshots can be doctored. I certainly won’t believe any of you about what happened. The internet archive always acted as a trusted proof of what really was present on a given site and when. Now, we celebrate destroying history and proof of alleged (and now unprovable) misdeeds. A dark day indeed.
I was under the impression "kiwi farms" was a dark place. The byuu story and reaction of the webmaster made me no fan. But this really changes things. Suddenly it's presumably "not just only" a twitter mob with some internet skills and resources committing vigilante justice.
This is becoming a precedent and the webmaster a martyr for the cause of internet freedom, and against Cancel Culture.
Suddenly I'm rooting for the supposed bad guy. I'm confused.
A few years ago, they realized it would be in the public archival interest to ignore robots.txt for gov/mil sites, and then possibly more types of sites. They have long had a manual process for submitting takedown requests by email; here's someone on reddit who claimed to have successfully gotten a page (presumably not under their control) removed from the archive [1]
Wikipedia is reliable to non-controversial topics only. Anything controversial is taken over by one side of the argument and only information that confirms that groups bias is allowed on the page.
I'd be cautious. One of the people editing these articles has extremely high Wikipedia privileges yet has publicly campaigned for the elimination of the site. There is absolutely no neutrality here.
I find myself growing more weary and concerned about Wikipedia's bureaucracy and politics. I'm not sure if I'm merely losing my naivete or the Wikimedia Foundation's integrity is in fact decaying.
I don't like it. We just pretend it didn't happen? They did really bad shit, and we just help them hide it.
Even with that aside, this is a lot of data, which, as an example, can be used in research about psychology. I'm never a fan of throwing data away, it's not like we have too much of it.
Its not the first time. Before than it was censoring content content that Scientology disliked. There was also the case of Snopes not being archived until a year ago, even after it got more involved in declaring more serious topics, rather than just internet urban legends.
There are people within the internet archive whose politics is so strong that I have said in private since 2016 that I have concerns they are a risk to the neutrality of the project. I am not going to mention their name to avoid a flamewar but that name will be mentioned more by others if they decide to remove more content.
That isn't apt, because removing Kiwi Farms from the Internet Archive doesn't remove it from existence.
Apt would be, should publishers have the right not to publish material like Mein Kampf, if they so choose, or does "free speech" now mean that all publishers must be forced to publish everything, however objectionable, if legal?
> That isn't apt, because removing Kiwi Farms from the Internet Archive doesn't remove it from existence.
The remove part was done already. They are not on the internet anymore. It was removed from Internet Archive because it contains some inconvenient information about DIY HRT to minors and other accusations.
Kiwifarms was a archive of the horrible behavior of the terminally online. If you're wondering why it was attacked with such vitriol, Google "bathtub hrt".
Following the rabbit hole leads to this wiki[0] which points to this "homebrew source"[1] which says, under Laboratory equipment -> Learn more:
"Although it is theoretically possible to make a 'low-cost' production (using only a 5mL syringe, a spinning top filter, a kitchen scale and a pressure cooker), the reproducibility and the quality will not be desired."
Good, in principle, I guess. I think this is a meaningless act, as I am unclear that archived threads were ever of any value to KF members.
Controversial opinion, but I think the internet archive shouldn't exist, and that the right to be forgotten trumps the right to outsource and automate the business of remembering. Maybe there is content worth saving, and maybe it ought to be manually scraped and preserved by a suitably interested individual.
So they are entirely fine with distributing pirated material, but a forum is too much? Reminds me to never to donate to them. I won't support censorious fascists.
I'm aware this is headed into No True Scotsman territory, but what pirated material is IA "entirely fine" with distributing? AFAIK their official position has always been to honor DMCA takedown requests -- I occasionally see PDFs of obscure but still-in-copyright books that users upload. But the high profile collections, such as public domain movies, seem pretty clear of infringing material.
I have no experience as a user, but I've heard about it in the past and have been following the keffals story. From my understanding it was a site largely dedicated too, or encouraging, or at a minimum allowing people to dox trans people and harass them by contacting employers/friends/family etc with pedophilia accusations. Keffals has been lobbying Cloudflare to drop hosting/DDOS protection for them after being forced to move to a new country, and due to them having a large online following for support they're having way more success than a lot of other people that they've harmed in the past
Web forum spun up to harass an intellectually disabled man into ruin (for those following along at home, objective: achieved), and then proceeded to attempt to ruin the lives of other people as well.
Short version: Website that tracks the salacious details of internet celebrities' lives appears to have crossed a celebrity who is very interested in having that information erased from the public.
---
Long version:
Kiwifarms is a site dedicated to discussing the affairs of famous people. Often, this goes as far as public records searches and weird internet sleuthing to find addresses and other such information that is usually considered private. The odd thing about kiwifarms is that it is organized so that individuals have a single thread, which is essentially a record of all the past information and rumors on that person in one convenient place.
There are disputed reports about Kiwifarms being instrumental in the harassment of 3 individuals to the point of them committing suicide, and people on kiwifarms have taken pictures outside of people's houses, etc. Lots of creepy behavior. Threats of violence have also appeared on the site, but are against its ToS and the owner of kiwifarms claims that they get moderated pretty quickly - whether they do is up for debate. It's mostly a center for sharing creepy levels of information and bitching about famous people, particularly when those people do weird things. Critics of kiwifarms believe that they are a center of information gathering (and thus coordination) for harassers.
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One notable individual, who uses the online handle "Keffals," did not like the content of their KF thread. Keffals is a transformation who has engaged in some behavior that is at best borderline, including sending hormones to kids without their parents knowing and running a discord server ("the catboy ranch") that involved prurient contact with minors. Keffals has also done several embarrassing things online, such as producing pornography and participating in internet drama.
Keffals was served with a search warrant recently, presumably regarding the former activities. At least one armed officer came to their house, but no guns were drawn, and Keffals' devices were seized. After the search warrant was served, Keffals erroneously claimed that someone from Kiwifarms had swatted them (and later walked back the claim), and then said that they were being threatened to the point of running from Canada (weirdly to countries with no extradition treaty), and started a campaign to get the site taken down. A gofundme was put up, also.
In response, people on Kiwifarms stepped up the creepiness, finding the hotel that Keffals was staying at in Ireland based on one picture of the bedsheets, ordering pizzas to the hotel, taking pictures outside the hotel, etc. Keffals later went to some other location, and I believe is not posting pictures any more.
During this time, several bomb threats and threats of violence against Keffals and the people who support Keffals also appeared on their kiwifarms thread. Also, people from kiwifarms tried to get the gofundme taken down.
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IMO the whole situation looks really bad for everyone involved. Two groups of internet trolls went to war. One side had a lot of institutional/media backing.
kf was the most accessible and moderated forum for gossip of internet personalities (mostly negative in the same way traditional gossip magazines are typically negative)
this recent action seems to be related to their long-running beef with a particularly well-connected transgender, over being the primary location for documentation on questionable activities like shipping hormone replacement drugs to minors
Someone here at HN at least posted this link which told more of the story than I have seen anywhere else. Also search the HN archives (for now at least it seems) for interesting discussions on KF prior to these latest events.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32720162
Sorry but this feels like book burning to me.