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Please get the mental help you need and stop visiting Kiwifarms

• Vecr 4y ago
  • danShumway 4y ago
    > Since no one impartial actually knows anything for sure about the real person behind the account, no one can do any sort of investigation that's anywhere close to ethical. Quick reminder that Kiwi Farms has entire threads dedicated to digging up hearsay and dirt on trans/autistic targets, and for people to now say, "well, have we really rigorously proven that this person is dead, and has that proof come from a fully impartial 3rd party source instead of just from friends and family members?" -- is an extremely selective call for rigor. Since when has Kiwi Farms ever cared about the neutrality of primary vs secondary sources of information? I don't buy that Kiwi Farms is just stepping back and saying, "we don't want to jump to conclusions", because if they were really against jumping to conclusions, I'm not sure that their site would even exist in the first place. It's not my intention to play whataboutism on this, but: A) if you're really concerned about rigor during callouts, that alone is already reason enough for you to dislike Kiwi Farms. B) pushing someone to the point where they would fake their own suicide and basically abandon their online identity is also a really messed up thing to do, and I'm not sure that it changes anything about the situation or makes Kiwi Farms any less culpable or awful. "We only bullied someone into virtual suicide" doesn't make the site look any more sympathetic at all. C) A lot of people close to Near have confirmed their death, and it really quickly gets into conspiracy theory territory to claim that Near had the resources or community organization necessary to pull off a ruse like that. Really, the only reason why doubt is being thrown on this in the first place is because the outcome is inconvenient to Kiwi Farms, this is not a level of rigor that is typically demanded in other situations. D) Incidentally, if we're going off of Wikipedia's editorial standards for recently deceased people and asking how they should be applied in this situation, Wikipedia states Near's death as a fact, so apparently the evidence is good enough for them. ---- I can't tell people how they should or shouldn't defend Kiwi Farms, but my gut instinct is that to a casual observer, pulling an Alex Jones defense and claiming that the multiple suicides that have been blamed on Kiwi Farms are all community-pushed "false flag" events, is probably not going to endear people to the site. If anything, it just makes the site's community seem even more disconnected from reality.