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For those who don't know KiwiFarm is a far-right forum that organized harassment campaign against many individual, especially trans developer. Some of their vic

by maeln 4y ago

For those who don't know KiwiFarm is a far-right forum that organized harassment campaign against many individual, especially trans developer. Some of their victims have committed suicide after years of harassment. Most notably Near, famous in the emulation community and Chloe Sagal, an indy game developer. CloudFlare continue to host them despite all.

unsignednoop 4y ago
Any proof about being far-right? Looks like the claim was only added to wiki today. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kiwi_Farms&type=revision&diff=1106535664&oldid=1106427863 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kiwi_Farms&type=r...
- maeln 4y ago
  You can literally go on the forum and read it if you need any proof.
  - convery 4y ago
    Just did, the latest featured thread is laughing about a Republicans silly statements. Seems to have no issues criticising both the left and the right..
    - oats 4y ago
      Oh ok then, I forgot that there aren't people who are further right-wing than the Republican party...
      - convery 4y ago
        You said to read the forum, I did. Saw no comments about politics, threads of people laughing at both sides of the political spectrum (with the majority of threads being apolitical). So where's these 'far-right' people hiding?
        mhoad 4y ago
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        It's more embarrassing to not provide evidence that is supposedly easily found when asked.
        mhoad 4y ago
        Nobody here is your personal librarian. Nobody owes you some carefully cited reply. The original point that was made is widely accepted by every neutral party familiar with the topic, it wasn’t some fringe theory. Then the replies started coming in that were at best ignorant and at worst bad faith demanding proof. It’s like trying to argue with your crazy uncle at Christmas about global warming. I’m not going to play that dumb game with you and not should anyone else feel compelled to. If you had any genuine interest in getting an answer it wouldn’t be difficult but it looks much more like you just want to be some contrarian for the hell of it.
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        I'm not saying you owe me anything. I'm just saying if you want to convince anybody you shouldn't just say there are people who agree with me but I won't tell you who they are or the examples they point to.
        mhoad 4y ago
        The point I was trying to make is that you’re walking into a conversation that’s multiple years old and not particularly controversial and then demanding that people do the work for you in order to help catch you up. I think if you were serious about actually wanting to know it wouldn’t be difficult to do which is why it seems like you’re just wanting to be contrarian for the sake of it. Maybe you could expand upon what you’ve done so far to try and answer the question for yourself? I was responding to someone who spent a grand total of several seconds on the topic before coming to a conclusion that they felt so strongly about that they thought they would come and argue with randoms on the internet about and as far as I can tell they put more effort in than you have so far.
  - colpabar 4y ago
    You can’t just make a claim and then not provide any evidence. If it’s so obviously “far-right” (it isn’t), prove it.
  - rvz 4y ago
    The burden of proof is on the claimant (That is YOU) to give that evidence not the other way round. Telling some one to look for that evidence is not 'proof' and it is YOU that needs to provide the evidence. If it was so easy to prove, you would have already done so in less than an hour. 20 hours is plenty of time to show this proof by now, yet there is none. There is no shame to admit that you have no evidence and you made a baseless claim.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  So there's some reason to say that it's inaccurate to classify the site as far-right. It did not start out as a far-right organization or anything. It's always been a troll farm whose purpose is to organize people who can take others down, but wasn't established as an alternative to stormfront or something. However, their victims are nearly all under the "left wing" umbrella. And if you go and read the posts on the maniacally long threads discussing their victims (especially the ones they've successfully goaded into suicide), it's riddled with far-right hate speech. So if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a duck?
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    >It's always been a troll farm whose purpose is to organize people who can take others down What? It was originally a forum for users of a wiki about Chris Chan. It's purpose is more about documenting what exists and discussing it. It's never been about trolling others or harassing people.
    - phillipcarter 4y ago
      It's always been about trolling and harassing. Why are you defending them?
      - charcircuit 4y ago
        >It's always been about trolling and harassing. That is not the point of the site. >Why are you defending them? Because I've been a member of communities where outsiders inaccurately describe the community to others making it seem like something it isn't.
        phillipcarter 4y ago
    - snausages 4y ago
      'Documenting' the existence of a socially maludjusted grown man so they can laugh at him and coordinate gaslight efforts definitely counts as harassment. It's always been like this
potamic 4y ago
It's a slippery slope to so many other issues. An issue that is black and white today can become grey tomorrow. Sanctioning a corporation to take moral decisions is giving them too much power. I would rather corporations not have such power and we use the legal route to control societal conduct.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  What issues, exactly? Companies are free to operate their own TOS and decide what activities they allow on their platform. There's literally nothing about dropping kiwifarms as a customer that puts Cloudflare in a weird position. And there's nothing stopping kiwifarms from operating on their own (and thus being directly responsible for the speech on the site).
- snarf21 4y ago
  Corporations already do this and always have. Movies/TV/Music place limits on whether nudity/violence/profanity/etc is allowed or not. Newspapers decide what articles they print and distribute. Shows/Networks/Platforms limit what ads they will show to users (e.g. Fox News isn't going to show ads that are anti-gun and NPR isn't going to run ads that are pro-gun) In general, this is how it works. Public pressure causes public change and eventually that leads to codification in law, not the other way around.
  - FiniteField 4y ago
    In this case though, the current "cyber mob", as you might call it, is agitating for a famously editorially neutral company (that simply provides a service to other websites) to become strictly partial based on what is essentially politics under the guise of an anti-harassment campaign. This is a hair's breadth away from demanding that the electric, water, and gas utilities suspend service from problematic but law-abiding individuals and companies. The claim is that private companies should be able to freely choose whether to "publish" another person's views, but the underlying intent is blatantly to bully all the right "dependency" companies such that it is absolutely impossible to operate a law abiding website unless it enforces the correct politics. In other words: - "Just make your own subreddit/group chat/etc" - "Just find another website to speak your views on" - "Just make your own website if you want free speech" - "Just run your own hosting company" - "Just run your own DNS registrar" - "Just build your own datacentre" - "Just run your own worldwide DDoS protection" (<-- You are here) - "Just run your own Internet backbone if you want infrastructure companies to peer with you" - "Just create your own Internet"
charcircuit 4y ago
It's not a far right forum and site members are recommend not to contact the people being discussed there. There aren't harassment campaigns being organized there.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  You are intentionally spreading misinformation about the forum on this site. Please stop, as your intentions can only be assumed to be malicious.
  - FiniteField 4y ago
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    I'm not spreading misinformation. I've been involved in neighboring communities and I am sharing what the site is. What I'm sharing are my legitimate beliefs and I'm trying to paint an accurate picture. I am not trying to misinform anyone, but rather inform them as I happen to be more familiar with the community than some other people here. You can say that I'm biased in favor of it as I live in the corner of the internet that is close to it and I would say that would be a fair assessment.
Aunche 4y ago
Why stop at Cloudflare? We need to tell PG&E to cut off their electricity and McDonalds to stop providing the calories that's enabling their harassment campaigns. /s
FiniteField 4y ago
>organized harassment campaign It should be noted that the stated aim of KF is a forum to document and discuss the escapades of people that naturally produce their own drama and spectacle, and actually interacting with the "lolcows", on- or off-site, is explicitly against the site rules. Obviously whether you believe that sentiment to be genuine is your prerogative. >Most notably Near, famous in the emulation community While I'm sure others have mentioned that there isn't any direct evidence to indicate that Near actually did commit suicide (I truly hope he is still alive, both on a human level, and because I followed his excellent emulation development), the uncomfortable detail that is always left unstated is that he was not a person driven from a previously well mental state to suicide. The truth is that, prior to his suicide note, Near attracted very little attention on the site, with just a small, HN-sized thread before he made an account to directly talk to people in the thread. In his communication with the KF administrator (which ironically I can't find since the site is being DDoSed right now) he said that his mental state caused him to hyper-fixate on the relatively small amount of negative attention from the community, and he admitted that he didn't know the precise reason that it bothered him so much. Before the administrator finished the email negotiations about what action to take about the thread, Near had sent a follow-up message saying that it was, essentially, too late and that he was going to take his own life immediately. All this isn't to say that this was Near's fault, and I think it's obvious that the ethical thing to do would have been to remove the thread. But ultimately if the question is whether a website's existence should be made de facto impossible, it's an important detail to mention, and a very similar story to other 2 or so people on the supposed "kill list". To put it crudely, the site exists to document the things that "crazy people" do online. Without ruling out that the site had a hand in people's suicide, it's pertinent to consider that there is a very strong selection bias at play if a person featured on the forum sadly takes their own life. >CloudFlare continue to host them despite all. I believe Cloudflare doesn't host the website per se, but proxies traffic for mitigation against attacks. The organiser of this current movement has been pretty overt about getting Cloudflare protection removed so that the site is at the mercy of DDoS attacks and other highly illegal means of disruption.
throwayyy479087 4y ago
KF is not right wing, it's just a troll farm. It's more or less apolitical - they make fun of crazy terminally online people, some of which are trans.

by maeln 4y ago

unsignednoop 4y ago

Any proof about being far-right? Looks like the claim was only added to wiki today. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kiwi_Farms&type=revision&diff=1106535664&oldid=1106427863 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kiwi_Farms&type=r...

maeln 4y ago
You can literally go on the forum and read it if you need any proof.
- convery 4y ago
  Just did, the latest featured thread is laughing about a Republicans silly statements. Seems to have no issues criticising both the left and the right..
  - oats 4y ago
    Oh ok then, I forgot that there aren't people who are further right-wing than the Republican party...
    - convery 4y ago
      You said to read the forum, I did. Saw no comments about politics, threads of people laughing at both sides of the political spectrum (with the majority of threads being apolitical). So where's these 'far-right' people hiding?
      - mhoad 4y ago
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        It's more embarrassing to not provide evidence that is supposedly easily found when asked.
        mhoad 4y ago
        Nobody here is your personal librarian. Nobody owes you some carefully cited reply. The original point that was made is widely accepted by every neutral party familiar with the topic, it wasn’t some fringe theory. Then the replies started coming in that were at best ignorant and at worst bad faith demanding proof. It’s like trying to argue with your crazy uncle at Christmas about global warming. I’m not going to play that dumb game with you and not should anyone else feel compelled to. If you had any genuine interest in getting an answer it wouldn’t be difficult but it looks much more like you just want to be some contrarian for the hell of it.
        _-david-_ 4y ago
        I'm not saying you owe me anything. I'm just saying if you want to convince anybody you shouldn't just say there are people who agree with me but I won't tell you who they are or the examples they point to.
        mhoad 4y ago
        The point I was trying to make is that you’re walking into a conversation that’s multiple years old and not particularly controversial and then demanding that people do the work for you in order to help catch you up. I think if you were serious about actually wanting to know it wouldn’t be difficult to do which is why it seems like you’re just wanting to be contrarian for the sake of it. Maybe you could expand upon what you’ve done so far to try and answer the question for yourself? I was responding to someone who spent a grand total of several seconds on the topic before coming to a conclusion that they felt so strongly about that they thought they would come and argue with randoms on the internet about and as far as I can tell they put more effort in than you have so far.
- colpabar 4y ago
  You can’t just make a claim and then not provide any evidence. If it’s so obviously “far-right” (it isn’t), prove it.
- rvz 4y ago
  The burden of proof is on the claimant (That is YOU) to give that evidence not the other way round. Telling some one to look for that evidence is not 'proof' and it is YOU that needs to provide the evidence. If it was so easy to prove, you would have already done so in less than an hour. 20 hours is plenty of time to show this proof by now, yet there is none. There is no shame to admit that you have no evidence and you made a baseless claim.
phillipcarter 4y ago
So there's some reason to say that it's inaccurate to classify the site as far-right. It did not start out as a far-right organization or anything. It's always been a troll farm whose purpose is to organize people who can take others down, but wasn't established as an alternative to stormfront or something. However, their victims are nearly all under the "left wing" umbrella. And if you go and read the posts on the maniacally long threads discussing their victims (especially the ones they've successfully goaded into suicide), it's riddled with far-right hate speech. So if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a duck?
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >It's always been a troll farm whose purpose is to organize people who can take others down What? It was originally a forum for users of a wiki about Chris Chan. It's purpose is more about documenting what exists and discussing it. It's never been about trolling others or harassing people.
  - phillipcarter 4y ago
    It's always been about trolling and harassing. Why are you defending them?
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      >It's always been about trolling and harassing. That is not the point of the site. >Why are you defending them? Because I've been a member of communities where outsiders inaccurately describe the community to others making it seem like something it isn't.
      - phillipcarter 4y ago
  - snausages 4y ago
    'Documenting' the existence of a socially maludjusted grown man so they can laugh at him and coordinate gaslight efforts definitely counts as harassment. It's always been like this

potamic 4y ago

It's a slippery slope to so many other issues. An issue that is black and white today can become grey tomorrow. Sanctioning a corporation to take moral decisions is giving them too much power. I would rather corporations not have such power and we use the legal route to control societal conduct.

phillipcarter 4y ago
What issues, exactly? Companies are free to operate their own TOS and decide what activities they allow on their platform. There's literally nothing about dropping kiwifarms as a customer that puts Cloudflare in a weird position. And there's nothing stopping kiwifarms from operating on their own (and thus being directly responsible for the speech on the site).
snarf21 4y ago
Corporations already do this and always have. Movies/TV/Music place limits on whether nudity/violence/profanity/etc is allowed or not. Newspapers decide what articles they print and distribute. Shows/Networks/Platforms limit what ads they will show to users (e.g. Fox News isn't going to show ads that are anti-gun and NPR isn't going to run ads that are pro-gun) In general, this is how it works. Public pressure causes public change and eventually that leads to codification in law, not the other way around.
- FiniteField 4y ago
  In this case though, the current "cyber mob", as you might call it, is agitating for a famously editorially neutral company (that simply provides a service to other websites) to become strictly partial based on what is essentially politics under the guise of an anti-harassment campaign. This is a hair's breadth away from demanding that the electric, water, and gas utilities suspend service from problematic but law-abiding individuals and companies. The claim is that private companies should be able to freely choose whether to "publish" another person's views, but the underlying intent is blatantly to bully all the right "dependency" companies such that it is absolutely impossible to operate a law abiding website unless it enforces the correct politics. In other words: - "Just make your own subreddit/group chat/etc" - "Just find another website to speak your views on" - "Just make your own website if you want free speech" - "Just run your own hosting company" - "Just run your own DNS registrar" - "Just build your own datacentre" - "Just run your own worldwide DDoS protection" (<-- You are here) - "Just run your own Internet backbone if you want infrastructure companies to peer with you" - "Just create your own Internet"

charcircuit 4y ago

It's not a far right forum and site members are recommend not to contact the people being discussed there. There aren't harassment campaigns being organized there.

phillipcarter 4y ago
You are intentionally spreading misinformation about the forum on this site. Please stop, as your intentions can only be assumed to be malicious.
- FiniteField 4y ago
- charcircuit 4y ago
  I'm not spreading misinformation. I've been involved in neighboring communities and I am sharing what the site is. What I'm sharing are my legitimate beliefs and I'm trying to paint an accurate picture. I am not trying to misinform anyone, but rather inform them as I happen to be more familiar with the community than some other people here. You can say that I'm biased in favor of it as I live in the corner of the internet that is close to it and I would say that would be a fair assessment.

Aunche 4y ago

Why stop at Cloudflare? We need to tell PG&E to cut off their electricity and McDonalds to stop providing the calories that's enabling their harassment campaigns. /s

FiniteField 4y ago

>organized harassment campaign It should be noted that the stated aim of KF is a forum to document and discuss the escapades of people that naturally produce their own drama and spectacle, and actually interacting with the "lolcows", on- or off-site, is explicitly against the site rules. Obviously whether you believe that sentiment to be genuine is your prerogative. >Most notably Near, famous in the emulation community While I'm sure others have mentioned that there isn't any direct evidence to indicate that Near actually did commit suicide (I truly hope he is still alive, both on a human level, and because I followed his excellent emulation development), the uncomfortable detail that is always left unstated is that he was not a person driven from a previously well mental state to suicide. The truth is that, prior to his suicide note, Near attracted very little attention on the site, with just a small, HN-sized thread before he made an account to directly talk to people in the thread. In his communication with the KF administrator (which ironically I can't find since the site is being DDoSed right now) he said that his mental state caused him to hyper-fixate on the relatively small amount of negative attention from the community, and he admitted that he didn't know the precise reason that it bothered him so much. Before the administrator finished the email negotiations about what action to take about the thread, Near had sent a follow-up message saying that it was, essentially, too late and that he was going to take his own life immediately. All this isn't to say that this was Near's fault, and I think it's obvious that the ethical thing to do would have been to remove the thread. But ultimately if the question is whether a website's existence should be made de facto impossible, it's an important detail to mention, and a very similar story to other 2 or so people on the supposed "kill list". To put it crudely, the site exists to document the things that "crazy people" do online. Without ruling out that the site had a hand in people's suicide, it's pertinent to consider that there is a very strong selection bias at play if a person featured on the forum sadly takes their own life. >CloudFlare continue to host them despite all. I believe Cloudflare doesn't host the website per se, but proxies traffic for mitigation against attacks. The organiser of this current movement has been pretty overt about getting Cloudflare protection removed so that the site is at the mercy of DDoS attacks and other highly illegal means of disruption.

throwayyy479087 4y ago

KF is not right wing, it's just a troll farm. It's more or less apolitical - they make fun of crazy terminally online people, some of which are trans.