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Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
- minimaxir 4y agoIs there precedent for this type of removal? Even sites like the Daily Stormer still exist on Internet Archive, albeit with a login wall.
- dhosek 4y agoI 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).
- prongnongs 4y agoI 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.
- philippejara 4y agothe 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... shit's scary
- prongnongs 4y agoAgreed, 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.
- UpstandingUser 4y agoCan somebody explain the back story? What is Kiwi Farms?
- X6S1x6Okd1st 4y agoThey've been harassing people to the point, and with the intent of them committing suicide.
- jackson1442 4y agoThis also includes harassing their family and employers.
- Ekaros 4y agoSo will the same rules be applied to all internet sites where any cases of this happen? Like let's say youtube, facebook and twitter?
- chomp 4y agoWeb 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.
- kelchm 4y agoWikipedia link for some background — I hadn’t heard of this before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
- worldofmatthew 4y agoWikipedia 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.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoOn articles like that one, the Talk page is a far more realistic view of the subject than the actual page.
- dmatech 4y agoI'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.
- JYellensFuckboy 4y agoI 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.
- moralestapia 4y agoWhoa, I thought they were almost completely neutral to these sort of issues. I guess not.
- danso 4y agoA 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] [0] https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_personal_information_removed_from_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...
- kadenwolff 4y agoThis 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.
- cauthon 4y agoPopular 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.
- smoldesu 4y agoPrivate 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.
- krapp 4y agoOK, but there is literally no business in the universe that won't drop you as a customer if you cause them enough trouble.
- smoldesu 4y agoYou'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.
- kome 4y agothat's not how an archive should work. but perhaps Internet Archive is not an archive and it doesn't want to be one.
- klyrs 4y agoSo if they scrape a kiddie porn site, they should keep that publicly available in perpetuity? That's not how the world works.
- jbuhbjlnjbn 4y agoThis comparison summons the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
- klyrs 4y agoNot really. It's a clear demonstration that archives do not retain everything always. Whatever you read into it beyond that is on you.
- ardfard 4y agoMore apt comparison, should we erase Meinkampf or Das Kapital or any books that inspire violences (for example, the holy books) from existence?
- krapp 4y agoThat 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?
- DarkByte8 4y ago> 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.
- danso 4y agoTangential 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: http://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims-of-manipulated-blog-posts-in-the-wayback-machine/ http://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims-... 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: https://archive.org/post/133690/robotstxt-only-gives-temporary-removal-of-pages https://archive.org/post/133690/robotstxt-only-gives-tempora... > 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?
- mmastrac 4y agoIt's probably there, inaccessible, waiting for future researchers in a more civilized age.
- scrollaway 4y agoI 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. Even spam stays in.
- westmeal 4y ago
- prongnongs 4y ago
- kodyo 4y agoHas any individual been arrested for a crime yet?
- grnmamba 4y agoIf only there was a way to look at the alleged evidence...
- philippejara 4y agoThe owner's statements: https://t.me/s/kiwifarms https://t.me/s/kiwifarms
- jbuhbjlnjbn 4y agoReading this, now I'm on the fence. 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.
- nachivement 4y ago
- superchroma 4y agoGood, 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.
- ketzerei 4y ago
- hnburnsy 4y agoWell 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32720162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32720162 Sorry but this feels like book burning to me.
- mazdayasna 4y agoThanks 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.
- dmix 4y agoThere’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.
- richbell 4y agoThere are already dozens of sites like this today. Many are uncreatively named offshoots of Kiwi Farms.
- bobsmooth 4y agoI regret ever donating to them.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoKiwifarms 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".
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gruez 4y ago>Google "bathtub hrt". I found a blog post and several reddit posts talking about it, but I still have no idea what it is. Is it literally made in a bathtub?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- a_shovel 4y agoFrom what I've seen, that does seem to be the accusation. I don't think it's actually possible to make hormones in a bathtub.
- 0cVlTeIATBs 4y agoFollowing 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." [0] https://diyhrt.wiki https://diyhrt.wiki [1] https://oelabs.co/en https://oelabs.co/en
- 3452356346 4y agoThey're going after other archive sites as well, apparently: https://twitter.com/mpetch/status/1567259704652623872 https://twitter.com/mpetch/status/1567259704652623872
- subsistence234 4y ago
- DarkByte8 4y ago
- honkdaddy 4y ago
- repost4ever 4y ago
- HereIGoAgain 4y agoOk this is just creepy! I thought this was about the "danger" and "threats"
- 47rufhdhsjsjdbb 4y agoHopefully the result of all this will be more mainstream adoption of tor, i2p, freenet and other censorship-resistant platforms.
- tjpnz 4y agoWhat'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.
- dragontamer 4y agoThe 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.
- dmatech 4y agoThe 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".
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThe 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.
- peanut_worm 4y agoI guess the internet archive doesn’t take their mission of preserving the internet very seriously
- jimmydorry 4y agoWhat KF? Never heard of it. I guess the old addage has never been truer: "History is Written by Victors"
- badRNG 4y agoThey have a reputation for targeting people to intensely harass into suicide, with Byuu being a notable victim in the HN/CS sphere. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610
- hoseja 4y agoThere 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.
- baud147258 4y agowas that reputation substantial though?
- colejohnson66 4y agoEnough 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.
- badRNG 4y agoYes. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
- grandpoobah 4y ago
- firstSpeaker 4y agoWhenever 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.
- manuelabeledo 4y agoI'm okay with removing someone from the internet if their business is to harass and dox people.
- firstSpeaker 4y agoAbsolutely. 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.
- Cr4shMyCar 4y agoThat'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.
- voidpointercast 4y ago
- HereIGoAgain 4y agoWho'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.
- mexicalino 4y ago[flagged]
- firstSpeaker 4y ago[flagged]
- blantonl 4y agoPart of the reason why we study history is to learn from past mistakes.
- firstSpeaker 4y agoI 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.
- justin66 4y agoIt's ignorant or dishonest on your part to equate the Internet Archive with "big tech."
- firstSpeaker 4y agoOr it can be neither. My comment was for general state of things and more particular for Cloudflare. Apologies for lack of clarity in the comment.
- hnfong 4y agoIt's ignorant or dishonest on your part to disregard the broader context in which "big tech" are increasingly calling the shots.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- __void 4y agoI am baffled by the comments here, not in a good way
- helf 4y agoAmazes 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? C’mon.
- devwastaken 4y agoBy 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.
- jjulius 4y ago>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.
- richbell 4y ago
- devwastaken 4y ago
- unsafecast 4y agoI 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.
- dmitrygr 4y agoHow 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.
- Rackedup 4y agoWhat else have they deleted? Anyone keeping track?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Rackedup 4y agoApparently, they also banned https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz (someone commented about it before but somehow the comment was deleted....) https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter....
- rchaud 4y agoOptions for those twisting themselves into knots over this egregious act of censorship: A. Complain online B. Strike a blow for free speech and host the data yourself.
- vdnkh 4y agoHN Libertarians: The Marketplace of Ideas is essential to discourse HN Libertarians when the free market acts: No, not like that!
- Ekaros 4y agoSo 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.
- danso 4y agoI'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.