7 ms·

I guess the internet archive doesn’t take their mission of preserving the internet very seriously

by peanut_worm 4y ago

jimmydorry 4y ago
What KF? Never heard of it. I guess the old addage has never been truer: "History is Written by Victors"
- badRNG 4y ago
  They 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 ago
    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.
  - baud147258 4y ago
    was that reputation substantial though?
    - colejohnson66 4y ago
      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.
    - badRNG 4y ago
      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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
      - forgotpwd16 4y ago
        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.
      - scohesc 4y ago
        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.
      - _9xrb 4y ago
        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: https://archive.ph/XNQYY https://archive.ph/XNQYY
        JYellensFuckboy 4y ago
        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.
    - themoonisachees 4y ago
      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.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        >>Some of them were children. 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
      - forgotpwd16 4y ago
        >were verifiably doxxed, harrassed and threatened Ηic Rhodus hic salta. Show how any of those claims are verifiable.
    - Cr4shMyCar 4y ago
      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?
      - voidpointercast 4y ago
        [flagged]
      - yesco 4y ago
        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?
        branon 4y ago
        > 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. I will form my own opinions and you will have no say at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect -- good luck. You can't stop the signal.
      - jstarfish 4y ago
        Your average eating disorder "support group" is guaranteed to have a higher kill count. The subjects of "To Catch A Predator" also comprise a few suicides. For a site supposedly created for the purpose of bullying people into suicide, 3 is pretty underwhelming.
toomuchtodo 4y ago
Not available does not mean not preserved. It’s likely darked; still stored on disk but not available nor are further snapshots permitted.
legacynl 4y ago
That's not their mission though.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
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.
- 0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
  Evidence KF has tried to stay obscure?
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Well there can't be evidence one way or the other now that they're off the wayback machine. Although it does enhance my point, which is that Kiwi Farms benefits from this.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      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.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        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.
andywood 4y ago
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: https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz And of course you've already begun downvoting.

I guess the internet archive doesn’t take their mission of preserving the internet very seriously

jimmydorry 4y ago

What KF? Never heard of it. I guess the old addage has never been truer: "History is Written by Victors"

badRNG 4y ago
They 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 ago
  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.
- baud147258 4y ago
  was that reputation substantial though?
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    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.
  - badRNG 4y ago
    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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
    - forgotpwd16 4y ago
      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.
    - scohesc 4y ago
      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.
    - _9xrb 4y ago
      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: https://archive.ph/XNQYY https://archive.ph/XNQYY
      - JYellensFuckboy 4y ago
        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.
  - themoonisachees 4y ago
    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.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      >>Some of them were children. 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
    - forgotpwd16 4y ago
      >were verifiably doxxed, harrassed and threatened Ηic Rhodus hic salta. Show how any of those claims are verifiable.
  - Cr4shMyCar 4y ago
    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?
    - voidpointercast 4y ago
      [flagged]
    - yesco 4y ago
      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?
      - branon 4y ago
        > 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. I will form my own opinions and you will have no say at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect -- good luck. You can't stop the signal.
    - jstarfish 4y ago
      Your average eating disorder "support group" is guaranteed to have a higher kill count. The subjects of "To Catch A Predator" also comprise a few suicides. For a site supposedly created for the purpose of bullying people into suicide, 3 is pretty underwhelming.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

Not available does not mean not preserved. It’s likely darked; still stored on disk but not available nor are further snapshots permitted.

legacynl 4y ago

That's not their mission though.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

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.

0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
Evidence KF has tried to stay obscure?
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Well there can't be evidence one way or the other now that they're off the wayback machine. Although it does enhance my point, which is that Kiwi Farms benefits from this.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    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.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      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.

andywood 4y ago

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: https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz And of course you've already begun downvoting.