Cloudflare Drops Kiwi Farms

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I've listened to the first of these.

Every time I've ever seen a news story about a matter on which I had independent knowledge, the news story got some things wrong. Sometimes the inaccuracies were just minor details, sometimes much more than that.

I suspect that the main problem is not bias, but simply that most reporters have too big a workload, on too-tight deadlines, to be able to pay adequate attention to all the details of each news story they write. Of course the reporter's (and editor's) biases no doubt have a role too -- probably mostly unconscious in most cases, although some distortions may be deliberate.

Also, many (though not all) news stories are mostly copied and pasted from parts of press releases from each of the major characters in a given story. Press releases, by definition, are meant to be plagiarized. In theory the reporter is supposed to double-check, but I suspect that most reporters just don't have enough time, unless the story is deemed to be sufficiently important.

Hopefully most reporters are, at least, more accurate when writing about major public figures, about whom they have frequent occasion to write, than they are when writing about people who are only occasionally in the news, or when writing about obscure subcultures, about which most reporters just don't have enough time to learn very much.

According to the info Dox47 has provided here, the Kiwi Farms regulars themselves did not engage in criminal harassment. The latter was done by people who were at most occasional posters there, using info provided by the regulars.

But, to me, this is a distinction without a difference. In my opinion, it's bad enough that Kiwi Farms publicized information that would facilitate criminal harassment, even if none of the board's regulars themselves did (or approved of) the actual harassment.

In my opinion, doxxing should be illegal in and of itself. In today's world, it should be illegal to publicly reveal someone's home address, phone number, or workplace without the person's express permission. (The only exceptions should be people who can afford bodyguards, or who have bodyguards provided by the government. Obviously, it shouldn't be a crime to mention the location of the White House.)

Thanks to the global Internet, people now need to have their privacy protected more than ever before.

Some people say that the Internet has turned the world into a "global village." I would say that it has turned the world into a global mob -- or, rather, a global war zone between competing global mobs.

You never know when you might say or do something that pisses off someone (of whatever political persuasion) with a big following on social media. And, especially if you are a young or young-ish woman, you never know when you might attract the attention of someone criminally creepy.

I personally know someone who appeared in a TV documentary about autistic women back in 2014 or so. As soon as it was shown, she was subjected to lots of online harassment, including fake prostitution ads featuring her name, phone number, and home address.

We now live in a world where ordinary people are exposed to all of the hazards but none of the perks of being a movie star. We now live in a world where it is very dangerous to be even a minor public figure. We now live in a world where people of all political persuasions are vulnerable to being "swatted," among other kinds of severe harassment that either did not exist or were not as common when I was younger.

That's why doxxing is such a big deal in today's world, although it would not have been anywhere nearly as much of a big deal before the Internet era.

If all that the Kiwi Farms regulars did was to make fun of people, then I would agree that they should not have been taken down. But revealing private personal info is where I draw the line.

I consider Kiwi Farms's habit of doxxing people to be sufficient justification, in and of itself, to "attack" Kiwi Farms, even if the Kiwi Farms regulars didn't engage in criminal harassment themselves but "only" enabled it.

As I said in another post, I think doxxing should be illegal. But, given that it's NOT illegal, I think doxxing a doxxer may be appropriate revenge.


"broadcasting her every move" in only a general way?

People should have the right to say things like "I am going to Ireland," and to post a photos or videos showing the insides of their hotel rooms, without having some creep track down and publicize the exact location of the hotel -- just as you should have the right to identify your location here on Wrong Planet as "Seattle-ish" without having some creep (or political enemy) track down and publicize your home address.


The podcasters talk quite a bit about how, for her own safety, she should just shut up and stop giving any clues as to her whereabouts.

There's just one problem with this advice: I am under the impression (correct me if I'm wrong) that she makes her living as an Internet personality. And, it would seem, showing and telling a lot about her personal life is a big part of her brand. That being the case, she would risk losing a large part of her audience if she were to stop doing that.

And she can't just go out and get another job. Notorious people are notoriously unemployable.

Another issue these podcasters make a big deal about is apparent inconsistencies between different tellings of her story about being "swatted."

But I would expect someone who has just experienced a traumatic event to be incoherent and not completely accurate (especially at first) in telling the story, and to tell it differently at different times. I would expect her to focus, sometimes, on just the most traumatic parts of the story (e.g. guns in her face) without putting them into proper context. And I would expect her to focus, at other times, on some of the more mundane parts of the story, avoiding or minimizing the more traumatic parts. So, to me, inconsistencies of this kind do not, in and of themselves, undermine the overall credibility of her story. Rather, they just seem to me like part of the way a lot of people would process a traumatic event.

(I haven't yet listened to the second podcast you linked to, so I don't yet know if they present other, more substantial reasons to doubt her story.)

Seriously?

How can doxxing NOT be illegal ?

If a person’s address, phone number, et cetera, are matters of public record, then there is nothing illegal about repeating that which can be found by simply looking for it.

However, ‘doxing’ that includes account numbers, passcodes, and other private (non-public) information is illegal or at least prosecutable in civil court.

I agree that doxxing should be illegal and it doesn't matter if the person had posted their own personal information. This just brings out people to harass that user when that information is posted. And how would anyone know anyone on Kiwi Farms wasn't doing the harassing? They don't need to mention it.

Regardless of what one thinks about the legality of doxxing, the issue here is that the story that was used to remove Kiwi Farms from the internet, that they were targeting and harassing a specific person, is demonstrably untrue, and absolutely no one who rushed to judgement has even so much as acknowledged being wrong, let alone that the supposed "victim" here was well aware of the true source of the harassment but blamed KF in order to settle a score (and cash in on some GFM money). Instead, the wagons have been circled and anyone suggesting that perhaps the media got the story wrong is being viciously attacked, which is admittedly par for the course with this sort of thing.

As a general principle, yes, however, Keffals continued to broadcast her location (and pictures of her lodgings) while claiming to be on the run from deranged stalkers who had made her fear for her life; do you see the contradiction there? It looks particularly bad in light of the fact that she was simultaneously fundraising off the threats (pleading poverty on her GFM while bragging about her six figure income to other streamers elsewhere, BTW), and that she was in the process of weaponizing the stalking against a website that she knew wasn't actually responsible for it.



Again though, she doesn't have to share anything about her whereabouts as part of her streaming show, let alone while she's claiming to be on the run from stalkers, it really looks like she was deliberately leaving breadcrumbs in order to facilitate the stalking that she was then turning around and monetizing.

If a person is already earning a decent living as a public figure, then, yes, it is indeed possible to profit by making oneself a martyr and taking risks that other people cannot afford to take.

Personally, I see nothing intrinsically wrong with this if, by so doing, one is able to strike a blow against a larger social evil that has caused genuine and severe harm to lots of other, less well-resourced people.

I'd like to finish listening to the second podcast (I'm up to the 50 minute mark, so far) before I comment on the ethics of other aspects of what Keffals has been doing, such as the fundraising and the singling out of Kiwi Farms rather than the other doxxing site where the info about her was posted first.

Just to be clear, you're saying you're okay with lying and deception if you think it's for a good cause?

Sometimes they will just find and go to another website.

No. I just haven't yet evaluated the evidence that what Keffals did involved "lying and deception."

Simply leaving "breadcrumbs" for a stalker is not "lying and deception," although it is indeed making oneself a martyr. The latter is what I don't necessarily object to.

By leaving "breadcrumbs" for a stalker and thereby making herself a martyr, she is putting herself in genuine danger, albeit danger that she is in a much better position to handle than most people are.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 18 Sep 2022, 9:12 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Listening to the second of these now. Here are my notes so far (up to about the 50 minute mark):

1) The podcasters nitpick about suicides of people who have been doxxed on Kiwi Farms, arguing that (a) said doxxing was not the sole cause of their suicide, but perhaps only the last straw, and (b) there have plenty of stories of people committing suicide due to being doxxed on major social media platforms such as Twitter, also.

The podcasters argue that, therefore, Kiwi Farms should not be deemed responsible for the distress it has caused to various people. To me that conclusion feels extremely callous. Yes, it's true that doxxing takes place on major social media platforms too, but to me that means doxxing is now a major social problem that needs to be addressed on a much larger scale, through better laws.

2) The podcasters mention another aspect of this huge social problem that I wasn't fully aware of before: If you're an artist, you effectively have NO copyright protection whatsoever if you also want to protect your privacy. If someone infringes your copyright and you send a DCMA takedown notice to the Internet service that the plagiarist posted on, the plagiarist is then informed of your legal name and home address. That person then can easily dox you. This, IMO, is a BIG problem for smalltime artists, writers, etc. I'd like to see a LOT more people raise a fuss about this issue in whatever way they can.

3) The podcasters describe several horrifying instances of doxxing and online harassment, sexual and otherwise.

4) Among other kinds of online harassment, the podcasters also describe a new one I never heard of before: blackmailing people into posting offensive stuff and into participating in the harassment of other people.

5) Apparently, one of the people who doxxed and harassed Keffals was an Ulster British loyalist who had been trolled by other people into believing that Keffals had been going around desecrating British flags and replacing them with trans flags. (The podcasters believe it's unlikely that Keffals actually did this.)

6) Apparently, the afore-mentioned Ulster British loyalist, who is also an all-around creep, claimed to be a Kiwi Farms regular but is actually associated more with another doxxing site (which the podcasters don't name). Keffals was doxxed on that other site, including her Uber Eats account info, before this same info appeared on Kiwi Farms.

7) The creep who doxxed Keffals was also, himself, doxxed on Kiwi Farms.

I haven't yet finished listening to the podcast. I'll listen to the rest later.

I've listened to the rest of the podcast. Mostly, it's just more about various online activities of the creepy British loyalist kid who stalked Keffals during her stay in Northern Ireland.

Anyhow, here are my current thoughts on two issues that were brought up earlier:

1) That the stalking and doxxing of Keffals occurred primarily on a site other than Kiwi Farms, and only secondarily on Kiwi Farms, and was not done by Kiwi Farms regulars, but Keffals focused only on Kiwi Farms. My guess is that Keffals didn't want to give any publicity to the other, less well-known site. The podcasters too didn't name the other site, but referred to it only as "the doxxing site," because they deemed it to be just too awful a site to be named.

2) Keffals's fund-raising after she was swatted. In order to form an opinion on the ethics of this, I would need to know a lot more about the timing of her fund-raising appeals and her reasons for saying she needed the money at any given time. Even if she was generally well-off, losing her devices (because the cops took them) meant losing (temporarily, at least) all her usual sources of income. Even after her devices were returned (sooner than she expected, apparently), it is likely that her bank accounts might still have been frozen for a while, plus she now had all manner of extra expenses due to her need to travel. So I would need to know a lot more details to know whether she raised significantly more money than she actually needed at the times she asked for it.

New info drop on Keffals, take it with a grain of salt as it's from someone in conflict with her, but it's heavily sourced:

https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffal ... n-internet

Doxing is legal but it needs to be civil and reasonable. Doxing often strays into harassment which is obviously illegal anyway.