Cloudflare Drops Kiwi Farms

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Put in mind Cloudfare may have blocked their site for liability. Someone can sue them for damages for their site because they are their server, not their hosting site. I am not sure who hosts kiwifarms. It could be a foreign website that hosts them due to different laws they have there. But I am surprised the website owner of kiwifarms hasn't been sued yet for damages and most of their subjects are vulnerable so they don't have the money to sue. I also notice lot of them seem to be autistic too while lot of users on kiwifarms also seem autistic too, they have even mentioned it. I also was aware some users here were also users on that forum because they mentioned it.

Because once you start allowing sites to be knocked offline due to public pressure campaigns, any crank with a grievance can get any site shut down just by creating enough of a stink about it. It always starts with the "easy" targets, not many people are going to stick their necks out to defend Alex Jones or Kiwi Farms, but soon enough something they like is on the chopping block and they can't do anything about it because they didn't nip it in the bud. That's the downside to having principles, you end up defending a lot of unpopular people in order to uphold them.

Mmhmm, yes.. websites with the sole purpose of facilitating crimes should be left alone to operate because shutting down criminal operations Could Lead To non-criminal websites getting shut down in the future.. Ridiculous!

This is like arguing with paint, but less stimulating. Perhaps I'll try memes, the written word doesn't seem to be penetrating.

Meme away!

The one referred to here?

No reputable business wants to enable criminal activity, or reckless activity that leads to a death. I don't know the site, but if they were moderating for incitement of criminal or dangerous activity, then they shouldn't be kicked off. If they weren't, then I'm happy to see them kicked off. JHMO. It may well have been a legal department call, not a PR one. I know all the lines here get super fuzzy and there are no perfect solutions. We are no where close as a society to solving the issues raised by social media.

That's where the question lies, from what I'm hearing, KF was moderating the threatening posts, but someone was screencapping them before mods could get to them and posting them to Twitter with the @cloudflare tag, so it sure looks like the person posting them and the person taking the caps might have been one and the same. Sure is a convenient way to take down a site though, isn't it?

Do you think autistic people being on both sides of victim and harasser is a form of self hatred?

No, the autistic spectrum is broad enough that there are a lot of different types that don't necessarily have much in common, some of us are unceasingly curious and willing to obsessively dig to find obscure information, while others lack self awareness and make fools of themselves on the internet (some do both at the same time), I think it's just a quirk.

Also, I think a lot of people don't understand what Kiwi Farms actually did, it was mostly a repository of information about dramatic online characters (Chris Chan being the poster child), they were like a tabloid encyclopedia of online weirdos. Their activities certainly enabled some online harassment and arguably incentivized it, but that wasn't the purpose of the site, which was mostly to point and laugh at the most outlandish personalities to be found on the internet.

I'm a bit of both myself, so when Chris Chan got tricked into doing something or did something really bizarre I'd be like 'damn, even I wouldn't do that!'
It was comforting to see someone else fall foul of that instead of me.

On the other hand if no-one else had done research on him I think I would be curious but I'm not the type to obsessively snoop on someone like that.
I did find myself reading his wiki to find out about him though.

If he lived in the UK I might've gotten involved somehow like being one of those who tries to warn him about scams.

Amazing how bad the reporting on this continues to be, everything from claiming Kiwi Farms was explicitly an anti trans site when it was not, being more of a general archive of internet drama, to attributing slang such as "troon" to them that either is directly traceable to other forums or in common usage across the internet, to ignoring the actual scandals they exposed, such as 6 figure embezzlement at a trans suicide prevention organization.

I think I've said this before, but if reporting gets something 80% right, you count it as a win.

That is the standard given to me by someone who dealt with and was quoted by reporters relatively frequently.

Sounds like this story is scoring quite a bit less, which is unfortunate.

One of the reasons have always had a problem with cancel culture is that you have to defend the right of even the most dangerous peoples "free speech". From what I have been reading about this site what they often do is not speech but criminal harassment that should not in any way be supported. But Dox47 is correct because in this zero-sum game political climate if these bastards are suppressed the slippery slope cancel culture door will be further opened to more incorrect suppression. Horrible bind we have been put in.

Kiwi Farms attracts a colourful bunch of people.

Oh man, there have been some developments in this story, it was already pretty wild, but it just gets crazier and crazier.

There are actually a ton of documents showing what really happened, that the harassment of Keffals attributed to Kiwi Farms actually originated with a single deranged individual incensed by a rumor about flags (it's a long story), who claimed to be from KF as a way of inflating their own perceived threat level and who was in turn doxxed and mocked by Kiwi Farms upon their discovery of this person claiming to be one of them. Further, Keffals knew all of this (she tweeted at the original harasser using his real name and may have infiltrated his Discord server), but used the publicity to attack Kiwi Farms and to collect a six figure GFM due to the threats (while simultaneously broadcasting her every move online, then complaining about being "stalked"), and to take credit for taking down Kiwi Farms (which is back up). This might be the single most byzantine piece of internet drama I've ever encountered, and the level of media malpractice should alarm anyone who values accurate coverage of any kind.

There's a ton of supporting evidence and links here, but you really need to listen to the podcasts if you're trying to understand this story and what happened, totally worth your time:

https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/ep ... ch#details

https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/dr ... ic#details

That's interesting. I'm not terribly surprised.


Also not surprising. (See my next post.)

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 17 Sep 2022, 6:24 am, edited 1 time in total.