Well 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.
They still have an hidden service online [0], an ipv6 only mirror [1] and they are working on restoring it "as normal" [2]. In any case they stated a backup of the site will be publicly available if they give up [3].
I find interesting they took the archived copy down instead of keeping it publicly available since it was the only way to prove what kiwifarms has done instead of having as only source "trust me bro".
Either way I don't think it matters since nobody actually bothered to link or prove any of their claims so I don't think it really changes much.
Thanks 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 Funny enough, I got that link from reading an archived version of Keffals' thread on KF while trying to get a bead on the situation myself.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.
There’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.
It feels deeply disingenuous to claim that all KF is doing is "cataloging someone's online life" while refusing to talk about constant SWAT-ing, the cheering of their victims committing suicide, and the constant IRL harassment they organize against their victims.
After Byuu, the emulator dev of bsnes, higan and more was harassed into suicide [1], harassment almost exclusively organized on KF, I've lost patience for weak defenses of a site that causes threats to folk's lives.
What I don't understand is why this is done by private corporations instead of the government. Stalking is a crime, harassment is a crime, SWAT-ing is a crime.
I don't want to live in a society where law enforcement is left to big tech vigilantism. There's a reason that governments are granted a monopoly on violence, they have democratic legitimacy and accountability that other entities do not.
The problem is you’re not solving anything with these antics. KF still exists and will continue to exist. It’s just book burning for the sake of feeling better with absolutely nothing to show for it. In this case not even the satisfaction of seeing a burned book.
People desperately want the world to be different, and it isn’t. It isn’t, and it won’t change massively within your singular life. So you can grandstand and congratulate yourselves on “winning” with the IA and CF decisions, but KF is still online and all you’ve done is make more people aware of their existence.
Furthermore, this idea of banning objectionable content ultimately ends in tyranny as the only way for you to possibly succeed on your mission is to add fundamental filters to the internet. No thanks.
A lot of these claims are contested though; that's the point; it's been discussed a million times already, but if you look at the actual thread on KF (which is now hard to do, it seems) there really wasn't all that much going on until they suddenly killed themselves with a statement "it was due to KiwiFarms".
Is it ethical to keep snapshots of pages doxing people? Or dumps of bank account numbers? There's no way to both preserve that content publicly and also protect the victims.
There were no dumps of bank account numbers. As far as I saw, Kiwi Farms users posted only publicly-available info about thread subjects. In my opinion, certain categories of public yet personally-identifying information should be covered by US law in a way similar to HIPAA. However, that is not currently the case.
Also, info like someone's phone number and home address are only a click away once you have their full name and approximate age/geographic location, at least for people haven't taken extraordinary steps to limit discoverability on Spokeo or White Pages. People post full names and locations to Twitter all the time. They call it "unmasking" when it's someone the ruling consensus dislikes, while they know the info will be used to look up the "dox." This is not Twitter or Kiwi Farms' fault. It is the result of flaws in our legal system which allow sites like Spokeo and White pages to operate.
> "Short version: [Kiwi Farms is] A very edgy forum ... where users cruelly gossip and post public information on niche online oddities (lolcows) that thrive on the attention KF gives them." [Emphasis mine.]
This piece of egregious victim-blaming should have been your cue to ignore this article. If it wasn't, the victim-blaming in the rest of the article (such as "She probably genuinely enjoys it. Or she has a death drive, a martyr complex.") should have cued you in.
There's a lot more people who were targeted by KF than Keffals. The majority were ordinary people who were part of a minority and had just enough of a platform to be on their radar (or were related to/had a similar name to someone who was). "They put themselves out there, online", but that doesn't mean they "have no one to blame but themself" for the harassment and death threats they received. They didn't do anything wrong. The fault lies fully on the users of Kiwi Farms and those who created and supported a community that allowed them to organize and coordinate their harassment.
I 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.
This 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.
Popular 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.
Private 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.
A website was bullied off the internet because it showcased the horrible activities of horrible people. I'm far more concerned that a handful of Twitter users can memoryhole an entire community.
Whenever 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.
Absolutely. 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.
Tangential 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:
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:
> 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?
I 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.
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.
This whole campaign has been damning for the folks trying to take down kiwifarms. All of the evidence of their bad past behavior that used to be confined to one obscure site is now plastered all over the internet, and millions of people know about it.
My personal semi-conspiracy theory on this is that the search warrant served on Keffals (no, not a SWAT call, a search warrant) contained some note that they got probable cause from evidence on a kiwifarms thread. Since then, Keffals has been running to countries with no extradition treaties to Canada and trying their hardest to erase that evidence from the internet under the guise of stopping suicides.
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:
What'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.
The 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".
The 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.
The 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.
But the site is going anywhere; it's going lots of places, in fact. They can't find a host that will both accept them and can handle the DDoS, so they've been bouncing around between domains and hosts. This is the kind of instability that destroys online communities, which in this case is good.
I 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).
I 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.
Amazes 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?
This isn't "shit dropping" off of the net.. This was the result of a true harassment campaign that finally resulted in a faux appeal to danger to literally force a completely legal site offline via illegal DDoS attack. (The stated goal of the media cheered campaign) And now an attempt to erase it's history.
You're right that it isn't a precursor to some horrible dystopian future of corporate control.. because it is actually that already! The internet is now broken. Another level of infrastructure (now basic network infrastructure) is open to tantrumers, PR etc veto!
People protesting a company is not "harassment". (Disclaimer: I'm an investor in Cloudflare)
> a faux appeal to danger
Law enforcement has been involved.
> a completely legal site
Yeah, no, at best it's in the black part of a very grey area until the slow US legal system catches up with the case.
> via illegal DDoS attack
Their various hosts dropped them. One of those hosts happened to also do DDoS protection, but that part is irrelevant if they have nowhere to host their website.
My advice to you: Stop browsing this type of forum. The brain rot via propaganda and misinformation is real. KF is not a victim. A bully is not a "victim" when their targets defend themselves.
If you rob me and I get you arrested after reporting you to the police, you're not the victim of a society ostracizing you, you're the perpetrator of crimes society doesn't tolerate. Quit hanging out with perpetrators.
I think kiwi farms should be taken offline because it’s a horrible site. What good is there in taking down the archive of it? Having archives of trump’s tweets was important after his twitter was removed so we could see what was there. There’s a difference between allowing people to use the site/post, and having a record of what was there.
They've extensively documented actual alt-right figures such as neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who they consider one of their "lolcows." They also followed and recorded the activity of accused rapist Christine (formerly Christopher) Weston Chandler, the original "lolcow", though several users interacted with Chris over the years in ways that may have contributed to his/her decline:
They also discovered and documented Isabella Janke, allegedly the person most responsible for convincing Christine to abuse her mother, among other allegations:
This truth of these allegations will likely come out at at Christine's upcoming trial, assuming enough evidence was preserved. Incidentally, Isabella's father Mike Janke has a professional relationship with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince:
By 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.
>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.
How 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.
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.
A 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]
Wikipedia 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.
I 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.
Its not the first time. Before than it was censoring content content that Scientology disliked. There was also the case of Snopes not being archived until a year ago, even after it got more involved in declaring more serious topics, rather than just internet urban legends.
There are people within the internet archive whose politics is so strong that I have said in private since 2016 that I have concerns they are a risk to the neutrality of the project. I am not going to mention their name to avoid a flamewar but that name will be mentioned more by others if they decide to remove more content.
Kiwifarms 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".
Good, 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.
So 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.
I'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.
I have no experience as a user, but I've heard about it in the past and have been following the keffals story. From my understanding it was a site largely dedicated too, or encouraging, or at a minimum allowing people to dox trans people and harass them by contacting employers/friends/family etc with pedophilia accusations. Keffals has been lobbying Cloudflare to drop hosting/DDOS protection for them after being forced to move to a new country, and due to them having a large online following for support they're having way more success than a lot of other people that they've harmed in the past
Web 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.
Short version: Website that tracks the salacious details of internet celebrities' lives appears to have crossed a celebrity who is very interested in having that information erased from the public.
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Long version:
Kiwifarms is a site dedicated to discussing the affairs of famous people. Often, this goes as far as public records searches and weird internet sleuthing to find addresses and other such information that is usually considered private. The odd thing about kiwifarms is that it is organized so that individuals have a single thread, which is essentially a record of all the past information and rumors on that person in one convenient place.
There are disputed reports about Kiwifarms being instrumental in the harassment of 3 individuals to the point of them committing suicide, and people on kiwifarms have taken pictures outside of people's houses, etc. Lots of creepy behavior. Threats of violence have also appeared on the site, but are against its ToS and the owner of kiwifarms claims that they get moderated pretty quickly - whether they do is up for debate. It's mostly a center for sharing creepy levels of information and bitching about famous people, particularly when those people do weird things. Critics of kiwifarms believe that they are a center of information gathering (and thus coordination) for harassers.
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One notable individual, who uses the online handle "Keffals," did not like the content of their KF thread. Keffals is a transformation who has engaged in some behavior that is at best borderline, including sending hormones to kids without their parents knowing and running a discord server ("the catboy ranch") that involved prurient contact with minors. Keffals has also done several embarrassing things online, such as producing pornography and participating in internet drama.
Keffals was served with a search warrant recently, presumably regarding the former activities. At least one armed officer came to their house, but no guns were drawn, and Keffals' devices were seized. After the search warrant was served, Keffals erroneously claimed that someone from Kiwifarms had swatted them (and later walked back the claim), and then said that they were being threatened to the point of running from Canada (weirdly to countries with no extradition treaty), and started a campaign to get the site taken down. A gofundme was put up, also.
In response, people on Kiwifarms stepped up the creepiness, finding the hotel that Keffals was staying at in Ireland based on one picture of the bedsheets, ordering pizzas to the hotel, taking pictures outside the hotel, etc. Keffals later went to some other location, and I believe is not posting pictures any more.
During this time, several bomb threats and threats of violence against Keffals and the people who support Keffals also appeared on their kiwifarms thread. Also, people from kiwifarms tried to get the gofundme taken down.
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IMO the whole situation looks really bad for everyone involved. Two groups of internet trolls went to war. One side had a lot of institutional/media backing.
kf was the most accessible and moderated forum for gossip of internet personalities (mostly negative in the same way traditional gossip magazines are typically negative)
this recent action seems to be related to their long-running beef with a particularly well-connected transgender, over being the primary location for documentation on questionable activities like shipping hormone replacement drugs to minors
Well 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
Sorry but this feels like book burning to me.
They still have an hidden service online [0], an ipv6 only mirror [1] and they are working on restoring it "as normal" [2]. In any case they stated a backup of the site will be publicly available if they give up [3].
I find interesting they took the archived copy down instead of keeping it publicly available since it was the only way to prove what kiwifarms has done instead of having as only source "trust me bro". Either way I don't think it matters since nobody actually bothered to link or prove any of their claims so I don't think it really changes much.
[0]: http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz... [1]: https://kiwifarms.top [2]: https://t.me/kiwifarms/29?embed=1 [3]: https://t.me/kiwifarms/28?embed=1
And as someone else said:
One can also use a Tor proxy (tor2web), there is a list here: https://gist.github.com/adulau/5caf188bb1f63263bf7ac00c4a19f...
For example, appending ".moe" to the ".onion" in that URL: https://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificed...
Which also allows it to be archived (as the mainstream archive sites don't recognise Tor hidden services): https://web.archive.org/web/20220905153904/https://uquusqsaa...
Thanks 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.
There’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.
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It feels deeply disingenuous to claim that all KF is doing is "cataloging someone's online life" while refusing to talk about constant SWAT-ing, the cheering of their victims committing suicide, and the constant IRL harassment they organize against their victims.
After Byuu, the emulator dev of bsnes, higan and more was harassed into suicide [1], harassment almost exclusively organized on KF, I've lost patience for weak defenses of a site that causes threats to folk's lives.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814
What I don't understand is why this is done by private corporations instead of the government. Stalking is a crime, harassment is a crime, SWAT-ing is a crime.
I don't want to live in a society where law enforcement is left to big tech vigilantism. There's a reason that governments are granted a monopoly on violence, they have democratic legitimacy and accountability that other entities do not.
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The problem is you’re not solving anything with these antics. KF still exists and will continue to exist. It’s just book burning for the sake of feeling better with absolutely nothing to show for it. In this case not even the satisfaction of seeing a burned book.
People desperately want the world to be different, and it isn’t. It isn’t, and it won’t change massively within your singular life. So you can grandstand and congratulate yourselves on “winning” with the IA and CF decisions, but KF is still online and all you’ve done is make more people aware of their existence.
Furthermore, this idea of banning objectionable content ultimately ends in tyranny as the only way for you to possibly succeed on your mission is to add fundamental filters to the internet. No thanks.
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A lot of these claims are contested though; that's the point; it's been discussed a million times already, but if you look at the actual thread on KF (which is now hard to do, it seems) there really wasn't all that much going on until they suddenly killed themselves with a statement "it was due to KiwiFarms".
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Is it ethical to keep snapshots of pages doxing people? Or dumps of bank account numbers? There's no way to both preserve that content publicly and also protect the victims.
There were no dumps of bank account numbers. As far as I saw, Kiwi Farms users posted only publicly-available info about thread subjects. In my opinion, certain categories of public yet personally-identifying information should be covered by US law in a way similar to HIPAA. However, that is not currently the case.
Also, info like someone's phone number and home address are only a click away once you have their full name and approximate age/geographic location, at least for people haven't taken extraordinary steps to limit discoverability on Spokeo or White Pages. People post full names and locations to Twitter all the time. They call it "unmasking" when it's someone the ruling consensus dislikes, while they know the info will be used to look up the "dox." This is not Twitter or Kiwi Farms' fault. It is the result of flaws in our legal system which allow sites like Spokeo and White pages to operate.
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From the article:
> "Short version: [Kiwi Farms is] A very edgy forum ... where users cruelly gossip and post public information on niche online oddities (lolcows) that thrive on the attention KF gives them." [Emphasis mine.]
This piece of egregious victim-blaming should have been your cue to ignore this article. If it wasn't, the victim-blaming in the rest of the article (such as "She probably genuinely enjoys it. Or she has a death drive, a martyr complex.") should have cued you in.
There's a lot more people who were targeted by KF than Keffals. The majority were ordinary people who were part of a minority and had just enough of a platform to be on their radar (or were related to/had a similar name to someone who was). "They put themselves out there, online", but that doesn't mean they "have no one to blame but themself" for the harassment and death threats they received. They didn't do anything wrong. The fault lies fully on the users of Kiwi Farms and those who created and supported a community that allowed them to organize and coordinate their harassment.
Fun fact: Taylor Lorenz's Twitter account is also excluded from the internet archive.
Another fun fact:
Taylor's uncle is Roger Macdonald, apparently a fairly prominent operator within the internet archive:
https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive
https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz
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Why?
I 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.
It's ignorant or dishonest on your part to equate the Internet Archive with "big tech."
It's ignorant or dishonest on your part to disregard the broader context in which "big tech" are increasingly calling the shots.
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Or 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.
This 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.
Popular 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.
Private 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.
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A website was bullied off the internet because it showcased the horrible activities of horrible people. I'm far more concerned that a handful of Twitter users can memoryhole an entire community.
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How many times have people been ridiculed to the point of suicide by their peers on Facebook, Twitter, etc? Should those sites be taken offline too?
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Whenever 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.
I'm okay with removing someone from the internet if their business is to harass and dox people.
Absolutely. 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.
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Meh, big tech are private corporations. That's what they've been doing for thousands of years.
If you care about censorship-resistance, support decentralized projects.
Tangential 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-...
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-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?
I 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.
It's probably there, inaccessible, waiting for future researchers in a more civilized age.
I guess the internet archive doesn’t take their mission of preserving the internet very seriously
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.
This whole campaign has been damning for the folks trying to take down kiwifarms. All of the evidence of their bad past behavior that used to be confined to one obscure site is now plastered all over the internet, and millions of people know about it.
My personal semi-conspiracy theory on this is that the search warrant served on Keffals (no, not a SWAT call, a search warrant) contained some note that they got probable cause from evidence on a kiwifarms thread. Since then, Keffals has been running to countries with no extradition treaties to Canada and trying their hardest to erase that evidence from the internet under the guise of stopping suicides.
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Evidence KF has tried to stay obscure?
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If it was doing Kiwifarms a huge favour, I don't think it would be celebrated by the people most determined to destroy it.
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Not available does not mean not preserved. It’s likely darked; still stored on disk but not available nor are further snapshots permitted.
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://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz
And of course you've already begun downvoting.
What KF? Never heard of it.
I guess the old addage has never been truer: "History is Written by Victors"
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
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That's not their mission though.
What'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.
The 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".
The 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.
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The 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.
But the site is going anywhere; it's going lots of places, in fact. They can't find a host that will both accept them and can handle the DDoS, so they've been bouncing around between domains and hosts. This is the kind of instability that destroys online communities, which in this case is good.
Is there precedent for this type of removal? Even sites like the Daily Stormer still exist on Internet Archive, albeit with a login wall.
I 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).
I 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.
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Amazes 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.
This isn't "shit dropping" off of the net.. This was the result of a true harassment campaign that finally resulted in a faux appeal to danger to literally force a completely legal site offline via illegal DDoS attack. (The stated goal of the media cheered campaign) And now an attempt to erase it's history.
You're right that it isn't a precursor to some horrible dystopian future of corporate control.. because it is actually that already! The internet is now broken. Another level of infrastructure (now basic network infrastructure) is open to tantrumers, PR etc veto!
> a true harassment campaign
People protesting a company is not "harassment". (Disclaimer: I'm an investor in Cloudflare)
> a faux appeal to danger
Law enforcement has been involved.
> a completely legal site
Yeah, no, at best it's in the black part of a very grey area until the slow US legal system catches up with the case.
> via illegal DDoS attack
Their various hosts dropped them. One of those hosts happened to also do DDoS protection, but that part is irrelevant if they have nowhere to host their website.
My advice to you: Stop browsing this type of forum. The brain rot via propaganda and misinformation is real. KF is not a victim. A bully is not a "victim" when their targets defend themselves.
If you rob me and I get you arrested after reporting you to the police, you're not the victim of a society ostracizing you, you're the perpetrator of crimes society doesn't tolerate. Quit hanging out with perpetrators.
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I think kiwi farms should be taken offline because it’s a horrible site. What good is there in taking down the archive of it? Having archives of trump’s tweets was important after his twitter was removed so we could see what was there. There’s a difference between allowing people to use the site/post, and having a record of what was there.
They've documented various criminals, pedophiles, and rapists, such as child abuser Nick Bate:
https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/columbia-man-jailed-u...
https://archive.ph/Kmu6p
They've extensively documented actual alt-right figures such as neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who they consider one of their "lolcows." They also followed and recorded the activity of accused rapist Christine (formerly Christopher) Weston Chandler, the original "lolcow", though several users interacted with Chris over the years in ways that may have contributed to his/her decline:
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/sonichu-creator-has-been-arres...
They also discovered and documented Isabella Janke, allegedly the person most responsible for convincing Christine to abuse her mother, among other allegations:
https://archive.ph/3Ev0l
This truth of these allegations will likely come out at at Christine's upcoming trial, assuming enough evidence was preserved. Incidentally, Isabella's father Mike Janke has a professional relationship with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1wio7sDDBA
By 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.
>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.
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They're going after other archive sites as well, apparently: https://twitter.com/mpetch/status/1567259704652623872
How 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.
The owner's statements: https://t.me/s/kiwifarms
Reading 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.
Whoa, I thought they were almost completely neutral to these sort of issues. I guess not.
A 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-sea...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/eut3na/can_i_get_p...
Wikipedia link for some background — I hadn’t heard of this before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
Wikipedia 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.
On articles like that one, the Talk page is a far more realistic view of the subject than the actual page.
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I 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.
Has any individual been arrested for a crime yet?
If only there was a way to look at the alleged evidence...
I am baffled by the comments here, not in a good way
Part of the reason why we study history is to learn from past mistakes.
that's not how an archive should work. but perhaps Internet Archive is not an archive and it doesn't want to be one.
Its not the first time. Before than it was censoring content content that Scientology disliked. There was also the case of Snopes not being archived until a year ago, even after it got more involved in declaring more serious topics, rather than just internet urban legends.
There are people within the internet archive whose politics is so strong that I have said in private since 2016 that I have concerns they are a risk to the neutrality of the project. I am not going to mention their name to avoid a flamewar but that name will be mentioned more by others if they decide to remove more content.
So if they scrape a kiddie porn site, they should keep that publicly available in perpetuity? That's not how the world works.
This comparison summons the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
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Viewing child porn is illegal, viewing anything on KiwiFarms isn't, in most places, including the US where the "Internet Archive" is.
More apt comparison, should we erase Meinkampf or Das Kapital or any books that inspire violences (for example, the holy books) from existence?
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They also honor DCMA requests and robots.txt. That's the way an archive works in the real world.
revoking the public access to dome material is kosher, but removing the material itself is not.
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Kiwifarms 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".
>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?
From 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.
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Hopefully the result of all this will be more mainstream adoption of tor, i2p, freenet and other censorship-resistant platforms.
Unlikely. It’ll probably just develop in to a regular occurrence to have bad think sites wiped out and deleted from the archives.
I don't see how this would make it more mainstream, it might boost adoption, but link them even more to what the mainstream sees as "bad guys".
I regret ever donating to them.
Options 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.
Ok this is just creepy!
I thought this was about the "danger" and "threats"
What else have they deleted? Anyone keeping track?
Apparently, they also banned https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz (someone commented about it before but somehow the comment was deleted....) https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://twitter....
Good, 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.
So 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.
I'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.
HN Libertarians: The Marketplace of Ideas is essential to discourse
HN Libertarians when the free market acts: No, not like that!
Can somebody explain the back story? What is Kiwi Farms?
I have no experience as a user, but I've heard about it in the past and have been following the keffals story. From my understanding it was a site largely dedicated too, or encouraging, or at a minimum allowing people to dox trans people and harass them by contacting employers/friends/family etc with pedophilia accusations. Keffals has been lobbying Cloudflare to drop hosting/DDOS protection for them after being forced to move to a new country, and due to them having a large online following for support they're having way more success than a lot of other people that they've harmed in the past
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Web 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.
So, twitter? /s
What's the rationale in accepting Twitter stay online but not this website? Plenty of harassment goes on there as well.
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They've been harassing people to the point, and with the intent of them committing suicide.
This also includes harassing their family and employers.
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Short version: Website that tracks the salacious details of internet celebrities' lives appears to have crossed a celebrity who is very interested in having that information erased from the public.
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Long version:
Kiwifarms is a site dedicated to discussing the affairs of famous people. Often, this goes as far as public records searches and weird internet sleuthing to find addresses and other such information that is usually considered private. The odd thing about kiwifarms is that it is organized so that individuals have a single thread, which is essentially a record of all the past information and rumors on that person in one convenient place.
There are disputed reports about Kiwifarms being instrumental in the harassment of 3 individuals to the point of them committing suicide, and people on kiwifarms have taken pictures outside of people's houses, etc. Lots of creepy behavior. Threats of violence have also appeared on the site, but are against its ToS and the owner of kiwifarms claims that they get moderated pretty quickly - whether they do is up for debate. It's mostly a center for sharing creepy levels of information and bitching about famous people, particularly when those people do weird things. Critics of kiwifarms believe that they are a center of information gathering (and thus coordination) for harassers.
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One notable individual, who uses the online handle "Keffals," did not like the content of their KF thread. Keffals is a transformation who has engaged in some behavior that is at best borderline, including sending hormones to kids without their parents knowing and running a discord server ("the catboy ranch") that involved prurient contact with minors. Keffals has also done several embarrassing things online, such as producing pornography and participating in internet drama.
Keffals was served with a search warrant recently, presumably regarding the former activities. At least one armed officer came to their house, but no guns were drawn, and Keffals' devices were seized. After the search warrant was served, Keffals erroneously claimed that someone from Kiwifarms had swatted them (and later walked back the claim), and then said that they were being threatened to the point of running from Canada (weirdly to countries with no extradition treaty), and started a campaign to get the site taken down. A gofundme was put up, also.
In response, people on Kiwifarms stepped up the creepiness, finding the hotel that Keffals was staying at in Ireland based on one picture of the bedsheets, ordering pizzas to the hotel, taking pictures outside the hotel, etc. Keffals later went to some other location, and I believe is not posting pictures any more.
During this time, several bomb threats and threats of violence against Keffals and the people who support Keffals also appeared on their kiwifarms thread. Also, people from kiwifarms tried to get the gofundme taken down.
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IMO the whole situation looks really bad for everyone involved. Two groups of internet trolls went to war. One side had a lot of institutional/media backing.
This...was very informative. Thanks.
kf was the most accessible and moderated forum for gossip of internet personalities (mostly negative in the same way traditional gossip magazines are typically negative)
this recent action seems to be related to their long-running beef with a particularly well-connected transgender, over being the primary location for documentation on questionable activities like shipping hormone replacement drugs to minors
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