Comment by badRNG
3 years ago
They have a reputation for targeting people to intensely harass into suicide, with Byuu being a notable victim in the HN/CS sphere.
3 years ago
They have a reputation for targeting people to intensely harass into suicide, with Byuu being a notable victim in the HN/CS sphere.
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.
was that reputation substantial though?
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?
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?
1 reply →
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.
[flagged]
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
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
>>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
>were verifiably doxxed, harrassed and threatened
Ηic Rhodus hic salta. Show how any of those claims are verifiable.