I don't know what Kikifarms is/does/has. That said, what do you do if you are asymmetrically attacked by activists? Are you automatically in the wrong?
Putting this at the beginning, just in case. I'm not saying that I support this website, but if we're going to be deplatforming and targeting websites, we better be damn sure that they're evil, otherwise we're just puppets of the activists.
Kiwifarms triggered a cascade. They did "enough" questionable things to create a slew of articles that self-reference each other and paint a picture of "kiwi farms is a harassment website that does these X Y Z bad things". There is no "proving" that they aren't bad now, it's been decided by some sort of weird and emergent self-referencing consensus process on the internet.
Last time this topic came up, I tried so very very hard, to find credible sources about wtf this website or it's users did exactly, and couldn't (found some but it was very light). I mean it's there on Wikipedia sure, but if you keep digging it starts repeating and self-referencing other websites that are just as "not credible" or relying on "other websites" that I can't take them seriously on their claims.
This very much reminds me of the question of notability and citing of sources in Wikipedia. The articles they reference are "enough" to have Wikipedia say that this website is "tied [...] to the suicides of three people targeted by members of the forum.". Wtf does "tied" even mean here? Red-flags abound. At this point it seems like a targeted harassment campaign by activists that may well not even know what Kiwifarms did first-hand.
> Last time this topic came up, I tried so very very hard, to find credible sources about wtf this website or it's users did exactly, and couldn't (found some but it was very light). I mean it's there on Wikipedia sure, but if you keep digging it starts repeating and self-referencing other websites that are just as "not credible" or relying on "other websites" that I can't take them seriously on their claims.
"Jesse Singal is an American journalist. He has written for publications including New York magazine, The New York Times and The Atlantic."
"Singal's political orientation has often been described as liberal but "heterodox", though he has expressed an aversion to the latter term as a descriptor of his work"
==
I'll quote some parts:
> briefly, so as not to ignore one of the most serious allegations, I also think the oft-repeated claim that Kiwi Farms directly caused or “was linked to” multiple suicides, is, when presented without any further context, misleading — not to mention an irresponsible way to report on suicide. On this front, I can’t really do anything but link (https://archive.ph/34wUy) to Moon’s own post on the #DropKiwiFarms controversy. YOU SHOULD NOT ACCEPT HIS CLAIMS AT FACE VALUE. But many of them are easily checkable and clearly true — for example, one of the suicide victims herself blamed her act on homelessness and mental health issues (for what that’s worth), and prior to suicide nothing had been posted about her to Kiwi Farms in six months (Moon says eight, which appears to be incorrect). Of course if you are already struggling with other issues, having a thread on a site like Kiwi Farms could exacerbate your situation, and nudge you toward suicide — “suicide isn’t monocausal” doesn’t mean external factors have no impact on it. But this is being reported in a much more simplistic manner, without much regard for the specifics of these terrible cases.
--------
> The Journalism About Sorrenti’s Specific Fight With Kiwi Farms Has Also Been Extremely Negligent, More Like PR Than Reporting
> On August 21, Sorrenti was sent a bunch of Uber Eats stuff from her own account that she didn’t order — a fraudulent charge.
> (...) she immediately blames Kiwi Farms, and uses the incident to inject more momentum into her campaign: Her third tweet is directed at the CEO of Cloudflare, and she says “this is why I want you to drop kiwifarms from @Cloudflare. even speaking up about it has meant retaliation for me. they are going to keep trying to track me down and you have the power to end this[.]”
> Sorrenti’s personal information, including her Uber Eats password, was posted to a notorious doxxing site the very next day, August 22, and a known hacker collective took credit. It took days before that information showed up on Kiwi Farms, and when it did the poster specifically credited the other site.
> I do not believe the hackers explicitly said they submitted the false Uber Eats order, but they were the ones who acquired and posted her account info, making them a prime suspect, Occam’s Razor–wise: again, the false order is sent in, and then her info is dropped on the site, with very little time between the two acts. Sorrenti’s information has been posted to the top of that site ever since, making it one likely source of some of the harassment.
> But she hasn’t mentioned that site at all, and in a pair of subsequently deleted quote-retweets she actually criticized me for even acknowledging its existence on our podcast and on Twitter:
> > Can you please stop making allusions to the site that has the dox of my entire family. I haven’t talked about it and asked journalists not to mention it because I don’t want to put my family at risk. There is no reason for you to be sharing this information. … Actual journalists know what the truth is. I’ve been quite forward about it. You are actively putting my family at risk because you care more about views than human decency. What the hell are you even doing?
> I agree that journalists shouldn’t mention this other site by name, let alone link to it, and I haven’t. But you can’t have it both ways: You can’t launch an entire campaign dedicated to ending a website that hosts personal information about you and your family and then complain when someone mentions the existence of a different website that… hosts personal information about you and your family. I do think the other website probably has more personal information about her family and associates, yes, but either the question of who is harassing Sorrenti is an international story, or it isn’t. If it is — and everyone hoping to get companies to #DropKiwiFarms, Sorrenti included, has sought to make it an international story — then of course it matters that at least one of these incidents appears to have had nothing to do with Kiwi Farms.
> (It’s very striking that *Sorrenti appears to have asked journalists not to mention the other site, and that she seems to have succeeded. It suggests she is effectively manipulating them not to focus on any potential source of her ongoing travails other than Kiwi Farms, which is of course a smart PR strategy from the perspective of her campaign. But why should journalists participate in that campaign?*)
> Along those same lines, and as I laid out in an endless episode of the podcast, there’s very strong reason to believe that the person who showed up outside the apartment where Sorrenti was staying and posted a creepy note to 4chan — a note that promptly caused the #DropKiwiFarms snowball to roll even faster and bigger — has nothing to do with Kiwi Farms. The kid who says he did it, who I spoke with at length via Twitter and Discord DMs, has an extremely long, rich, abusive online history, all linked to the same base username, and he has no genuine connection to Kiwi Farms. In fact, Kiwi Farms thinks he’s a dork and has tried to dig up personal information on him.
> It’s crazy that this needs to be said, but there’s a difference between reporting on a sympathetic source and acting like a member of their public relations team.
No, but any reasonable examination of Kiwifarms shows a history of swatting, doxing, and bullying that has led to suicides. If I had a hosting business, I don't see why I should be required to carry their content or provide service to them. It's not a free speech question - it's a shitty behavior question.
> If I had a hosting business, I don't see why I should be required to carry their content or provide service to them.
This story is about an ISP, not a hosting business. To understand why, imagine if you were instead a utility company asking why you should have to provide water or electricity to them.
This hypothetical is utter nonsense. If you weren't helping hitler, he would send his storm troopers to arrest you, then do what he wanted anyways. There's a reason godwin's law exists: people think that invoking hitler is an argument cure-all, not realizing there's a reason why hitler is considered a uniquely bad person.
We pretense to live in a "free society". This refers to one where each person is allowed to do as he pleases, as long as he isn't interfering with another's right to do the same. The concept of "utility neutrality" can only exist within such a society, but more importantly, a free society cannot exist without such a concept. As long as there are laws preventing a person from misusing utilities, someone's use of a utility can never be an attack on another's freedom: before that occurred, they would be arrested for breaking the law. On the other hand, people rely on access to utilities for heating, for cooking, and more broadly for survival, let alone necessary for that pursuit of happiness supposed to be crucial to the american dream. If a person's utilities can be cut off arbitrarily, then naturally this can be used as a punishment for their behaviour or identity; their person, in other words, is no longer free to do as they will. If you cannot see how this is exactly a step towards hitler's dystopia, then there is no helping you.
No, but Cloudflare and several other ISPs will not drop you simply because a large volume of people complains. This doesn't work like Twitter moderation. The quality of these complaints warrants not wanting those people associated with you.
Then why are they still hosting several sites that people complain about it all the time too. Cloudflare loves providing services to Nazis as long as they don't get themselves associated with mass shootings too often in the same small time window (8chan) or your Infosec hire turns out to be associated with some of the Nazis who claim they have inside help to stay on Cloudflare. (Daily Stormer)
So is Gab, and they are also using Cloudflare. They also have their own ASN and have been sitting on Hurricane Electric (HE) for years despite all the calls to 'deplatform' them, which like I expected Kiwifarms to move to Epik for their domain, they will also move to HE or elsewhere.
I guess Gab is not villain of the month to be deplatformed today.
That's beside the point. Even so, it is as 'irrelevant' as Mastodon is regardless.
The whole point is, Cloudflare still has them as a customer despite all the chaos that has happened with Gab in the past and despite the calls and previous failed attempts to deplatform and wipe them off the internet, they are still there using Epik, HE and I predict that KiwiFarms will follow suit.
Until the next time one of them becomes the villain of the month, then we'll see the same calls, deplatforming attempts once again.
Maybe you're not aware, but when an ISP receives a load of hate mail saying "cut off this site" this mail is received by a human who has a chance to check out the site and decide whether it is so evil it should be cut off, or whether the haters are just full of shit.
We aren't even talking about a mere repository of hateful information - in terms of badness, Kiwifarms isn't like a Nazi's Guide to Killing Untermensch. Even that could probably find hosting somewhere on the internet. It's a level above that. This was a forum for coordinating tracking down and harassing people in real life and keeping them in constant fear until they commit suicide. That's the point. They do it for fun.
