[ffwszgf]

Cloudflare can do whatever it wants but I wish they were honest about it.

The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense. If anything the owner has been monitoring the thread more proactively and making sure people follow the law. This is included not allowing the creation of new accounts and reminding everyone that their data will be turned over to the authorities should it be requested.

The only thing that picked up steam in the last two weeks is the campaign to drop Cloudflare and the media attention on the situation. That’s why they caved in. It got big enough to reach Bloomberg/wsj/congress. Just be honest about it.

[altcognito]

> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.

I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.

They have a responsibility to their investors to insure that their brand isn’t used to coordinate violence.

Dont just shrug your shoulders while a small group invites violence because “that’s just too bad” We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive. Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.

[jyrkesh]

> I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.

I don't believe that Cloudflare gathered the same volume of info that many others have about KF. OP's point is that behavior as bad or worse than what's been going on (yes, including super detailed doxxing, swatting, death threats, and the like) have all been going on for YEARS on KF, and Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.

Full disclosure: I'm actually disappointed that they made the decision to cut them off. Not because I'm pro-KF at ALL, it is absolutely abhorrent. But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.

But to the original point, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus of more people being in the "shut it down" camp than the "leave it up" camp (which makes sense to me, as soon as the spotlight is cast, most people are going to say it's disgusting and should be taken down).

[ineedasername]

>Cloudflare paid no mind until a larger campaign got going.

You seem to think that is a criticism but it’s actually a pretty good description of how things should work: a problem got enough attention to rise to their notice and they dealt with it. I see no fault in cloudflare setting a high bar on this, for generally not paying attention to content unless it’s serious enough to really grab their attention.

The fact that there are other problems of various severity elsewhere doesn’t change that. The fact that not all targets have as large of a public voice to avoid harassment and potential violence is a tragedy, not a mark against cloudflare.

[jyrkesh]

Left some more comments on this down-thread, but I really meant it neutrally. I don't know if I agree with you that it's how things SHOULD work, but it certainly is how they DO work.

[ineedasername]

> SHOULD

How could things work any differently? A problem cannot be addressed until it rises to their attention. I don’t think there can be any dispute in that.

There are diffent ways this can happen, but that just shifts the argument to how they should structure their organization to facilitate those different ways. Do they prefer an open reporting system? Do they actively monitor and look for problems? Do they decide to be so hands off that only problems that rise to their attention organically, outside of formal structure, are the ones they deal with?

Once we recognize that, the discussion shifts to what sort of problems, when brought to their attention, they decide to address or decide to take no action.

Now we can have a conversation about that, so let’s do a thought experiment:

You own a small business, let’s say bespoke software. It’s small enough that the nature of the work means you talk to every potential customer before beginning a project. A customer comes to you with a very interesting and intellectually challenging project. You like this kind of work, it’s your favorite type of project. But then in the conversation the customer says “I’m going to use this software in part to facilitate personal harassment that is borderline illegal. It will make targets miserable and they will have little ability to do anything about it.”

Do you still take that job? If you answer “no” then your value system is inconsistent unless it entails the belief that Cloudflare should act as it did.

After that, all we’re arguing about are cloudflare’s motives: Money, PR, etc. You might argue that cloudflare does a bad job at this. Or lacks the ability to scale that decision in all cases. But your value system still says that if their is someone at cloudflare aware of the problem that has the power to say “NO” as you would then they should do so.

You can criticize cynical motives or incompetent and spotty enforcement but you can’t criticize them for those cases when they actually say “no”.

If you would say “yes” then we can amicably part ways in this discussion. We would have discussed things in a way where we have positively engaged in a discourse about our beliefs to the point that I will know enough about yours to know that we disagree on such a fundamental level that the productive discussion we had to get to this point has run it’s course. We are unlikely to get further, probably just repeating and restating things in different ways.

But if you have a no then you really have to examine why you feel cloudflare should not do the same. How you can, absent those secondary issues of motive and scale, make a logically consistent argument that individual people at cloudflare with the same power of “no” should behave any differently.

[nemothekid]

>I think it's disingenuous to suggest that this decision wasn't primarily catalyzed by the PR calculus

You seem be taking a very uncharitable view of CF here. Why isn't "the PR around blocking Kiwifarms made Kiwifarms posters more agitated until they did something that CF couldn't take lying down" an option? That's perfectly consistent with recent events and what CF posted in their blog (and frankly, more likely).

[AbrahamParangi]

You should, as a general rule, never take a charitable view of the actions of businesses. If you start with the most machiavellian interpretation possible you will be more right than wrong. Not that you will be always right, but absent special information it is the presumptive default.

[saltminer]

I was actually monitoring the Keffals threads to laugh at the salt on display. It was hilarious at times, then you'd run into stuff like people determining what restaurants she was likely to be at so they could detonate a bomb and kill her. It's such a brazen display that, even if it was a joke, I don't think the first amendment would be an acceptable defense if your door got busted down over it.

CF should have kicked them off long ago, but when they say "Escalating threats", they're really underselling it IMO. KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting, so I have a very hard time believing the "it's only for teh lulz" crowd.

[ahtihn]

> KF already tried to murder Keffals via swatting

While that is obviously the intent, the fact that "swatting" even works is serious failure of law enforcement and I don't understand how the public still accepts it after all this time.

[lupire]

There are two businesses here, CF and KF. In a dispute, the benefit of the doubt goes to one of them. And it's clear which is more trustworthy.

[AbrahamParangi]

To be clear, nothing I say is any sort of endorsement of Kiwifarms. Cloudflare is a business so it’s Machiavellian. Kiwifarms is… I don’t even know what Kiwifarms is. Something worse.

But you shouldn’t trust (meaning the way you’d trust a person you know) any business. Especially not well run businesses! They’re not people— and the better run they are, the more Machiavellian.

[jyrkesh]

I totally understand that reading, and I completely agree with you that it's consistent with their business goals and operating principles. I was just calling it out to the (admittedly minority) of folks in these comments that seem to view them as some sort of moral savior who's making these calls for the good of society.

[dogecoinbase]

CF no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32705613

[andsoitis]

> But I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better, and generally think that keeping these folks relegated to unseen areas is net-negative.

Why net-negative? If it is accessible online (and it must be, otherwise how do they communicate?) then one can still peruse, have a pulse on it.

[password4321]

> one can still peruse, have a pulse on it

Not without an invite to the private Discord / Google doc / telegram group / whatever.

[jyrkesh]

Yeah, this is basically what I meant. Even Discords on TG groups that are "public" but still require your identity to attached and therefore "doxxable" in some respect are still off the radar in the sense that they're not included in research datasets.

I sometimes wonder if online and violently oriented extremism is indeed on the rise, or even completely mainstream at this point. Or if it's actually a very small, isolated problem that gets amplified and magnified through the clickbait media cycle. Or anywhere in between (like e.g. the common claim that these ideas are laundered into the mainstream, potentially with some amount of watering down, dogwhistling, or code switching that obfuscates the source).

At this point, I really think very few people, if anyone, even know the order of magnitude of the problem. Certainly, there's been some academic studies done on the topic, but most of them focus on fully public content on e.g. Twitter or TikTok, as opposed to the "dark circles" like KF, TG groups, and Discords.

There are also technically public boards that are somehow blocklisted on more mainstream social media that exist in a sort of grey area. I probably can't post any of them here without the risk of getting this comment moderated, but many of them were formed in the wake of exoduses from banned subreddits, and then popularized by advertising on those subreddits in the small window between getting quarantined or admin-moderated and getting banned.

Idk, this comment wasn't very cohesive, even after some edits, but yes, there's a big difference between a public subreddit and a semi-public Discord server in terms of monitoring certain kinds of speech. And I think most people here at least somewhat buy into the legitimacy of the Streisand Effect, and I think a lot of this is just that but with nastier people.

[anigbrowl]

Depends on motivation level.

Extremist types do have a tradeoff between security and visibility because they need to grow the size and/or quality of their network or watch it shrink due to boredom or demotivation. conversely people who monitor extremism want o limit its growth, but not so aggressively that extremists significantly up their game and monitors have to start researching infrastructure from scratch.

[philistine]

That's exactly a problem with theses sites; they are horrible and yet can slowly recruit people because companies still provide them with services that allow them to stay public.

[derefr]

Such groups can splinter endlessly into unidentifiable new subgroups. How do you stop those? What is your imagined end-game here — making freedom of association default-deny?

[ajross]

> I do tend to peruse extremist circles on both sides to understand the radicalism a little better,

Genuinely curious about what "extremist circles" you're perusing on the left that seem to fit into this category? Most of the big protest leaders in the various groups have always been and remain on twitter. Your text clearly implies there's some kind of secret conclave that the rest of us are missing, which is... not at all my experience.

What sites/communities/whatever are you talking about here?

[jyrkesh]

I'll quote myself from this comment where I explain a little more about my social media habits in that space. I think you're right that a ton of them are on Twitter, I'd add Reddit, and also say I've never dared try and dip into the shitstorm of private Discord channels: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32156760

> ...far left filter bubbles--with calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing, and all the rest of it--absolutely exist on Twitter and Reddit (among other places, I'm sure). In particular, just pop over to subs like /r/GenZedong, /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, /r/Anarchism, /r/AnarchismZ, /r/196, /r/2624, /r/JusticeReturned, or many many others.

[ajross]

> calls for violence, personal attacks, doxxing [...] exist on Twitter and Reddit

You're going to need to cite them better then. I mean, I read some of those subs. They're out there, sure, but they're absolutely not doing what you claim they are, and (like all subreddits that want to stay up) ban those who do. I'm sure you can find a single comment here and there, but no, there's no coordinated SWATing on reddit, that's ridiculous.

[AllegedAlec]

> You're going to need to cite them better then.

There's this person on twitter who regularly calls for doxxing and actual harassment by seending stuff to people's employers and family. I can't remember how to pronounce their name though. Kuhffuls? Kheffils? Shoot, I just can't recall...

[jyrkesh]

I was really hoping I wouldn't get this kind of response because I'm really not trying to be combative or make any kind of point about the relative volume of calls for violence on different sides of the political spectrum. And I have no interest in screencapping a zillion messages over years of having been an internet degenerate to try and prove to you that some non-zero amount of it exists, via a tit-for-tat conversation on what's fake, what's an isolated instance, what's a false equivalence blah blah blah. It's tiresome, and I've watched it play out more times than is probably good for my mental health.

Plus, none of it is relevant anyway because there are so many people poisoning the well with fake personas that are misrepresenting their political enemies for more "evidence" that their group is in the right.

(Ugh, this is bringing to mind a Reddit rabbithole where some person claimed to be ex-AHS-ingroup, and that AHS people were posting CP under fake conservative accounts on conservative boards, and then AHS people claimed that this person was never in the AHS Discords, or that they didn't exist, or the screenshots were fake, and that ACTUALLY it was conservatives posting CP under fake leftist accounts on leftist boards, and OMG HOW DO THESE PEOPLE SPEND EVEN MORE TIME ON THE INTERNET THAN ME I NEED TO STEP BACK FROM THE COMPUTER. And no, I didn't walk away feeling like I had any idea what had actually happened.)

In any case, it's my belief that all ingroups have people within them that aren't operating under their purported values (religion, politics, public servants, etc.). I also believe that the people who have the most power to effect change are the people willing to call out those within their own ingroups who are violating their group's purported principles. E.g. cops gotta call out cops, men gotta call out men, Israelis gotta call out Israelis and Palestinians gotta call out Palestinians. And yes, leftists gotta call out leftists.

I ALSO think that we need more coalition between groups with overlap on certain high-value beliefs and initiatives, and that it's easier to form that unity when people aren't using bad faith arguments to defend the more toxic members of their ingroup.

[paulmd]

r/196 is more or less a general-purpose meme discord and about the spiciest thing I’ve seen is people dumping on landlords.

cannot recall ever seeing anyone doxxed on r/196 ever ever. Someone just got mad they got downvoted for trying to brigade conservative opinions onto a bunch of 20y/o’s.

edit: the one thing that is absolutely true is that they aggressively enforce the civility rules... not a great place to go and have a "civil discussion" about whether LGBTQ groups have a right to exist. And I'm betting that's what happened, lol.

[pelagicAustral]

Leftypol anyone?

[rejectfinite]

>I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare and assuming good faith I believe them when they say there are legitimate threats to body and person.

There are "legitimate threats to body and person." on every chat platform everyday. Yet they are still operating.

Could this offending content not be reported to moderators and admins?

Edit: Just flag and downvote me with no reply, good discussion. This site is turning into facebook/reddit.

[andywood]

I have the same information, unless CF pays someone to lurk the Farms more than I do. Unlikely. This is a pretext plain and simple. Prince is full of it. There was one fedpost and it was taken down. It happens. There's no machine learning algo scanning new comments to see if they sound like plausible threats.

[abigail95]

Having never read Kiwifarms I don't know whether the threats are real or not.

But it's not like the person/s they are targeting, or their plans are secret

CF is making a specific claim that law enforcement is too slow against the escalting risk.

Why would this be true?

Kiwifarms seems like a big problem but it's a small fish in the total criminal pool.

It's not like a Kiwifarms post goes up and a bomb goes off 5 minutes later. If the police can send a swat team anywhere in the US within 2 hours for a hoax, I'm certain the same resource exists for actual threats.

[asah]

We can't know, because Cloudflare provided no evidence (e.g. redacted examples) to justify their decision.

[dmix]

Then they should provide at least some basic details. Trusting them to be honest is silly. This sort of thing needs transparency.

[wyager]

> I don’t believe you have the same information as cloudflare

Yes he does - the activity of KF posters is public.

The amount of bullshitting going on here is insane. People are just making things up wholesale.

[altcognito]

Cloudflare has probably more than one person now involved in monitoring with realtime tools what is being done on their network.

This doesn't take a lot of intuition to think that they have a better idea than a random person on the internet.

[lupire]

CF provided domain DDOS protection, not serving, for KF. So content/hosting isn't part of service CF were providing.

[rejectfinite]

The posts are public on a public forum. You dont need an account. Like Twitter! :)

>realtime tools what is being done on their network.

That inspects every post? That sees some hidden forums for ultra doxxing and crime?

[ineedasername]

I don’t know where posts are coming from when I see them online. We can only guess at the specifics (which will hopefully be released when there’s time for an after-action report) but presumably cloudflare may be able to see ip addresses and have some idea of location. If someone posts “I’m coming to kill you” a dozen times but the ip is in Europe and doesn’t appear to be a VPN then that’s less cause for concern than the same posts made by someone with a residential ISP ip that’s half an hour away from the target.

Of course that may not at all resemble what happened, but you are incorrect to believe the cloudflare doesn’t have a privileged position that allows them more information.

[Karunamon]

When the topic under discussion are the contents of a publicly available website, unless you think that Cloudflare has some kind of tooling scanning for specific terms on the CDN origin (why?), no, I am pretty confident in saying they do not have any additional information. This is not some arcane matter of network management, this is the public contents of a public website that anyone can verify.

[bombcar]

The additional information would be “the board is getting pissed and you need to fix this now”.

[Handytinge]

> We all have a responsibility to discern what is valuable speech and what is corrosive.

That's not the internet I signed up for, and I don't agree with or support it. Very sad state of affairs.

[istinetz]

>Mentally ill people exist, and they are more than happy to use these forums, and they are often used in these forums as tools.

I can say literally the exact same thing about twitter. This is extremely high bar you're setting for this one site, that you're not following for literally any other social media.

[ahiknsr]

> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense.

I believe the final push for Cloudflare to drop them was this forum thread where users were organizing a bomb threat & armed confrontation against several members of the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign.

(copied from https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/x56mot/cloudfla...)

[Cyberdog]

Interesting how that screenshot on Keffals' Twitter feed crops out the number of downvotes that post would have received, as well as the replies from other posters calling that poster a fed and a glowie.

[matheusmoreira]

Yeah, it's a meme as old as the forums themselves. It's hilarious that this one post that everyone immediately saw through was the one that made Cloudflare react.

[dart200]

one screenshot by someone crying wolf as much as possible proves exactly nothing.

the post was deleted within a few mins, so extremely sus. violent threats are posted on all major websites, idk why this one is so exceptional.

doesn't even look real, smells entirely like bait. or someone trying to get KF taken down.

[google234123]

To be fair, if the opponents of KF were willing to illegally ddos the site then it’s not a stretch to say they wouldn’t be willing to do a false flag.

[lupire]

DDOS and murder (SWATting is use of deadly force, so is attempting murder) are not interchangable crimes.

[_-david-_]

The post you are responding to is insinuating that if a group is willing to commit one crime (DDOS) they may be willing to do another crime / questionable act like make a bomb threat post to frame KF.

[JYellensFuckboy]

Am I missing something? The linked source contradicts that comment. The source only links one post by one user - a horrible attempt at a joke by my reading - and it was removed.

Is there more?

[pixl97]

>a horrible attempt at a joke by my reading

No. Just no.

"We should just blow everyone up, lol, j/k" < This is fascism in practice. This is the behavior that leads to violence.

>Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. --Sartre

[dvzk]

Just say that you want Kiwifarms deleted from the internet. There is nothing tenuous or uncertain about that stance, if you own it openly. Hiding behind concern over a false and un-serious threat is a coward's strategy.

[pixl97]

I honestly know nothing about the site, somehow before today I've missed the place existed. I can see in past history HN history it's been quite a contentious site.

If sites are making threats of violence against others, and it is not being moderated, even fascists 'I'm just kidding' behaviors, I'm perfectly fine banning them, I'm not hiding behind anything, this is my stated position.

You're just falling into a typical libertarian trap, a common failing on sites like HN. That is the "All voices should be heard, even those calling for violence and intimidation of others", it's just very suspect because the groups that tend to espouse that tend to do so say it from a position of privilege and are not the ones having acts of violence carried out against them.

Violence should not, and ultimately cannot be tolerated.

[cornel_io]

I know nothing here, but it sounds from other posts like it is being moderated very aggressively, and posts like these survive for mere minutes.

Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.

I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.

[dvzk]

No, I do think Kiwifarms should have been prosecuted and unhosted, for failing to curtail frequent mass harassment threads against ordinary and mentally ill individuals, which led to real-world harm. I'm just not going to defend deplatforming by quoting downvoted and deleted jests from a few users who could also be anti-KF astroturfers.

[slothsarecool]

Just adding some light to the escalations; there were bomb and shoot threats over the last few days. The userbase on the site upped the tone of their "jokes"/threats after the last blog post and thats what caused the final suspension.

[stepupmakeup]

I don't know what happened prior to today, but earlier today there was a bomb threat which was apparently removed by the site's moderators within minutes, but it hit Twitter anyway. The fact that this isn't mentioned anywhere by the people currently leading the "campaign" already proves there's an agenda.

[syrrim]

People have always posted (usually fake) threats in kiwifarms threads. They have always been removed promptly. The same is true of basically every large website on the internet. When cloudflare made their post saying they wouldn't remove kiwifarms, the site already had that reputation.

[rejectfinite]

There are "bomb and shoot threats over the last few days" on FB, Messenger, Telegram, Signal, CoD/CS lobbies etc everyday. Like Kiwifarms the content is removed when reported. What is the issue?

[_vvaw]

There absolutely were not, and this is a gross exaggeration. One user made a clearly satirical comment about posting IRA soldiers with bombs at every cafe in the Ulster area. This was screenshotted by Keffals and posted to Twitter as a serious threat. Everyone else posting in the thread understand it was an extremely dumb joke. The post was removed by the KF owner within minutes. If that is why the site went down, I’ll be amazed and disappointed.

[_vvaw]

Update: I am amazed and disappointed.

[mpyne]

I think the point is that this isn't even KF's first go at the bomb threat thing. They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides... and CF was always OK with. Always.

Until now.

When KF forced CF into a choice between protecting KF and protecting the victims of KF, CF chose KF, repeatedly.

Until now.

I'm glad CF has made the right choice, finally. But it clearly is not going to come from within, it's going to have to come from continued public awareness.

[philippejara]

Is there any proof, at all, of any swatting, being organized there? seems to be a question that eludes people.

[mpyne]

On the off-chance that this is a serious question and not gaslighting, start with this investigative journalist's thread: https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15657972205318144...

This isn't recent either, the same reporter wrote on the site back in 2016: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-trolls-cheer-trans-woman... (linked to from his Twitter thread).

I personally witnessed Near's live-tweeted descent into despair, culminating in their suicide (https://twitter.com/eevee/status/1409230358977998851?lang=en, https://twitter.com/near_koukai/status/1408986839743037448), all driven by KF.

As Near described it:

> But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse. It's escalated from attacking me for being autistic, to attacking and doxing my friends, and trying to suicide bait another, just to get a reaction from me. I lost one of my best friends to this. I feel responsible

The behavior from just the Daily Beast story alone exceeds the harm caused by things like spamming, for which CloudFlare does ban email users. CloudFlare even runs a dedicated service that "crawls the Internet to stop phishing, Business Email Compromise (BEC), and email supply chain attacks at the earliest stages of the attack" [1].

One could only wonder how magical the Internet would be if CloudFlare could stop doxxing and account hijacking attacks at their earliest stages! Or... you know, at least not facilitate those attacks coming from within their own network. Because once this all crosses into harassment, stalking, doxxing and mass online bullying, it stops being about "speech" and starts being about facilitating and organizing criminal activity.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/products/zero-trust/email-securit...

[philippejara]

Ok, the investigative journalist's thread shows literally no proof or even evidence that kiwi farms was involved in the swatting, and the man with the note apparently posted it on /pol/(?) so not even kiwi farms was on that one. Neither of the other two links said anything about swatting.

I'm serious here, and genuinely trying to understand this underlying consensus that the one to blame for it is that website, but I just don't see it.

[mpyne]

If Keffals's own personal statement wasn't enough, this press article https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/swatted-toronto-man-caug... confirms her address and her father's were posted to Kiwifarms immediately prior to them being swatted.

Also, KF's admin directly mentioned that those on the site are using it for swatting (see https://www.sinseer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/FaveAhKVE..., taken from a page posted by a different victim of KF-sourced harassment).

> the man with the note apparently posted it on /pol/(?) so not even kiwi farms was on that one

You mean the note literally saying "KiwiFarms all Troons"?? https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15658039736716369...

Where they uploaded the first pic is hardly the issue, that KiwiFarms was organizing the online harassment campaign, including doxxing and swatting, is the issue.

And I couldn't help but notice you seemed to miss Near's tweet. Do you think they were unclear as to the source of their misery?

[charcircuit]

You sidestepped the question. He asked for proof.

[krainboltgreene]

No one is answering you because it's obvious to even the most intermediate observer where this work is coming from.

The only reason anyone would give KF the benefit of the doubt is because they willfully are ignoring the activity going on in KF.

[betwixthewires]

What about to people like me, who have only ever heard of kiwi farms in passing, who don't really know anything substantial about any of this stuff and want to know more? Is it obvious to us? I'd like to see what everyone's talking about when they talk about this site, and if they're right, without actually going there. Can you help me out with that?

[krainboltgreene]

You want me to google news articles for you?

[Cyberdog]

So the lack of evidence of wrongdoing is evidence of wrongdoing. Got it. That will certainly fly in court.

[krainboltgreene]

What court? What lack of evidence? Are you even on this earth right now?

[philippejara]

So there isn't then?

[e2le]

I do wish people would archive these pages to dissuade any doubt of wrongdoing.

[_dain_]

>They've organized bomb threats, swatting, stalking vulnerable people at hotel rooms they've fled to, and worse things besides

all of these things are against site rules, users who do them are banned (and mercilessly mocked).

the MTG swatting was so obviously a false flag, whoever did it said "YES I AM FROM KIWIFARMS AND THIS IS MY EXACT USERNAME", there was no actual discussion of a swatting attempt in the thread prior to that; nobody would just straight up admit who they were while committing a crime like that, especially after null repeatedly said he hands over people's info to law enforcement if they post illegal shit.

remember, the site is currently being DDoSed, which is a crime. people want it gone. so is it that impossible that the DDoSers would also do other illegal crap (like swatting) and blame it on KF to get their way?

[smcl]

Oh shit maybe we're all wrong then! Can I ask, then, what is the purpose of the site, if it's not to co-ordinate the harrassment of individuals by sharing their personal information?

[rejectfinite]

>what is the purpose of the site

It is a forum.

Should sites have to have a "purpose" and does this need to be vetted by some authority or the hosting provider?

What is the "purpose" of Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Signal, 4chan or Discord?

>by sharing their personal information

I mostly saw public Twitter screenshots being reposted. I swear some people dont seem to understand that Twitter is public and not all DMs.

[smcl]

Ok have fun doing whatever it is you do that isn’t doxing on your forum when it’s back online (after the doxing and the threats took it offline) I guess.

[artificial]

Regarding the "purpose" argument. Authoritarianism is on the rise. What are you, some kind of wrongthinker? :)

[HideousKojima]

The purpose is to document the bizarre (and oftentimes outright creepy and/or illegal) behavior of the terminally online. You know, stuff like helping your friend sell his bathtub brewed hormones to minors without their parents finding out. Or running a Discord server called Catboy Ranch that has several minors on it, and you send them personalized collars that declare them your property. Just ordinary, innocent stuff that is no one else's business, clearly.

[bobsmooth]

To laugh at silly people online.

[HereIGoAgain]

What are you talking about exactly? As far as I've been able to find, they don't even have a history of harassment, let alone something illegal, not as a forum/community. As we saw with this "threat" here.. it was reported and deleted as soon as the mods saw it and the user perma banned.. Just like every other attempt by a "member" to post something illegal or interact with someone off site.

[_dain_]

these were obviously (stupidly poor taste) jokes, and they were removed as soon as the site admin was made aware. death threats are against the rules of the site. what exactly makes this so urgent that KF has to be blasted off the internet?

[dmix]

100% they are trying to have their cake and eat it too. First you pretend you care about free speech for a week and gesticulate in public. Then you come up with some extraordinary circumstance so it doesn’t seem like it’s the new normal.

[crazytalk]

Heavily reminiscent of Reddit caving in on /r/jailbait following exposure in the WSJ. Actually not heavily reminiscent, identical

[frickenhamster]

After hearing about the drama and reading kf's pov, I can definitely understand why the people ddosing kf want it down. The stuff they do is illegal and absolutely vile but overlooked by the people in power because it suits their politics. It scares me as a prospective parent.

[charcircuit]

>The stuff they do is illegal

The content on the Kiwi Farms is legal.

Edit: Disregard this as I misinterpreted what I quoted.

[frickenhamster]

I was referring the the stuff the people who want kf down were doying, ie selling homemade hormones to underaged children.

[matheusmoreira]

> selling homemade hormones to underaged children

What is this? Who is doing this and why?

[iaml]

This happens because a lot of times trans people find themselves in the position where they realize they are trans but can’t do anything about it because they were born in a country that doesn’t offer the qualified help to them (at all or in timely fashion). Sometimes it has to do with their parents refusing to hear what’s on their mind. That’s when “trans diy” options come to light and they helped many a trans people previously. The thin line where this kind of behavior might turn into something less innocent might not be immediately obvious, especially when phrased in a way that is supposed to elicit emotional response.

[fatherzine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere "first, do no harm"

"Non-maleficence, which is derived from the maxim, is one of the principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare are taught in school and is a fundamental principle throughout the world. Another way to state it is that, "given an existing problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to DO NOTHING, THAN TO RISK CAUSING MORE HARM THAN GOOD." It reminds healthcare personnel to consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. It is invoked when debating the use of an intervention that carries an obvious risk of harm but a less certain chance of benefit."

[matheusmoreira]

That is absolutely insane. I don't care what the gender politics situation is. These hormones have significant risks associated with their use and are not things that can be sold to children.

[_-david-_]

It is trans people / trans activists. They want children who think they are trans (despite 60-80% of children growing out of it) to use hormones.

[ttybird2]

Is there a source for the "60-80%" figure?

[honkler]

>what is this?

Selling homemade hormones to underaged children

>who is doing it?

Mentally ill people

>and why?

Mental illness

[scythe]

They didn't say that there was "dangerous escalation" in the past two weeks. They said that there was a pressure campaign over the last two weeks, and they also said that they didn't want to comply with this campaign.

They, crucially, said that there was dangerous escalation over the past 48 hours, i.e., since Thursday. Given that most of us have jobs, we might not have noticed. But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?

[derefr]

Cloudflare didn't say that they contacted law enforcement in the last 48 hours; they said that they've been in contact with law enforcement for weeks and law enforcement hasn't acted (i.e. to give them a court order to shut the thing down.)

[convery]

> But what changed in 48 hours that led Cloudflare to contact law enforcement?

Several hit-pieces in the media? Saw nothing out of the ordinary in the thread about Keffals a couple hours ago.

[zerocrates]

I don't know what else has been there, but this seems like it would qualify, no?

https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885

I understand that it's since been deleted.

[convery]

Maybe, but people shitposting about blowing up half a city just to annoy a streamer doesn't really sound like the kind of threat that would make a company do a 180 on their position..

[rejectfinite]

It was deleted as it is against the rules of the site? The strawman of "damage control" seems like a retrofit by Keffals.

[happyopossum]

Err, how would that qualify as a legitimate threat?

[lookalike74]

Thank you for this comment. The only possible negative here is "Kiwifarms itself will most likely find other infrastructure that allows them to come back online." Cloudflare supposedly being "concerned that our action may only fan the flames of this emergency" is disingenuous at best.

[hackerlight]

> The claim that there has been some “dangerous escalation” in the past 2 weeks is nonsense

How do you know?

And to be specific, the claim was "targeted threats have escalated over the last 48 hours to the point that we believe there is an unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life".