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by malepoon 1381 days ago
> between two internet mobs headed by two unsavoury individuals

This is a bit too much "both sides are bad" for me. Fact is that Kiwi Farms is a horrible website where people harass others, share information about them, and drive them to suicide. That's pretty bad on its own.

1 comments

Look at it from Cloudflare employees' point of view though. Do they really want to spend their time getting drawn in to any more of this trivial online drama? No, of course not. Pulling the plug is the sensible business decision.
This is definitely online drama, but I'm not sure I'd call it "trivial." This isn't people arguing about how many days are in a week.
It's trivial in the same way that celebrity gossip is trivial.
Whether foo and bar will get married is, in my opinion, considerably different from organizations that collect and magnify hatred against members of various disempowered groups.
Out of these two antagonistic online mobs, which is the disempowered one?
Are transwomen creators really disempowered online these days? The internet's a very different place from how it was in 2007.

Contrapoints, Gigi, Maya Henry were the first three that came to mind and from what I've seen all have wildly successful online followings, and a literal army of Twitter and Discord users to come to their defense. KF is the only site I'm aware of that bullies trans people, but I can think of loads of popular accounts and forums that happily go after Republicans, depressed single men, Christians, and any other group which the online majority has decided is deserving of abuse. I think the take "trans people have a hard time being accepted online" is pretty outdated now.

Care to list the disempowered groups?
Transwomen are the big relevant one here, but Kiwi Farms happily hates on black people too.