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by ajross 1385 days ago
So KiwiFarms was just a site dispassionately interested in the "natural behavior" of "people on social media", and the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harrassment campaigns based almost exclusively on content and information collected on that site by the dispassionate observers is... what, just a crazy coincidence?

I'm sorry, but that's absolutely ridiculous and you know it. No one posting someone's address or geolocated data to KiwiFarms is doing so unaware of what is going to happen. At best, whatever moderation happens (I certainly didn't see much, but hey, you're the expert) exists to provide some kind of cover for the inevitable attention from law enforcement.

You know this. I know you know this. I just can't believe how many people are here on HN willing to make excuse after excuse for this site.

1 comments

> the fact that the people under discussion were almost universally subject to seemingly coordinated harassment campaigns

Almost universally? I don't think I can think of a single person discussed on Kiwi Farms experiencing that.

Or, well, I take that back I can think of one person: Patrick Tomlinson. Patrick Tomlinson, all his personal faults aside, is legitimately constantly being pestered by a crowd of fans of the Opie and Anthony radio show. Originally they were on Reddit, and then migrated to their own forum. Kiwi Farms later discovered this brouhaha and started discussing it.

That's about it.

Now plenty of people have an incentive to claim they're experiencing coordinated harassment. Every social media personality since the dawn of time, whether they're being discussed on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, is massively incentivized to make up claims of harassment. Usually the kernel of truth is that they might have received maybe one rude DM from someone, which they then parlay into "harassing messages". There's never any receipts and the connection between the main group discussion and the person messaging is dubious at best. They wield this like a cudgel to shut down all criticism of their behavior.

I mean, hell, take Onision. He pulled that shtick constantly. That and DMCA abuse. And the discussions he was shutting down were (true) claims that he was grooming teenaged girls sexually. The mainstream public finally heard about Onision because of Chris Hansen's investigation. But there are dozens of Onision types out there pulling the same trick.

Kiwi Farms has always been very careful to cultivate a culture against interacting with the subjects.

Again, I think you really are imagining some kind of 4chan type scenario. That simply isn't the case.