[_vvaw]

Over the past week I’ve read enough on and about Kiwi Farms to conclude that while “doxing” does happen there, as it does on Twitter and other websites, the claims of harassment and SWATing and users driving people to suicide are highly and cynically exaggerated. The evidence simply doesn’t support these claims, particularly the suicides:

https://archive.ph/JPHtM

The main issue seems to be that Kiwi Farms documents the actual, public behavior of many disgusting, pedophilic, embarrassing people on the Internet, some of whom are trans. Some of the people they document and laugh at are also neo-Nazis or alt-right. Some of the Kiwi Farms users are trans.

The willingness of many in news media and at companies like Cloudflare to take these claims of SWATing and harassment at face value with next to no evidence, or in the face of obvious sock-puppet posts to Kiwi Farms that are instantly removed by moderators, has been disheartening. It reminds me how r/againsthatesubreddit mods posted CASM to conservative subreddits to get them banned by site admins. I increasingly understand that the opponents of Kiwi Farms use the exact same tactics they project onto the site: doxing and SWATing Joshua Moon, harassing him and Kiwi Farms, spreading false information about the site’s content and activities. Their goal seems to be wiping evidence of child grooming, illegal drug distribution to minors, and other very bad and embarrassing behavior by their community from the web. They may succeed.

I hope reasonable members of the trans community can distance themselves sufficiently from these unstable activists. I hope people like Keffals have their unsavory activities documented and shared with a wider audience. I hope this mob of unscrupulous activists doesn’t succeed in controlling all speech on the Internet.