Surprised at the number of people on here arguing against this because of 'censorship' who by their own words pretty clearly frequent the site...

I think those who are arguing against it either don't know quite how extreme KiwiFarms is, or strongly agree with the hatred, doxing and SWATting of minorities and vulnerable people that their members do.

I suppose you're right, and a bunch of them seem to be throwaways, or perhaps people who only made an account to defend their site (I'm basically on a throwaway too). Sad they fell into the same persecution complex thing people seem to get trapped in... like you're really defending the site where they welcomed the Christchurch shooter's manifesto? You really think you're doing something? That's what you want to fight for?

I've never understood the attitude that there should be zero nuance to free speech. That somehow we can't collectively look at the Christchurch manifesto and say, "that's over the line".

Yes, I believe there are laws that are unjustly applied, but this is a) not a law and b) so obviously different from any sort of edge case. The only people who think kiwifarms should exist are sociopaths.

It's a modern day witch-hunt. I grew up in an environment where thinking that deviates from what's commonly acceptable is deemed not worthy and such person should suffer the consequences. It takes time, maturity and probably most important seeing a lot of world to get it changed. I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life, so they end up focusing on extremely negative things as a way to justify their actions or escape their reality.

FYI people are interpreting this as saying the witch hunt is the KF users being targeted, and not what they did to other people (who FWIW might be bad people and do bad things, but this weird disconnected cyber-vigilantism teeming with "far-right" overtones is just not the way to deal with that...).

I read it that way too at first but it makes no sense in light of your OP.

By writing witch hunt, I've meant that KF users hunt down certain individuals they may not agree with, for whatever the reason. I definitely didn't mean that KF users are being hunted.

> I bet a lot of those people on that site are completely lost when it comes to purpose or their place in life

Which makes them a prime target for extremist thinking/alt-right groups.

The alt-right playbook series goes into this rather well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g (video has content warning, ironically).

> It's a modern day witch-hunt.

The problem with real witch hunts was that witches don't exist. By definition, any "witches" found and punished was an injustice.

That's not the case here. Kiwifarms users have committed acts that have drawn public attention, criticism, and consequences like today's.

What kind of actions? I don't chase up people around the globe just because I disagree with them. I don't support in any shape or form doxxing or swatting anyone. People need to be mental to engage in this kind of nonsense.

Yeah, those comments are either extremely ignorant or disingenuous. It takes about 30s of browsing KF to realize that it is coordinated harassment - there are entire subforums devoted to harassing one individual person with thousands and thousands of messages each.

It's one of the most awful places I've ever seen on the internet, and I have zero respect for the people who try to launder large-scale harassment into "it's just free speech!"

I think you're going to need to define what you mean by harassing here. Because talking about people who make fools of themselves publicly is certainly not what most people, and certainly not the law, would consider "harassment"

I cannot think of a valid argument against taking KiwiFarms off of Cloudflare (unless the FBI finds it useful to have them on a domestic service, or something). The only troubling thing about this traces back to a question that sits in the backs of all of our minds: how much do we trust these companies to do good with the ridiculous amount of power they have over society? Even when Big Tech Megacorp™ does something good with that power, it can still be unsettling to see that power being used.

Your post is the perfect example of the no-effort no-info SM reply. How many different social media opinions did your understanding of the site come from?

Swatting is illegal on the site, harassing too, in fact it's against the rules to really try to interact with anyone at all. And they target everyone and anyone who publicly says or does stupid stuff regularly. Don't feel to bad, most people tend to easily fall for misinformation like this.

Your false dichotomy is obvious and gross.

False. It is unobvious and ungross

> don't know quite how extreme KiwiFarms is

I have looked at the site and it's doesn't seem that extreme, unless there's a bunch of content not visible to guests. It looks like any anonymous IB from the early 2000s. The people who are calling it "extreme" seem to mostly be trusting other people's descriptions of the site.

> SWATting of minorities

As far as I can tell, the only people verifiably being swatted are KF site operators. I have yet to see a case of swatting with compelling evidence of attribution to KF.

If you anger certain members of the community - e.g. by being a vocal trans person - you'll be targetted by members who will attempt to find your personal information, your full name, your birth name, your phone number and address or other information that can be used to harrass you. An example from the "Main Character" on KF right now, Keffals, is this: https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885?s=20&...

That's pretty extreme no?

Nah it's not. I think it's most likely someone who's naive, with an outside chance it's someone playing daft laddie

I read the site sometimes, although my argument is that anything against US law is against the site rules and this whole thing is disingenuous. But it's also censorship whether or not you frequent the site.

I get how if you just read about it that KF sounds awful. Not sure how legit any of that is tho. Do the people you suspect of being readers of KF seem like awful degenerates to you?

Unfortunately internet discourse in the last 10 years has tended to descend into echo chambers. If you’ve managed to avoid interactions with the content being posted there and in other spaces like it, you have done quite well.

Worse than that, the mentality pushed forth in echo chambers like this seems to crystallise peoples thoughts, to the point that alternative thoughts to the zeitgeist therein these spaces are not tolerated or even heard without revulsion or aggression.

I’ve seen this in both the extremes of Right wing and Left wing politics in the last ten years.

Currently in my opinion, the extreme right wing seems to be the more dangerous of the two. In part due to the volume of adherents to the ideology and the secondly proportion of people within who are die-hard adherents, thirdly globally, the political centre appears to be a good bit further to the right of where it was 20 years ago, it seems that more extreme right wing political thought is more accepted now.

I hear people say this a lot these days, usually someone pushing some fringe cause from the left side of the divide. How has the center and right moved further to the right? I mean what issues have they moved on?

But why now? The site has been known for years.

Even if you have no moral or ethical qualms with them (unlikely as that is), it seems like a legal liability issue in general.

How so? Illegal activity and even interacting with people off site is against the rules. They have and do work with police when someone says/does something illegal. This whole issue is and always has been about the things certain people don't like knowing the site allows to be said and nothing more.. please keep up.

It hosts archives of terrible shit people have done and allows free discussion of their activities. That's why so many people want the site taken down. It has nothing to do with them killing, doxing, stalking and swatting hundreds of innocent trans people.

For example, the person that started #dropkiwifarms is a literal soviet worshipping communist, openly flirted with minors on twitter, hosted a discord server full of minors and sexual fetish content, and had a terminally embarrassing findom porn career, and talks frequently about sending minors illegally brewed HRT without their parents knowledge. This is all factual and documented, you can look it up if you want. So you can see why they would want the site taken down.