If anything, the reason there's such a controversy in the first place is that they've gotten far more attention than they wanted. This sort of activity is only possible while skulking in obscurity.

Damnatio memoriae is devastating to a public figure, but it is doing KiwiFarms a huge favor. It lets them scurry away under some new rock and keep going under a new name. The worst thing you could do is probably just shine the brightest spotlight you can find square at their activities.

There is a good reason we erect monuments and museums to atrocities. It's not for ease of rubbernecking, but so that we can learn and avoid them in the future.

This whole campaign has been damning for the folks trying to take down kiwifarms. All of the evidence of their bad past behavior that used to be confined to one obscure site is now plastered all over the internet, and millions of people know about it.

My personal semi-conspiracy theory on this is that the search warrant served on Keffals (no, not a SWAT call, a search warrant) contained some note that they got probable cause from evidence on a kiwifarms thread. Since then, Keffals has been running to countries with no extradition treaties to Canada and trying their hardest to erase that evidence from the internet under the guise of stopping suicides.

She has run to one country, the United Kingdom, which surprisingly doesn't have an extradition treaty with Canada, but which is mentioned specifically as a country that will extradite to Canada on this [https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/emla-eej/bycan-parcan.ht...] Canada government website.

Very few countries, even without an extradition treaty, will refuse to extradite someone over prurient contact with minors. However, there will still be hearings and lots of legal process to fight the extradition - a lot more than if there were a treaty.

the problem is no one wants to look at the truth anymore, they were sold a narrative by a corrupt media and any attempts to inject truth or principle in the conversation are just shut down with screams of "phobe" or "ist" name calling

This doesn’t really hold up to logic, at least as written.

If the note references probable cause from a thread and the evidence is on kf, wouldn’t the authorities already have that evidence or be able to get a search warrant for it? Why would they search someone’s house for it?

Probable cause is not enough evidence to convict someone, but enough to conduct a further search to see if there is enough evidence for a conviction. See here (although this is US-focused, many other states have similar ideas): https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-rights/probable-ca...

Basically, they had the allegations and enough substantiating evidence to go to the point of looking for more evidence, but not to get all the way to an arrest/conviction. A search warrant is the next step.

EDIT: Also, the police have most likely downloaded the information, but you never know.

If you want a real conspiracy theory, recall that original and long-running KF thread subject Christine Weston Chandler was persuaded to incestuously assault her mother by a person named Isabella Janke. Kiwi Farms uncovered Isabella's history with Christine, and extensively documented her online activities to include allegations of extortion, CASM, and animal abuse:

https://archive.ph/3Ev0l

Now consider that Isabella's father Mike Janke is a former Navy SEAL who has a professional relationship with Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1wio7sDDBA

These records have been wiped from the Internet Archive. I wonder how long they will remain on archive.ph.

Evidence KF has tried to stay obscure?

Well there can't be evidence one way or the other now that they're off the wayback machine.

Although it does enhance my point, which is that Kiwi Farms benefits from this.

It's silly. If Kiwifarms benefits from and wanted this, try telling it to those people on Twitter, or to admins and moderators on Reddit, where even talking about Kiwifarms could get you banned, much less linking to it.

If you try to convince them, likely you would get an unbelievable amount of negative online attention sent your way. Ironically the same thing they hate Kiwifarms for.

As an aside, I've noticed a common and extremely effective strategy frequently used by the alt right and other fringe ideological groups (not just in American politics but also in Europe and basically everywhere) is to first stir up a big stinky controversy, wait for the predictable social media overreaction, and then to just withdraw and completely refuse to engage, making their critics look like a bunch of lunatics raving at windmills (because the over-reaction is a hundred times much more public than the controversy), while also keeping the critics on their back foot, always reacting rather than acting on their own terms.

In practice: The abstract entity KiwiFarms takes all the shit, very few of the people actually constituting its membership seem to take much flak; meanwhile its critics look completely unhinged, even though they're absolutely right and KF is incredibly reprehensible, they still do their best to undermine the credibility of their own cause by acting and behaving like a frothing at the mouth lynch mob much more interested in power-tripping and revenge than truth and justice.

The strategy is straight out of Sun Tzu on how to deal with a stronger army, and I haven't really seen any examples of anyone handling it well.

I can't see this "withdraw and completely refuse to engage" thing. They're not organized enough to employ any kind of Sun Tzu thing. The "strategy" is chosen by default because they aren't allowed to engage, in most places. Even if you try to just report what they are saying, not even endorsing it, you get removed in most places.

May very well just be selection. The strategy is prevalent because it works, not through the machinations of some machivellian mastermind but because other strategies don't work.

Though off archive.org, KF is still available via some routes like tor.

If it was doing Kiwifarms a huge favour, I don't think it would be celebrated by the people most determined to destroy it.

Wouldn't be the first time someone had celebrated winning a shortsighted battle at the expense of ultimately harming their own cause.

Not available does not mean not preserved. It’s likely darked; still stored on disk but not available nor are further snapshots permitted.

Kiwi Farms has a thread on Taylor Lorenz from WaPo, because of certain erratic behavior. Taylor got her own dirt removed from the internet archive. Taylor has been helping Clara go after Kiwi Farms.

Taylor's uncle is Roger MacDonald, founder of TV News archive:

https://archive.org/details/roger-macdonald-tv-archive

https://dicktracyonline.substack.com/p/who-is-taylor-lorenz

And of course you've already begun downvoting.

What KF? Never heard of it.

I guess the old addage has never been truer: "History is Written by Victors"

They have a reputation for targeting people to intensely harass into suicide, with Byuu being a notable victim in the HN/CS sphere.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610

There is no proof at all that that user hasn't simply abandoned a handle, for others likewise the connection is less than tenuous and besides i.e. Twitter has much worse, proven track record of doing that and worse. Stop the knee-jerk reaction and spreading wilful misinformation.

was that reputation substantial though?

Yes, yes it was. Kiwifarms users harassed, stalked, and doxxed 3 people (at least) into suicide and ruined many people's lives. How many people has an average site like Hacker News bullied into suicide?

How many has Facebook? Twitter? Back when I was in high school (graduated 2014), three students within my district committed suicide from cyber bullying conducted through these platforms, there wasn't even any bans!

Kiwi-farms seems fairly mundane based on everything I've read about it so far (not that I can even look at the site for myself now). Why is there a double standard here? How the hell did these random twitter users manage to gain the power to pick and choose who gets to be on the internet now?

> How the hell did these random twitter users manage to gain the power to pick and choose who gets to be on the internet now?

This is the part that really worries me. Random Twitter users trying to dictate what _I_ am allowed to read. And Cloudflare and the Internet Archive bends to their will! Highly embarrassing, these people should be taken at anything but face value.

Cloudflare folding is nothing new, but I really expected better of the Internet Archive.

Openly, to any outrage-politicking militant Twitter deathsquad member: you will never stop me from reading what I want to read. I wasn't aware of Kiwi Farms before your ridiculous antics but now you can bank on me reading EVERYTHING I can possibly get my hands on.

I will form my own opinions and you will have no say at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect -- good luck. You can't stop the signal.

Your average eating disorder "support group" is guaranteed to have a higher kill count.

The subjects of "To Catch A Predator" also comprise a few suicides.

For a site supposedly created for the purpose of bullying people into suicide, 3 is pretty underwhelming.

Yes. I provided a link you can click on, but you can also go to the Kiwi Farms Wikipedia page that catalogs victims killed and nearly killed by Kiwi Farms harassment campaigns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

Growing up, my teachers/mentors taught me not to cite Wikipedia directly for any academic/journalistic works, mainly because most people didn't actually check the sources that article writers were using and there's the risk that there's heavy biases one way or the other because - anybody can edit articles.

Looking at the Wikipedia article you linked, I don't see any definitive, authoritative sources of information that directly links KiwiFarms and these horrible events other than random tweets posted by people on the internet.

After looking through 5-6 different sources cited in the bottom of the article, I don't even see any references or screenshots of the actual website used in reporting, just journalists taking what other people are saying as fact.

And if you follow the citations the only sources you get are unverifiable tweets. Not a single report considered to check the original threads or do some research on whether the claims are true. Peak journalism all around.

I've never seen this alleged "suicide counter" on the website, though I've only looked at it closely in the past couple weeks.

The site owner posted this rebuttal to assignment of blame for these suicides, which I find compelling. For instance, the widow of one victim decried Vice News (one source referenced in the article) for using her death to attack Kiwi Farms:

https://archive.ph/XNQYY

The "suicide count" in question was in one user's mini-bio (the bit below someone's profile pic where they can put custom text - not sure what that's called). Keffals' claim that it's a site "feature" is deceitful and that multiple users had it is an outright falsehood.

Enough that three people have had their suicides linked to KF. KF isn't a place that you can ignore if you're a target; they will harass you until the day you die, literally.

The people driving the effort to deplatform it were verifiably doxxed, harrassed and threatened, often times in real life, through swatting and in-person harrassment. Some of them were children.

This isn't even witch-hunt style "newspaper will embellish the story", this was published on the forums by the ones harrassing people. The goal of the forums was to provide a space for doxxers to share info on people they didn't like (that they called "lolcows"), and elicit a reaction out of them for i guess entertainment?

KF was a site for snuff movies, except instead of a guy torturing and killing another, it was psychological abuse of the highest degree.

>>Some of them were children.

I am trying really hard to not run afoul of HN posting guidelines here, but this is RICH given the accusations against the main instigator of the deplatform efforts

>were verifiably doxxed, harrassed and threatened

Ηic Rhodus hic salta. Show how any of those claims are verifiable.

That's not their mission though.