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.