Can somebody explain the back story? What is Kiwi Farms?
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Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
11–20 of 271 posts
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#12Tangential question: When the Wayback machine retroactively excludes a site's content – e.g. a site owner adds a robots.txt that specifies exclusion — the data isn't deleted, right? Just flagged to prevent being found in search again. In other words, if exclusion of KF turns out to be an unnecessary or unwanted (or if researchers want to study the KF data in the future), it's just flipping the flag, right?
Here's an example of a site that was retroactively excluded by webmaster request, but was later (forced?) to remain in the searchable archive:
http://blog.archive.org/2018/04/24/addressing-recent-claims-...
edit: to answer my own question, seems like retroactive exclusion has, at least since 2007, not been interpreted to be a mandate for actual data removal:
https://archive.org/post/133690/robotstxt-only-gives-tempora...
> Hello, I want all old content from immortal ia.com REMOVED permanently from The Wayback Machine. So I read the exclusion policy, placed up a robots.txt file and requested the Alexa bot go to my website. Then checking The Wayback Machine, I got a notice that the site was blocked by the robots.txt file. But after I removed the robots.txt file, the archived pages reappeared. Is there a way to permanently purge all old pages of a website so that they will NEVER reappear in The Wayback Machine? Am I obligated to keep the robots.txt file in place forever?
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#13that's not how an archive should work. but perhaps Internet Archive is not an archive and it doesn't want to be one.
So if they scrape a kiddie porn site, they should keep that publicly available in perpetuity? That's not how the world works.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#14No post body was provided.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#15This is ridiculous and has been a cascade of awful precedents for the Internet. This is legitimately an extremely bad sign of what's to come for the Internet's future.
Popular endorsement of harassment to the point of suicide seems like a worse sign, personally.
When it comes to threats to freedom of expression, I'm much more concerned about the religious right's abuse of government authority to censor education, ban books, and suppress the vote, than I am about private institutions taking steps to protect human life.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#16Is there precedent for this type of removal? Even sites like the Daily Stormer still exist on Internet Archive, albeit with a login wall.
I think that for sites like this, the best approach would be to archive but not allow access to archives for some arbitrarily long period of time (10 years? 100 years? the point being largely to preserve the contents for the benefit of some hypothetical future scholars of history and culture).
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#17that's not how an archive should work. but perhaps Internet Archive is not an archive and it doesn't want to be one.
Its not the first time. Before than it was censoring content content that Scientology disliked. There was also the case of Snopes not being archived until a year ago, even after it got more involved in declaring more serious topics, rather than just internet urban legends.
There are people within the internet archive whose politics is so strong that I have said in private since 2016 that I have concerns they are a risk to the neutrality of the project. I am not going to mention their name to avoid a flamewar but that name will be mentioned more by others if they decide to remove more content.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#18that's not how an archive should work. but perhaps Internet Archive is not an archive and it doesn't want to be one.
They also honor DCMA requests and robots.txt. That's the way an archive works in the real world.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#19Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#20This is ridiculous and has been a cascade of awful precedents for the Internet. This is legitimately an extremely bad sign of what's to come for the Internet's future.
Popular endorsement of harassment to the point of suicide seems like a worse sign, personally. When it comes to threats to freedom of expression, I'm much more concerned about the religious right's abuse of government authority to censor education, ban books, and suppress the vote, than I am about private institutions taking steps to protect human life.
Private institutions have every right to stand behind whoever they choose. As a user, I have no intention of using Cloudflare because (even as a queer individual) I don't feel safe using a platform that would censor me if enough people were mad enough. I would much rather choose a platform that stands by their TOS as-written, instead of stepping in to arbitrate on a case-by-case basis.
Cloudflare has ever right to open Pandora's Box, but I want nothing to do with it. Much like Namecheap's fumble earlier this year, the way they handled this situation showed their true colors, and made it evident that I don't want to ever do business with them.