Part of the reason why we study history is to learn from past mistakes.
Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
91–100 of 271 posts
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#92I guess the internet archive doesn’t take their mission of preserving the internet very seriously
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.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
was that reputation substantial though?
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.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
was that reputation substantial though?
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.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did it achieve nothing? Deplatforming has shown to be effective. The Nazi site that CF shut down is very difficult to access.
It doesn't stop Nazis from existing though (or even knowing about, visiting and supporting the site). If we do the same thing with KiwiFarms, we just make it harder to monitor and easier for serial-abusers to collaborate. The majority of KiwiFarms users simply aren't solely enabled by the website existing, either. I simply don't believe in deplatforming, and it disappoints me to see Cloudflare shrug and cave in.
Deplatforming is analogous to quarantining a person with an infectious disease. It works. The FBI can still monitor whatever's left of KF on Tor or Discord.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#96Whenever I read stories of big tech making decision to destroy some digital asset by taking decisions like this or banning people from their accounts (read gmail, google drive, etc.) It makes me shiver. They can put a brick wall in front of anyone's life/business.
I'm okay with removing someone from the internet if their business is to harass and dox people.
Absolutely. When there is a due process and it is done with the accordance of law that we are all supposed to abide. Not by unilateral decision of a tech CEO/Staff.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#97What's the endgame here? Because the site's not going anywhere and everything that's happened has only emboldened their user base. There's likely to be unintended consequences too with even less scrupulous and accountable operators popping up to offer their services to sites like Kiwi Farms. They're not going to have any shortage of customers going forward.
The same could be said of 8chan doxxers and harassers.
It turns out that when you mess with people's lives, those people fight back. Stop doxxing people and harassing them if you want business partners to host your forums.
You smother their 'community'. It's a last ditch effort that should be used rarely, but this isn't the first time something like this happened, and it won't be the last.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#98Well I guess there is now limited ways for someone to evaluate for themselves on whether KF was posting horrific content without significant moderation. Guess we at least have Taylor Lorenz to tell us exactly what is going on here in a full and unbiased way. Someone here at HN at least posted this link which told more of the story than I have seen anywhere else. Also search the HN archives (for now at least it seems)…
It feels deeply disingenuous to claim that all KF is doing is "cataloging someone's online life" while refusing to talk about constant SWAT-ing, the cheering of their victims committing suicide, and the constant IRL harassment they organize against their victims. After Byuu, the emulator dev of bsnes, higan and more was harassed into suicide [1], harassment almost exclusively organized on KF, I've lost patience for w…
The problem is you’re not solving anything with these antics. KF still exists and will continue to exist. It’s just book burning for the sake of feeling better with absolutely nothing to show for it. In this case not even the satisfaction of seeing a burned book.
People desperately want the world to be different, and it isn’t. It isn’t, and it won’t change massively within your singular life. So you can grandstand and congratulate yourselves on “winning” with the IA and CF decisions, but KF is still online and all you’ve done is make more people aware of their existence.
Furthermore, this idea of banning objectionable content ultimately ends in tyranny as the only way for you to possibly succeed on your mission is to add fundamental filters to the internet. No thanks.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#99Hopefully the result of all this will be more mainstream adoption of tor, i2p, freenet and other censorship-resistant platforms.
Unlikely. It’ll probably just develop in to a regular occurrence to have bad think sites wiped out and deleted from the archives.
Re: Kiwi Farms has been removed from the Internet Archive
#100I hope in 10 years we could compare the state of the internet with today and see what else has slowly became the norm. It feels like we are moving toward a tech tyranny bit by bit. Every day we wake up and things are change a very little bit and we assume this is how it has always been or it is supposed to be.
Note that I do not defend any ill action that anyone on KF has done. What I am trying to point out is how the Internet is becoming a playground for few big tech to do as they see fit. Maybe our regulation/laws didn't catch up, or that they are inefficient, and that opens the space for tech staff/CEOs to make judgement calls and execute the judgment.