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) for interesting discussions on KF prior to these latest events.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32720162
Sorry but this feels like book burning to me.
Perhaps this will lead to a successor site with a similar "mission" that consists only of what would be a thread OP on KF, without the thousands of pages that follow wherein people say the n-word as many times as they can.
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 weak defenses of a site that causes threats to folk's lives.
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.
I don't want to live in a society where law enforcement is left to big tech vigilantism. There's a reason that governments are granted a monopoly on violence, they have democratic legitimacy and accountability that other entities do not.
The best that could have been done is if CF continued to proxy it, and answered discovery and court orders, that way users could be unmasked and prosecuted. But now they got away free.
There is clearly massive demand for content about people like Chris Chan and Keffals, and these people have a way of constantly generating new controversy and attention (this obviously doesn’t justify harassment or IRL threats). If the drug war taught us anything it’s that demand can’t be squashed by playing wack-a-mole and then putting your fingers in your ears until it pops back up again next week.
Because law enforcement (at least in the US) is woefully bad at their jobs and don't care. I have first-hand experience with this when I had a close friend who was being harrassed by someone local (we knew who it was) and LEO refused to lift a finger. I've talked about it multiple times before on HN [0][1][2][3] but even with this guy graduating to physical actions (keying the friend's car, following/stalking them) the police did nothing.
So if our only options are "Have the police do nothing" or "Have a private corp decide to not do business with a company anymore" then I know which one I'm picking, which one will actually help reduce harm. Even if they spin up under a new name they will lose users along the way. Deplatforming works.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32521976
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31610876
> But now they got away free.
That was always going to happen. Keeping them/old content online was never going to change that. Our "justice" system is horribly broken.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Archive.org now provided more shade.
What I don't know is if Kiwi Farms _requested_ to be removed from Archive.org. As a publicity stunt, I could see a request for removal and then a wailing that they've been removed.
There was a minor kerfuffle with Snopes and a fact check of theirs which embarrased them. They later revised their fact check to no longer be embarassing. Problem was, archive.org still maintained the original. You can no longer find the original article from 2018 on archive.org. I'm sure that the only people who wanted the embarassing fact check removed were Snopes themselves. Archive.org was apparently happy to help them revise their history, by limiting how far back you can see anything in their library from Snopes.com.
I find interesting they took the archived copy down instead of keeping it publicly available since it was the only way to prove what kiwifarms has done instead of having as only source "trust me bro". Either way I don't think it matters since nobody actually bothered to link or prove any of their claims so I don't think it really changes much.
[0]: http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedz... [1]: https://kiwifarms.top [2]: https://t.me/kiwifarms/29?embed=1 [3]: https://t.me/kiwifarms/28?embed=1
Also, info like someone's phone number and home address are only a click away once you have their full name and approximate age/geographic location, at least for people haven't taken extraordinary steps to limit discoverability on Spokeo or White Pages. People post full names and locations to Twitter all the time. They call it "unmasking" when it's someone the ruling consensus dislikes, while they know the info will be used to look up the "dox." This is not Twitter or Kiwi Farms' fault. It is the result of flaws in our legal system which allow sites like Spokeo and White pages to operate.
Whether it's legal or not is unimportant. My question is for the internet archive: is it ethical for them to knowingly rehost dumps of PII? Just because it's public doesn't mean it's right for them to treat it like any other page. The goal of the KF users is to harass by putting that information out there: if IA rehosts that intentionally, they're making an active choice to further the goals of KF users.
It would be great if there were some other record keeper so we could ensure the church didn't "lose" any records that made them look bad.
But I'm sure you would have stopped any 3rd party back then who was setting out to transcribe the inquisitions' trials. After all, they were just giving the church yet another platform to spread their intolerance.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jun/16/artsandhumanit...
One can also use a Tor proxy (tor2web), there is a list here: https://gist.github.com/adulau/5caf188bb1f63263bf7ac00c4a19f...
For example, appending ".moe" to the ".onion" in that URL: https://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificed...
Which also allows it to be archived (as the mainstream archive sites don't recognise Tor hidden services): https://web.archive.org/web/20220905153904/https://uquusqsaa...
Taylor's uncle is Roger Macdonald, apparently a fairly prominent operator within the internet archive:
> "Short version: [Kiwi Farms is] A very edgy forum ... where users cruelly gossip and post public information on niche online oddities (lolcows) that thrive on the attention KF gives them." [Emphasis mine.]
This piece of egregious victim-blaming should have been your cue to ignore this article. If it wasn't, the victim-blaming in the rest of the article (such as "She probably genuinely enjoys it. Or she has a death drive, a martyr complex.") should have cued you in.
There's a lot more people who were targeted by KF than Keffals. The majority were ordinary people who were part of a minority and had just enough of a platform to be on their radar (or were related to/had a similar name to someone who was). "They put themselves out there, online", but that doesn't mean they "have no one to blame but themself" for the harassment and death threats they received. They didn't do anything wrong. The fault lies fully on the users of Kiwi Farms and those who created and supported a community that allowed them to organize and coordinate their harassment.
I see you've backed off from "bank account numbers" to "bank account details," perhaps after Googling the same Twitter screenshots I just found in an attempt to verify your claim. Those screenshots show a user describing a hacked bank account's balance and recent purchases. That's pretty bad; hacking into bank accounts is very illegal. The individual who broke into the account very likely committed a crime. Regardless, the screenshots don't show any credentials or account numbers. I'm not sure if posting someone's bank balance is illegal, but I'm guessing it isn't; maybe it depends on how it was obtained... don't know, not a lawyer.
Of course, the screenshot is totally unverifiable now that KF is wiped from the Internet Archives, which is the point of the submitted link.
How? The site is down and now the archives are too. This strikes me as a bizarre lie.
But what you may ultimately accomplish is ushering in tyranny and government regulation of the internet in the name of censoring objectionable content.