The regulars on Ovarit, the Reddit-esque haven for some of the internet’s nastiest TERFs, are having a normal one today, by which I mean they’re comparing the (hopefully permanent) takedown of doxing site Kiwi Farms to 9/11.
According to poster BondiBlue, Kiwi Farms losing the services of not just Cloudflare but their Russian host
does not bode well for freedom of speech on the Internet, or in general, and will only serve to embolden far more authoritarian regimes. This little bird was the canary in the coal mine and now it’s dead.
“This little bird” drove people to suicide, and mocked them after their deaths.
I know I will always remember where I was when the 9/11 of the Internet happened. And once again, I feel like the terrorists have won.
Jesus F. Christ.
In a followup comment, BondiBlue compared the Kiwi Farms shutdown to yet another infamous historical tragedy — Pearl Harbor.
They literally broke the Internet for their own selfish purposes. September 5, 2022, a date that will live in infamy.
Other Ovarit commenters offered similarly melodramatic responses to the news.
Hontrapoints compared the situation with … psychiatric abuse?
I … believe that we will eventually come to see this as a dark time in history and view it with the same retrospective horror as we view the lobotimizations of the previous century.
According to someone called Universechild, meanwhile
I’ve never known such a “oppressed minority” wielding so much power before 🙄…
If KF goes for good, you know they will be coming for any exclusively female networks next – they can’t stand us having anything of our own.
Before long the internet will be an echo chamber for the stunning and brave – the rest of us will be forced underground in reality, no real way to network globally without the supreme leader TRA’s watchful eye.
I’m done with this clown world.
“Clown world” is an alt-right catchphrase; I wonder where Universechild picked it up?
Some commenters reached almost QAnon levels of delusion. SakuraBlossoms complained that
Sites that have let people share CHILD PORN over and over and over again don’t get taken down. White supremacist sites where terrorist attacks have been planned don’t get taken down. But a site that makes fun of fetishistic men and pedophiles and breaks no laws can’t be allowed to stand! How much more obvious can it be that fetishistic men and pedophiles are the ones who hold all the power, and protecting their own ilk is far more important to them than any of the other issues they pretend to care about?
BondiBlue also thought the problem was men in drag — sorry, “fat eunuchs in drag.”
It’s about fat eunuchs in drag — very, very powerful fat eunuchs in drag — having unfettered access to groom kids for their own personal desires, and nobody being allowed to talk about it.
That, I think, is why I’m close to tears this morning. Not simply because a shitposting site got banhammered. But about why and who’s behind it and what’s coming next. I wouldn’t care about any of this if kids weren’t the target. …
This is about kids dammit. This is about a multi-gazillion-dollar power structure that wants kids to play with in the worst, most unfathomable of ways. They want them on puberty blockers so that they never grow up. And they’re getting away with it because everyone who speaks out has been deemed a MAGA bigot and unpersoned. Because we care about kids. …There’s big money in this and it’s all about having a steady supply of kids.
Uh, citations needed, Bondi.
I feel so sick the more I think about it.
Yeah, that’s what ludicrous conspiracy theories do to your brain.
There were some commenters willing to talk about a few of Kiwi Farm’s more unsavory aspects — its casual and omnipresent racism and sexism. But most agreed they could look past these little flaws because it was such a bastion of “free speech.” By which they meant that their favorite kind of bigotry — anti-trans bigotry — was welcomed as well.
Birds of a feather, as they say.
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I could have lived the rest of my life happily without having read the comment accusing a trans woman I’ve never heard of having “skinwalked a little girl from (_her_, dammit!) childhood”, “even stealing her name”… complete with Buffalo Bill references. Holy shit. The freaking levels of racist transphobic awfulness in that comment floor me.
(And gee, I love my legal name, but sometimes it is inconveniently long, unusual, and difficult to pronounce. When I need a simpler name, say, to give for a pickup order at my local burger joint, I use the name of one of my childhood best friends. Would that poster think I was “skin walking a little girl from my childhood”? )
As someone who was on a plane the morning of the actual 9/11, I am beyond sick of people invoking that day to mean “Mommy/Daddy took my toy away.”
On the bright side, KF has now been rendered.. well, null.
They’re either going to die a slow death or have to jump from host to host like Daily Stormer.
And I couldn’t be more happy about it.
What’s been frustrating is Moon & Co’s response to the whole thing, pretending to be victims, claiming they were framed (despite their actions being clearly laid out and available to search). Someone even appropriated the Jewish star armband and wrote “kiwi” in the middle to use as their pfp (this individual of course has actual Nazi connections and is about to have a legal fight of their own with German authorities for their part in it).
looks around for 3000 dead people and a country in massive freakout
looks around for 2400 dead people and a country in total war the next day
Nope, not seeing it.
Also, KF was a white supremacist site, so QED to that one comment.
I can only thank “whatever” that for some reason, on the trip I took, I booked my flight home as the last one out on 9/10.
I hope they disappear entirely, having caused damage to the good name of a harmless endangered bird, a good shoe polish, a tasty fruit, and an entire country of fairly sensible humans.
I hope that Fibrehub drops Kiwifarms soon.
Anyone who shouts “think about the kids” and decries CSA like this… Especially when Kiwi Farms has been known as a hub for people to connect to trade CSA material? Defending that while attacking teans people as “groomers”… That’s definitely a case of protesting too much. Someone definitely has something to hide and it’s almost certain something that would make them criminal and a hypocrite.
@ Natsume
fucking _exactly_
these goddamn right-wing creeps harbor and enable sex predators all the fucking time and they have the audacity to label every trans person as a groomer.
care to guess what kind of people my abusers were?
I had heard about the Cloudflare banning from CBC earlier today, actually:
What is Kiwi Farms, the forum a streamer blames for harassment that prompted her to leave Canada?
The streamer in the article title is Keffals, who was mentioned on this site before after a SWAT attempt, and who was doxed yet again even after leaving the country.
OT:
From a very stupid CNN article about how Rings of Power is totes awful for having brown people and fighting women in it, but the critics aren’t racist at all:
Ah, right! It’s the “We can’t be racist if we also hate white women who fail to live up to our standards of femininity!” defense.
What idiots.
@Natsume: Remember, with the RW, “every accusation is a confession”. They project more than all the IMAX cinemas in the world, combined.
@Crip Dyke: Whereas a friend of mine, who has read ALL the books Tolkien and his son published, and indeed had an Old English professor (also old and English) who had actually been a student of Tolkien’s, is quite enjoying the series. But then she’s not a bigot.
She doesn’t like this Elrond, but we can’t all be Hugo Weaving, right?
(Except in the Matrix, where everyone will be Hugo Weaving)
According to Keffals, apparently Joshua Moon hosted a Neo-Nazi group in New Zealand on the side and only had it exposed when their website went down at the same time as Kiwi Farms. Unsurprising, really.
And as of today it’s been completely expunged from Internet Archive. For all intents and purposes, the site never existed.
Why the hell has it taken so long for Cloudfare to take down Kiwi Farms in the first place? This has not been the first time that it’s complained about and people have tried to get it taken down before, especially given their harassment against people in all sorts of vulnerable groups. Usually, Joshua Moon manages to find a way to get it back up and running though.
Didn’t someone mention in a previous thread that their plans to dox Majorie Taylor Greene was the actual tipping point for getting KF canned? Not the, you know, all the other lives they destroyed for the heck of it?
OT: a question for the techies in the audience here. How do you turn off the private browser mode on an older model iPhone? A couple of days ago I downloaded an update for one of my mobile games, and that somehow hit something in my Safari settings to turn on private browsing without my knowledge or consent. The solutions I found via Googling plus a couple of reboots only resulted in my phone refusing to display anything but a single separate screen (i.e. I can no longer access any of the tabs I had open before this annoyance began). Like, I cannot access anything from the Tab button except this one screen in private mode. The non-private browsing option and the ‘see all open tabs in private’ options no longer exist on my browser, according to it.
I have not yet downloaded the latest iOS update, so I don’t know if that would help things here or make them worse.
Any advice?
@Jono
Probably because their CEO is far-right, and may even have an account on KF.
Meanwhile, the circus continues:
https://mobile.twitter.com/m0lpe/status/1567245850753093635?cxt=HHwWhsC-nYbz_L8rAAAA
I’m in awe of what Keffals and her friends have done TBH. It’s hard to describe how omnipresent a threat KF is in the lives of normal trans people, and apparently even experts on cults and extremism discouraged journalists from covering KF because it was too dangerous.
Dreamwidth (one of the blogging sites that split off from LiveJournal years ago) recently moved off of Cloudflare over their continued hosting of KW (and isn’t going back, which suggests they had some other problems with CF).
Ah, Clodflare, the McKinsey of cyberspace; a behind-the-scenes logistics company with fingers in seemingly every pie. :/
@Redsilkphoenix:
That was me, and I only said that it may have been the tipping point. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince only said that there were “credible threats emerging from that site” and that the police weren’t working fast enough to contain them. It is also a note that he doesn’t seem to think that 8Chan or the Daily Stormer pose any sort of similar threat, which is some (admittedly weak) evidence that the MTG situation is the more likely reason.
As for what was going on with MTG, which is difficult to find information about because the mainstream media is treating it as an afterthought for some reason: At some point, probably relatively recently, MTG took a disliking to KiwiFarms. Why, I have no idea, and can only speculate. Regardless, she’s been low-key making it known that this is a site which “should not exist”, which pissed off some KF users. Someone placed an anonymous tip that a man had been “shot 5 times in a bathtub” at MTG’s address. The police considered it a likely prank but checked to make sure. Later she got a call from someone saying they did it to her because they were “upset about her political position on transgender youth rights” and hinted that there might be more to come.
Instead of “it was the libs” she concluded “it was KiwiFarms”. As far as I’m aware, it hasn’t conclusively been linked to KF (but then again, as I said, information on this is hard to find, maybe the police and/or the FBI are keeping silent until the investigation is concluded?) but it is known that some members of KF were preparing a harassment campaign against MTG, so it’s very likely.
…As a couple of side notes: Keffals’s twitter response to what happened to MTG was “IVE BEEN BUSY ALL DAY WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON”. Chelsea Manning’s response to this whole situation (both Greene and Keffals) was “I don’t think long term the solution to this kind of dangerous speech is to ask hosting providers to have to take these things down. We need a more balanced and measured long-term approach.”
TL;DR – Why Greene might be the straw that broke the camel’s back than Keffals, despite the greater media exposure of the latter’s situation.
How fast they turn on the “cool girl” when she says something sensible for a change.
The police literally did not check. At no time during this “swatting” was MTG handcuffed or held at gunpoint. At no time did the police enter or sweep her home, with or without a warrant. It’s unfair to compare what Greene alleged happened to what actual swatting victims have gone through. Victims like Keffals, ironically.
@ [email protected]
“the poice checked” does not to me imply a SWAT, it suggests they went round and politely asked if they could have a look at the bathrooms, as one would expect given who and what MTG is. Couldn’t have the nice white politician upset now could we? /S
@Jazzlet
Per the official report from the department itself, at no time did an officer enter Greene’s home, let alone search it in part or in full.
But at the least, Kiwi Farms does go after and dox the really right wing and alt-rite youtubers and personalities. They do go after some really shitty people, some of whom are discussed on this site.
@Jay C
So? They still make a habit of stalking, harassing, and abusing vulnerable people. Why are you giving them even that allowance?