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Comment by throwaway56101 | Hacker News Reader

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Harassment campaigns by Kiwi Farms users are known to have contributed to the suicides of at least three individuals.[15] The Kiwi Farms community considers it a goal to drive its targets to suicide, and has celebrated such deaths with a counter on the website.[22]: 55, 61 They have used social media reporting systems to mass-report posts by harassment targets in which they have expressed suicidal thoughts or intentions, with the goal of reducing the possibility their targets receive help.[22]: 91

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

I went down this rabbit hole before, and that wiki page is such a mess of self-referencing articles and recycling outrage in various forms and using one to build on the other. Whatever the original thing is that Kiwifarms did is long lost in this sea of recycled articles, as they're now forever "the site that helped bully and 'contributed' to some people's suicides".

It's sloppy at best, and a coordinated and vindictive smear campaign at worst. And like seriously people, I'm not defending bad things, but we have to have an honest discussion. This is like the website/org equivalent of a "rape accusation", that's never been formally "proven" in a court, yet will follow them forever.

If you went down a rabbit hole and done research, you should have been able to find evidence of such things. And there is a lot of bad stuff they've done that hasn't gotten mentioned by their Wikipedia article.

Kiwifarms, now banned, official twitter page said their goal was “exploitation of the mentally handicapped for amusement purposes”. ( Source: https://archive.is/jYp5p ).

I think Kiwifarms is (borderline) criminal. Null, the admin of the site, outright said he was ok with users posting stolen financial information, such as Social Security Numbers and Credit cards. Source: https://archive.is/0fOcS . There are many examples of private financial information being posted on the site.

I would describe them as operating with a paper thin layer of "plausible" deniability. Officially you aren't allowed to harass or interact with the targets. But posting their home address, stolen passwords, phone numbers, and private information about relatives is all allowed. (Which would have no use if they were simply a gossip forum).

But even the rule against interacting with "lolcows" (called "cowtipping") is rarely, if ever, enforced. For example, one user had sex with a "lolcow" and posted photos. The admin explicitly said they would allow the content to remain up: https://archive.is/zYnpK#35%

None of the KF "victims" have been confirmed, and even so, it would be hard to legitimately claim that KF caused their deaths. People just hate that site because it's a gossip forum that exposes a lot of scummy behavior

Meanwhile, people have doxed others on Twitter, blown their heads off on Facebook livestreams, and posted manifestos on 4chan before slaughtering bystanders, yet nobody calls for any of those sites to be taken offline

>non ironically using wikipedia as source

Wikipedia is essentially useless for anything politically related due to how badly biased it became, one its own founders nowadays says this. Their "authoritative sources" policy pretty much assures whatever CNN and New York Times say is the unquestionable truth.

>using greentext arrows on HN

>upset that Wikipedia accepts mainstream news orgs as valid sources

>mfw

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