Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sequoia | Hacker News Reader

I heard a podcast interviewing the site owner[0], hearing his perspective was interesting though I don't know how much of what he says is true either. He raised one very salient point, however, which was that ISPs probably didn't start dropping him out of nowhere. He asserts that there is a highly persistent and technically knowledgeable party threatening ISPs & other providers by going after the provider's other customers to pressure the provider to drop kiwifarms. I don't know what the truth is but it is odd that kiwifarms keeps getting knocked offline as neonazi forums etc. stay online.

I don't know much about kiwifarms, never visited it, but given the claims in this post (that it's "uniquely awful," that the site itself is victimizing people) I think it would be helpful if the authors would link to some context/evidence. Maybe it's all true in this case, but I've been on the internet long enough to know that believing grave accusations without evidence is a very bad rookie mistake.

0: https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-inter...

They're one of the few sites bad enough that even Cloudflare blocked them, which made big news at the time

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

ISPs get threatened all the time and don't take content down just because some rando is mad. Kiwifarms needs to provide proof that ISPs are being threatened, as opposed to the more likely scenario that the harassment victims are filing normal abuse complaints and alerting the ISP to the TOS violations taking place all over the site.

If this were the case, I wonder how 4chan, stormfront, etc. stay online. Surely 4chan's providers get floods of complaints about doxxing etc. Or pastebin for that matter.

The fact that the EFF is writing about this case and that they're forced to use KF as their one example (clearly they find this distasteful & would prefer to use any other example if they could) indicates that something is unique or at least peculiar about this case.

Compared to 4chan, kiwifarms admins take a more active role in directing and encouraging harassment towards specific targets. it's a lot easier to tie the illegal activity to the site's owner. and the cops don't do shit because internet harassment is a seriously under-prosecuted crime. even the EFF admits that. the only route for victims is to follow the chain of upstreams till they get one that isn't in league with kiwifarms. (kiwifarms' hosting provider is even posting in this thread spreading the same untruths the kiwifarms admin says)

4chan, pastebin go beyond the bare minimum legally required. 4chan includes "You will not post or request personal information ("dox") " and pastebin's prohibits content that is "libelous, defamatory, or fraudulent" and "discriminatory or abusive toward any individual or group"

The other difference is the site owner actively encourages harassment and bans any discussion to the contrary

I've been doxxed & threatened on 4chan[0] (most of the doxxing was actually on pastebin), I contacted 4chan admins and received no response. 4chan does little or nothing to combat doxxing & harassment, I think you're incorrect that these sites "go beyond the bare minimum legally required" at least not 4chan.

And yet, that site is still up.

0: remnants of some archived posts https://www.google.com/search?q=%22sequoia+mcdowell%22+site%...

EDIT: nevermind what I said about the doxxing & whatnot happening years ago, apparently they're still at it as recently as January! https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/text/sequoia%20mcdowel...

If you filed abuse tickets with the companies hosting 4chan, you should be able to get some response. The kiwifarms victims are demonstrating this is possible. There is hope for you. I wish you luck.

4chan does remove posts and IP bans users for posting doxx. The thing is that IP bans are easy for some to work around. And that all 4chan threads expire after some time.

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