SWATed streamer Keffals to organise protest in front of Cloudflare SF office
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There need to he clear rules. If we shut down every forum where someone says something bad once, are we going to shut down Facebook and Instagram? Of course not, we'll stop short of that. So we give an unfair advantage to Facebook and Instagram, forever entrenching them as the only platforms where speech can happen?
Getting back to the Princess Diana analogy, KF probably started as a harmless place to joke about public figures, but in the modern world where everyone is pushed to cultivate their own personal "brand", even someone as uninteresting as a nintendo emulator programmer, it puts regular people at risk of the worst kinds of stalking and harassment etc.
There's no need to assume, we know exactly where KF started. It originally focused on one specific target before branching out, a severely autistic person known as Chris Chan who isn't notable for any reason other than being a target of incredibly intense stalking, harassment and manipulation. The site didn't need to "fall from grace" when its baseline from day one was stalking a random mentally ill person for amusement.
This is demonstrably false. Chris Chan became the obsession of the internet because of his incredibly odd and anti-social behavior, such as plastering signs around campus looking for a "boyfriend free girl" and telling other men with boyfriends to go jump off a cliff (https://sonichu.com/cwcki/Attraction_Sign#The_Sign.2C_Mark_1). Calling him "not notable" is just not true.
Down the Rabbithole has a good video about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IPtLvxO8hs
Even if you do class Chris Chan as "notable", is that supposed to make it OK to strip-mine a mentally ill person for content?
Speaking of harassment, it's also misleading to refer to him as a the first "target". Kiwi Farms (formerly the CWCiki Forums) started as a place to discuss Chris Chan, but it was far from the only or the worst one. For example, KF was strongly against the "idea guys", who actively tried to harass Chris in real life.
There's lots of nuance here, and I think we ought to acknowledge what is fact versus fiction. Otherwise we're just talking about a made-up boogeyman.
When people do insane shit online for internet fame they don't really get to cry when it goes sideways.
The world is full of crazy people, especially online.
I think it's crazy having seen the advent of the internet, to watch it devolve into people begging for attention/money.
I wish so bad we could go back to usenet and geocities when people posted out of love and passion, but 'You can never go home'.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.in/thelife/news/online-creator-c...
Decades of posting all about your life online and doing insane things for internet fame, and even your own personal details means they can't cry when that attention isn't always positive.
Chris is himself a troll. He has physically attacked a gamestop employee, his mother tried to run over another one.
Again, if OP wanted to garner sympathy, Chris wasn't the example to be used.
He also gloated about having a girlfriend while deliberately witholding information that he knew would get him in trouble; he teased out hints that it was his mother, such as "she's an older lady", "we've known each other a long time", "she graduated from <school> in accounting".
Maybe your ranting about online fame would make sense if reading about this person was 1 of my hobbies. This person would be the unknown creator of a low quality web comic without Kiwi Farms and related groups as far as I know.
Let me try. KF is a place to archive the publicly-posted online antics of people who willingly publish said antics to the internet. Interacting with the subject of a thread is against the rules and anyone bragging about doing so is banned. If you dislike the idea of people making fun of you for your actions, don't broadcast them to the internet.
Nobody is buying the line that KF is a purely passive observer, when drawing their attention is so strongly correlated with receiving harassment, or that they only observe intentionally published information, when they scoop up so much obviously private information like addresses and deadnames.
This is the same group of trolls connected with the death of the emulator developer Near a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814
Wasn't this proven to be a hoax?
That said, after digging into this a bit more it seems that the most credible proof he didn't commit suicide is that the U.S. State Department has no record of it. They allegedly killed themselves in June but according to government records no US citizen died of suicide in Japan in June. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
How was it determined Near was in Japan at the time? Or was it assumed because they lived there?
You didn't say Near's suicide was unproven. You suggested it was proven a hoax. It's not strange people ask for proof when proof was claimed.
2. The original claim, being that Near commited suicide due to Kiwi Farm, was documented in the link two comments up.
As another commenter said, the government records state that no US citizen died at all in Japan in June 2021. This is of course a bit ridiculous given that 50,000+ people live there and 10-12 people die per 1000 people per month in Japan. This means that around 500 US citizens should have died in Japan that month. Obviously, the US government doesn't have to account for literally all its citizens dying for any cause anywhere, just the important ones.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1011514/japan-mortality-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_in_Japan
Near used both he/him and they/them, per the person who alleged they committed suicide: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/14104199133327237...
> 2. The original claim, being that Near commited suicide due to Kiwi Farm, was documented in the link two comments up. > > As another commenter said, the government records state that no US citizen died at all in Japan in June 2021. This is of course a bit ridiculous given that 50,000+ people live there and 10-12 people die per 1000 people per month in Japan. This means that around 500 US citizens should have died in Japan that month. Obviously, the US government doesn't have to account for literally all its citizens dying for any cause anywhere, just the important ones.
"Expected" numbers mean nothing: in the real world, unexpected things happen all the time. This is a fallacious argument reminiscent of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_averages .
This is all wild speculation without evidence.
> the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003, mandates that, to the maximum extent practicable, the Department of State collect and make available on the Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs Internet web site certain information with respect to each United States citizen who dies in a foreign country *from a non-natural cause.*
So you get third party reports on the net from unknown people, and you tend to believe it at face value?
this may well have happened, but everyone should exercise a bit more caution when reading stuff online.
As far as I can tell that claim is purely based on speculation. It's possible that the death wasn't reported, or was somehow reported as "natural". However, it's impossible to know due to the lack of any basic information. (And I think improbable that Japan, of all places, would screw up the paperwork.)
Not to detract from the overall point — I think there are many reasons to dislike Kiwi Farms — but making dubious claims muddies the water.
Would anyone stop defending Kiwi Farms if Near's suicide was proven? Would anyone decide Kiwi Farms is not so bad if Near was proven alive? 2 other targets' suicides are undisputed as far as I know. Kiwi Farms defenders say anyone who killed themselves because of harassment would have killed themselves anyway. And they say an unenforceable rule against interacting with targets means the forum can't be blamed.
The headline said Respected developer who was bullied online dies by suicide. My browser found allegedly nowhere in the article. I didn't see anything similar to allegedly when I skimmed it again. Could you point it out?[1]
> And you're right, everyone has already made up their mind based on feelings. That's the cool thing about facts, you don't have to do that.
Not what I said. The cool thing about facts is they shape opinions and actions. I don't think many opinions are shaped by the difference between 2 and 3 deaths.
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/respected-developer-died-suicide-expe...