Hacker News Reader

Comment by mardifoufs | Hacker News Reader

8chan had the whole mass shooter thing. Comparing the two websites is very hyperbolic.

8chan users radicalize each other and encourage each other to commit mass shootings. KiwiFarms users post the personal information of people and encourage each other to harass them to the point of suicide. I don't see how they aren't comparable.

Swatting also results in shooting deaths

What is the distinction you are drawing between a death from a swatting and pulling the trigger yourself?

Is this some "I didn't kill you, I just tied you up and left you on the tracks at 11:55 for the noon train" distinction?

And just because the attacks aren't explicitly coordinated on the site doesn't mean there's not culpability there... if an 8chan user is radicalized by 8chan and attacks a target suggested by 8chan, that doesn't mean 8chan isn't responsible just because the user didn't explicitly type "yes I am going to attack on Febtober 7th at 2pm".

That's sort of the problem with the whole "stochastic terrorism" thing... there's a transparently thin veneer of deniability for everyone involved, even the leaders. We obviously don't tolerate those excuses when dealing with jihad, you're going to get sanctioned or even bombed even if you're "just their spiritual leader and not actually involved with planning.

There's no reason to with 8chan or KF either.

I think the post you were replying to was agreeing with you. "I don't see how they aren't comparable", i.e. they are comparable.

> KiwiFarms users post the personal information of people and encourage each other to harass them to the point of suicide.

Both of those things are EXPLICITLY against the rules and are heavily enforced. They only take public information and are point and laugh, but don't touch.

Reprehensible for sure, but your portrayal isn't accurate.

That’s a technicality and you know it. No one is stupid enough to believe they’re posting this personal information to laugh at it, right? What’s funny about a phone number and or a street address?

KF actively pushes people to commit suicide. People have died because of them.

So does Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and every large platform. There is so much harassment, doxing, and other disturbing behavior on all the platforms.

This is a remarkably facile comment; on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram you can find people who aren't out to drive trans people to commit suicide, and content which isn't about how to best call SWAT teams to people's homes. On KiwiFarms, that is all there is.

I see plenty of posts on Kiwifarms that don't seem to be advocating for anything like that. Where exactly are all these posts? If the only thing on Kiwifarms are posts like this I should be able to easily see them.

All of those platforms regularly remove that type of content and ban users that post it.

Twitter and Meta have policies against doxing. Difficulty preventing it at much larger scale does not make them equivalent to Kiwi Farms.

I don't care if they have policies. They have a huge amount of posts directly advocating violence and doxing that don't get removed.

> Difficulty preventing it at much larger scale does not make them equivalent to Kiwi Farms.

KiwiFarms has a policy against illegal behavior. If your argument is that having a policy and half assing it is sufficient for Twitter then you should be consistent and allow KiwiFarms the same excuse. The size is irrelevant. If anything it should mean Twitter should be held to a higher standard due to the sheer reach of the platform. Twitter has significantly more resources to stop this behavior through both automated and manual processes. Stop justifying Twitter's complete and utter failure.

KiwiFarms doesn't half-ass, they ignore. They need to try before they can be excused for trying.

KiwiFarms has removed posts that were doxing people in the past. I am not sure how frequently they do it though, but since they do it sometimes 'half-assing' seems appropriate.

Then it should be easy to find examples. And as you can't prove a negative, the burden of proof is on those claiming such posts to exist.

The owners of those platforms don't actively encourage that content, and it makes up a small portion of the content rather than the main purpose

I'm not sure that it is the main purpose of KiwiFarms. There appears to be a large number of posts not related to any of that behavior. I don't use KiwiFarms so maybe I just don't know where all these doxing posts are?

Also, due to the sheer size, Twitter and the others almost certainly have significantly more of these types of posts.

And each of those platforms you've mentioned have explicit rules AGAINST harassment, doxxing, swatting, and other reprehensible behavior KF engages in.

Sure, it may be posted, but lots of it is removed as soon as it is identified and/or reported.

Kiwifarms has a policy against illegal behavior (which would include some harassment and swatting). I am not sure if doxing is illegal?

Policies don't mean anything when a huge amount of it stays up and the platform does nothing about it.

There are posts literally and explicitly calling for people to murder others on Twitter. The posts have been there for multiple years (at least the last time I checked). Twitter and the other big players completely fail at content moderation.

> Kiwifarms has a policy against illegal behavior

wink wink

Is that supposed to be Twitter winking at Kiwifarms because they do the same thing?

Is this in fact the case? Of course it is being claimed, but I always perceived that KF's nastiness was relatively self-contained, e.g. when someone encourages suicide, it's performative to other Farmers, rather than reaching out to a potential victim or their loved ones. All bark, no bite, and caged.

Wikipedia has information on 3 suicides related to KiwiFarms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms#Suicides_of_harassm...

Joshua Moon, the owner of Kiwifarms was on Rekieta Law[1] and provided his view that kiwi farms did not cause these suicides

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gP92u3ld1-w

I can see no reason why the owner of kiwi farms would want to believe that kiwi farms wasn't directly responsible for suicides (and terrorism via swatting). /s

Of course kiwi farms caused those suicides.

The current push for cloudflare to unlist kiwifarms is in response to a well known twitch streamer's attempted killing via swatting. They literally had to leave the country (canada), and the new address was found, and they were swatted again.

https://globalnews.ca/news/9097654/twitch-streamer-and-trans...

Their "nastiness" (suggestion: terrorism) is never self contained. I know several people who've been doxxed on there - every single person had to move and change their legal name. If a thread on someone in KF is active, they will find every member of your family, your workplace, friends and loved ones. Then if they find your friends are "degenerates", they will doxx them too, and all their family workplace friends and loved ones.

The fucking point of the site is harassment - they post ADDRESSES and PHONE NUMBERS, why would those ever be allowed if it was supposed to be self-contained?

Here is the how the southern poverty law center describes Kiwifarms:

> KiwiFarms – a forum with roots in 4Chan culture that has become notorious for engaging in extreme trolling, harassment, and even stalking

Source: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...

Throwaway because its not safe to post on my primary account about them while kiwifarms is allowed to operate.

I don't think this is accurate. I've only looked at KF briefly, but it seems like the causal ancestor is actually that KF tracks people who are loudly and publicly doing crazy stuff, which correlates with people who are at risk of loudly and publicly killing themselves.

What did the neo-Nazi site have that the others didn't? "Nazis" isn't the answer because I can find Nazis on a lot of websites out in the open.

If kiwifarms becomes the original public manifesto posting spot for national mediafest mass shooters, their views may change.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com