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Comment by richbell | Hacker News Reader

> You're also forgetting the countless screenshots and other documentation that exists of KF from prior controversial incidents.

Screenshots are not a trustworthy medium. Many of the articles published about Kiwi Farms contain significant factual errors and rarely cite sources for the claims they do make.

For example, the CBC recently published an article claiming that the Christchurch shooter "revealed his intentions (on Kiwi Farms) hours before carrying out the attack".

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/kiwi-farms-online-forum-1.6565...

If you read articles from 2019 it was claimed that the gunman posted on 8chan shortly before the massacre. The claim that he posted on Kiwi Farms hours before is completely new and unsubstantiated.

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>Screenshots are not a trustworthy medium.

Sure. That's why it's likely that - again, I don't know how this still bears repeating in this comment chain - IA still has the site archived, just not publicly accessible.

> I don't know how this still bears repeating in this comment chain - IA still has the site archived, just not publicly accessible.

Because if it isn't publicly accessible it functionally doesn't exist, and what remains is a number of publications of questionable veracity.

Perhaps law enforcement will eventually be able to comb through the data, but there is no guarantee the general public ever will be able to.

Any relevant body investigating things is perfectly capable of reaching out to IA for access to their archive of the site.

I am not claiming it isn't. My point is that 99% of people who haven't heard of Kiwi Farms prior won't be able to validate any claims against a primary resource.

It becomes a very questionable "trust us, they were bad" from sources that are demonstrably flawed.

(I am not saying they aren't bad, but from researching common claims like the owner is a pedophile and the Christchurch shooter posted on Kiwi Farms myself, it's clear that quite a few are exaggerated or not true.)

The site was tried not in a court of law but in the court of public opinion. Removing evidence from the one court where it matters, especially as precedent for similar extralegal trials in the future, is harmful to the open web.

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