This website is/was big and sprawling and pretty much anything goes, which meant that there WERE some incredible weirdos who posted there. Anyway, the site has been completely taken off the server due to “imminent threats to human life.”
I stumbled onto it while looking for something else, and basically limited my posting to several threads. Are there any other Dopers who are familiar with this site?
I heard they were allowing doxxing and then death threats to be sent to certain transgender people.
I was not familar with it until the recent Cloudflare news, but if the Wikipedia article is accurate it sounds rather horrible.
This… and that online abuse led to three suicides, seems a good enough reason to shut it down to me.
You only wish that they’re offline.
That was quick. Almost like it planned.
Almost like somebody in Russia is happy, nay overjoyed, to help host the destruction of the USA, and is simply waiting for any opportunity to offer their services.
But if the owners/principals of this operation are in the US, surely they’re within reach of law enforcement.
Or is this going to be another debacle of First Amendment absolutism, even if it harasses and kills people?
I only clicked on this thread because I never heard of this thing. Thought maybe it had something to do with New Zealand.
Now I wish I still had never heard of this thing.
(Almost time to start The Beer, so maybe by tomorrow, I won’t)
I’ve never heard of it either but I’m glad I’m aware of it now. Now I can cheer for its destruction (which doesn’t seem to be coming, sadly…)
I did not participate in any of the doxxing, and I’ll admit that I did see a few threads that made me want to take a cyber-shower.
If the owners/principals are not harrassing or threatening people, it’s not clear what law they’d be violating.
Can we arrest Zuckerberg if people make threats on facebook?
And while you can certainly make a moral case that being very mean on a website leads to someone’s death, I don’t know that you can make a legal case that the website or operators thereof are killing them.
They may have taken it offline while they iron things out.
About 15 years ago, a teenage boy in my area rode his bike in the middle of the night to the church/private school that he attended in a small town (the buildings were located just outside town) and set a bunch of fires while posting pictures on a gaming website. Long story made short: The webmaster shut the site down temporarily, and they were actually the ones who notified authorities (a volunteer fire department) and even though the buildings were a total loss, nobody was injured, including the arsonist, who AFAIK was never identified.
The church and school were newly rebuilt after having been destroyed by a tornado the previous year.
ETA: The story says that a truck driver called in the initial report. These must have all happened at around the same time.
Even the Russians dropped them.
When you need to complain that the Russians are censoring you for being too Nazi, it’s time to pack up your swastika and return to the rock you crawled from.
Similarly, when Russia won’t do it even to thumb its nose at the US or continue causing chaos…
It should be noted KiwiFarms also harrassed a ton of right wing people including Ethan Ralph the self-proclaimed “Leader” of the Alt-Right, whom they regularly tell to kill himself, so they probably made WAY too many enemies on both sides.
I’d never heard of the thing and it sounds like by the time I got to this thread, the whole thing had already disappeared. As such, I’m pretty blasé on the whole topic. But I would say that, to me, it sounds like a website for angry and depressed people. If you had some sort of cure or treatment for people in that situation then, having them all collected together on a single website could give you the opportunity to try and reach them in a fairly effective manner.
Likewise, you know where to go to watch what they’re all getting up to, to try and harm others. When you break that up, now they’re harder to locate.
Here’s a Twitter thread by a woman who’s 9 year old trans child was doxxed and harassed by KiwiFarners. It’s been going on for years as her daughter is now 15.
That seems rather insulting to “angry and depressed people” as a group, most of whom would consider it highly unethical to doxx and target people for harassment and trolling campaigns online.
KiwiFarms was a website for unethical and abusive anonymous harassers and trolls (and in some cases, criminals). While many of them may indeed have been angry and depressed, that’s not an excuse for their behavior, and most angry and depressed people do not behave like that.
Like, the internet should have been willing to keep KiwiFarms around just on the off-chance that somebody might discover a successful treatment for abusive harassing behavior that can be effectively administered via website? In a word, LOL.
Like, the internet should have been willing to keep KiwiFarms around because it’s somehow better to provide abusers with a convenient platform and hub for coordinating their abusive anonymous online harassment activities? Likewise LOL.
From a societal standpoint, though, those ones don’t really matter.
An alcoholic who goes to work, doesn’t drive after drinking, doesn’t beat his wife, etc. is sort of not an alcoholic from the viewpoint of the outside world and tracking him down and trying to get him into treatment is not a big need.
But if you found a website for alcoholics who like street racing, you’d have a prime target to advertise programs for getting sober.