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Kiwifarms is probably done for. Null is unable to get legal representation because his lawyers dropped him after five years of business for "ties to russia" and his mailing address has been terminated for unspecified reasons. Tor is inaccessible because of DDOS attacks. The site has had a security breach and user data has possibly been leaked. This is probably the most complete deplatforming anyone who hasn't actually committed a crime yet has ever experienced.
I believe that KF has significant value in the culture war for the red team and it seems strange to me that not a single person with any financial power has stepped in to help. For most people, KF is seen as a evil nazi website and at best a shitty gossip forum, but it did contain a lot of useful information and opposition research on highly prominent people that will be memoryholed forever if the site goes down (Even internet archives are being purged). Keeping it alive on the clearnet would require a substantial investment, but it wouldn't be impossible to do.
Where is the red/grey team version of George Soros? Peter Thiel?
Are there any options for a completely legal (in the United States) site like KF to stay online? What will themotte do if they ever make an enemy that understands how easy it is to wipe them off the net?
Eh, Null is doomposting as usual.
The most disturbing thing about all this to me is how easy it is to prop a blatant falsehood via "citogenesis". Multiple reputable sources have claimed that KF drove three people to suicide, therefore it's on Wikipedia as established truth. As far as I know, this is false.
As far as I know the only way to prove that it's false to someone is to ask them who those people were, at which point they discover themselves in a very sus tangle of people repeating rumors they heard from multiple people but with no actual sources, and either get enlightened or appeal to authority of a National Security Analyst for NBC and former Assistant Director of the FBI: twitter.com/FrankFigliuzzi1/status/1566438538765279232 and, yeah, the response can only be that things are really that bad, sorry.
Just a primer for those not in the know (since the primary source for these is, well, down right now):
Chloe Sagal self-immolated as an act of protest against the sorry state of mental healthcare. She repeatedly tried to go to other people in the LGBT community for help and housing, but for various reasons (it's a long story), they did not provide it to her. She was holding a manifesto but it flew away when she set herself on fire. Many people blame her death on the Farms despite there being no evidence for this (besides her having a thread), and doing this cheapens her death while letting systemic societal issues go by without scrutiny.
Julie Terryberry was abused for years by her significant other. Notably, Julie was not trans, and anyone reporting her as trans is spreading misinformation and should not be trusted. As a result of the abuse, when her S.O. left her, she killed herself. This is tragic, but pinning her death on a website (just for having a thread) is a disgrace to those who are in abusive relationships and does nothing to combat the true cause of her death.
Byuu/Near emailed Null and threatened to commit suicide if his 13-page thread that had been dead for months wasn't taken down. He did not take it down (and anyone doing the tiniest of game theory should know that if he did, it would have set a precedent incentivizing more people to threaten suicide to take threads down). Shortly thereafter, he posted a suicide note, and then his death was "confirmed" by a claimed friend of his (who no one knew was his friend) who claimed to have direct contact with the Japanese police, despite Japan having strict privacy laws and that no police department in the developed world would ever willingly give out information to people who are not close family members of the deceased. There remains no proof of his death except for a statement by another third-party claiming to be his employer. And yet despite the outrage there hasn't been much evidence of him ever being harassed by the site (no, criticizing him on your own forum is not harassment). Every time people claim this, they speak in general terms and vague vibes, but never give any specific details as to what happened, and certainly don't provide enough substance to link the Farms to it.
The most infuriating part of all this is that it is trivial to point to actual instances of the site acting against the subjects of its threads, or in their terms, "poo-touching". All one needs to do is point to any of the many zoosadist threads on the site (zoosadist meaning a zoophile who has abused animals) who have ended up in jail. But that would paint the site in a good light, and they don't want to do that.
Oh wow, the fact that Byuu/Near might actually just have committed "virtual" suicide of his handle makes me quite happy. That seemed like a really unnecessary, sad and weird way to die for someone who is so obviously talented and driven.
But it also shows to me how easy it is to get fooled by these kind of "internet truths" where nobody checks anything and everything is proven by citations of secondary sources of flimsy evidence. It's definitely something I should be a bit more wary about in the future.
Regarding KiwiFarms: I don't think I have any love for the site and even less for its users. The site and its users might sometimes do marginally positive things by accident, but on average they seem unnecessarily cruel and antagonistic towards ... mostly random autistic internet strangers.
So if the site dies, I will not shed a tear.
But of course, it's always the jerk who had it coming (other example is the daily stormer) who gets censored first. We have come a far way from the old internet where "censorship is not the answer" (this was a left-coded position not too long ago). However, the fact that you can't have a mildly hated site on the internet anymore without being at least tolerated by one big tech company is certainly discomforting.
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