Where’s his fedora?
I trust no one will be trying to defend this unfortunate victim: Kiwi Farms is dead. It would have been nice if it had been executed sooner.
If you never heard of Kiwi Farms, lucky you. RationalWiki explains:
Kiwi Farms is an immensely creepy stalking forum run by manchild Joshua Conner Moon out of his mom’s house. The people who are stalked are what are known as “lolcows” to the site’s userbase or “exceptional individuals”. Think some of the Internet’s worst assholes and coalition of criminals projecting their frustration onto minorities – and now that you’re picturing GamerGate, think creepier.
Due to difficulties enforcing harmful speech on the internet, there hasn’t been much legal action taken on Kiwi Farms, despite them being responsible for harming many people (directly and indirectly), costing them jobs and partners, exaggerating and spinning rumors, or even mentally abusing their victims to the point of suicide. In fact, the owners maintain that there is nothing illegal about the site, citing technicalities (we don’t harass people; our users do!) and phonebooks also distributing personal information (because sharing the address of this person we find weird is totally the same as a printed 411Wikipedia!); or just simply denying, downplaying, or justifying the activities being taken place. No services are buying their lies, however, as KiwiFarms is struggling to find any web service company willing to do business with them ranging from Paypal to CloudFlare to even Russia-based DDOS-Guard. Not even 8chan wants anything to do with the site owner.
Too loathsome for 8chan! That’s how bad it is…was. It was one of those sites one avoided tangling with because a) its users were violent and abusive, and b) there was no content there worth engagement, consisting entirely of angry losers vomiting up cliches. Even RationalWiki’s short confrontation got them mad.
Kiwi Farms has a thread “discussing” RationalWiki, which it describes as a “whiny hugbox for spergs and a clusterfuck of never ending drama on a rapidly declining website”. Cynical later helpfully labeled the statement as “sarcasm”, though it’s not clear what part of the statement is supposed to be “sarcastic”, especially since he continued to insult us.
“Sarcasm,” “jokes,” and mindless buzzwords are never adequate explanations for the kind of stupid behavior these kinds of people indulge in.
But you know what does?
Moon is a Florida man.
(Sorry, that was sarcasm and a joke.)
… a Florida man.
City, zip code, and street address, please!
You want me to dox him? You want his social security number, too?
The whole dossier!
A quick web search shows two different address for “Joshua Conner Moon, Florida” – one, irony of ironies, in Niceville.
I wouldn’t mind racking up credit card debt in his name. When he complains, I will say “can’t you take a joke?”.
BTW, what about the persistent* rumor that Joshua Conner Moon raped and murdered a girl in college, and got away on a technicalicy? Just asking.
*In my imagination.
There’s been discussion elsewhere about the fact that, after everything they did which recently included SWATting a Canadian trans activist and then continuing to dox said activist even after they left the country… part of what finally brought them down may have been some of their members having a fight with Marjorie Taylor Greene, which lost them the support of the bastards with the deep pockets as they’d finally become too loose a cannon and were going after targets their backers liked.
I’ve been seeing articles about them for a while. Mostly triggered by the events jenorafeuer (@ #6, above) referred to and the resultant campaign to get CloudFlare to stop providing DDoS protection and DNS services to them, which was–eventually–successful. CloudFlare’s public reasoning was that the site had crossed a line into actual threats. Previously, they’d claimed it was just business and they weren’t actually hosting the site. The response to that was that they were–effectively–screening the actual host making it difficult to figure out who it was so that the hosting service could be approached directly. And to that CloudFlare just said that any legal authority could get a subpoena to uncover that information.
Hadn’t previously heard that they’d actually gotten shut down. Last I heard they were getting DNS support (and possibly hosting, the article wasn’t entirely clear) from a company in Russia. How they were to pay for the services wasn’t mentioned.
@whheydt:
And events like this and many previous have driven home that Cloudflare is not a good friend to rational discourse on the Internet. At best they’re ‘free speech absolutist’ types who ignore the fact that this usually leads to a tyranny of the loudest shouters (which, frankly, is what their organization exists to provide protection against).
There’s a fundamental asymmetry between folks who want the world to allow them to exist as they are rather than oppress them, and the folks who claim oppression because their particular bigotry may not be enshrined in law anymore, even if the smarter of the latter group have been appropriating the language of the former to pretend to be on the right side of history.
Wonder if Moon likes apples. Because just how does he like these apples?
Sucks to suck.
PZ–
The worst thing Kiwi Farms was involved with was swatting. Harassment with added risk of being shot by police. I don’t know why swatting didn’t make it into the RationalWiki summary you quoted; it’s in the body of the entry.
Also, I’m not convinced KiwiFarms is dead yet. Apparently they’ve found a provider in VanwaTech. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/kiwi-farms-back-online-vanwatech/
whheydt–
CloudFlare was defending its decision to provide services to Kiwi Farms long after the violent activities were common knowledge. Something else changed their position. Possibly a combination of the story getting too big to ignore (it was being reported prominently in major news services around the world) and, knowing the kind of evil execs at CloudFlare (they defending their position as “being a utility” like the mail and therefore not responsible for what people do with it, completely ignoring the fact that US Post screens parcels to prevent dangerous goods being posted), they suddenly found a moral streak when other customers started leaving in protest, and quite possibly, as someone else has pointed out already, because the people funding right-wing extremism don’t take kindly to it being turned on one of their own (in this case Taylor-Greene).
jenorafeuer@8–
Most of the so-called “free speech absolutists” are only absolutist about free speech that harms other people. When one of Twitter’s most notorious serial harassers started hassling Jack Dorsey, he was banned before the sun had set. Tesla sued Top Gear for giving a negative review of a Roadster. The Murdochs are currently arguing in US courts that they should not be held accountable for reinforcing Trump’s lies about Dominion Voting…while simultaneously suing a small Australian media outlet for defamation for reporting on the Murdoch networks spreading those same lies.
“We don’t harass people; our users do!” And guns don’t kill people; people do. Jan. 6 was simply a visitation by curious tourists. With sound reasoning like that, how could 8-chan deny them access?
All this world needs is another true free speech web service. I suggest you name it ScumSludge — that one hasn’t been trademarked yet.
chrislawson@11:
Oh, trust me, I know. Why do you think I used scare-quotes around “free speech absolutists”? It’s a running trend that such people are all in favour of free speech until it starts getting used against them.
It’s not entirely dead yet. ISNIC has a domain parked for Moon while they wait for him to verify his identity. https://www.ruv.is/frett/2022/09/11/extremist-website-gains-icelandic-domain
Other people have been tracking Kiwifarms demise more closely, and I note the following:
Sept 11:
https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1569019910994395136
Sept 18:
https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1571417934911643648
Sept 19:
https://twitter.com/ellenfromnowon/status/1572322972731408389
(more links are out there)