InfoTeddy
2yr ago
I've been meaning to write an article on this, but personally, I think the campaign to take it down has been a huge ethical disaster, besides just being a disaster in the practical sense of, you know, actually getting the site taken down. (I know it might be ironic to say that considering they're down at this very moment due to being dropped by Zayo, but I'm sure they'll come back up soon, like they always do, in no small part thanks to one insane stubborn person named Joshua Moon.)
For the sake of argument, we will ignore things like the questionable ethical character of many of the figures who lead (or led) the movement, documentation of which is on the very website they want to take down so much (which covers things like their child grooming or distributing HRT to minors behind their parents' backs); the dangerous precedent that it sets to have critical infrastructure companies simply turn off service if a harassment mob complains to them loudly enough; we'll even ignore the fact that many of the things people claim about the website are simply flat-out untrue and complete lies (such as the claim that it drove 3 transgender women to suicide--they don't even get right that one of them didn't identify as a woman and one of them wasn't transgender in the slightest!).
That is, even if Kiwi Farms is so reprehensible and beyond redemption that it deserves to be deplatformed immediately without any sort of due process, almost all action taken against it has been deeply unethical. I've already explained in my AAQC how the DDoSes against it has almost certainly inflicted harm on untold numbers of innocent bystanders. (After I posted that I also looked into ethical DDoSing such as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon and, well, I find it hard to believe that the DDoSes against KF were of the sort that didn't come with externalities.) But since then something else has came to light, namely that the hack that brought it down for a week most likely used a zero-day.
In mid-September, the forum was compromised by an unknown attacker, with user data attempting to be breached before the forum was deleted and brought offline. While it's unclear if user data was ever exfiltrated (and to this day no credible claims made by anyone to have user data have ever been confirmed), what has been made clear is that the attack used a vulnerability in XenForo relating to being able to inject arbitrary scripts into the page. I'm not too sure on the details but according to Null, the attacker uploaded an Opus file which was then loaded as an inline web document able to execute its own scripts.
So what's the issue, isn't this all still ethical? Well, on October 11th, Null announced in the Telegram that XenForo released a security patch that was already applied to the site. He's most likely referring to this security release, which fixes an issue that relates content injection. This heavily implies that the exploit used to hack the site was a zero-day, i.e. an exploit that the vendor (in this case, XenForo) didn't know about before it was used in the wild. As you can imagine, zero-days are quite powerful, to the point that knowledge of zero-days is actively bought and sold by either perfectly legal private companies (malware brokers such as Zerodium) or plain and simple black market criminal organizations. This YouTube video covers the subject pretty well.
Either way, hiding away knowledge of vulnerabilities is keeping them from being patched, which is not good for the security of the public at large, to say the least. The implication that the KF hacker funded a malware broker to exploit a XenForo zero-day hence carries negative ethical implications on their part.
In this light, the only good actions done were when private companies turned off their service, but again, even that is only okay if you're willing to accept the dangerous precedent it sets that companies will deny service if harassment mobs complain loudly enough.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
They were up last time I checked, so something new happened?
The latest downtime is thanks to an employee at Zayo, their new ISP (or one of their new ISPs? Null doesn't make it clear), being friends with Liz-Fong Jones, who besides being one of the people behind #DropKiwifarms has also been trying to get the site taken down for 5 years now. Null has said he is working on something but has not given any further details. All this information is according to their Telegram channel.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Interesting to note that we're mentioned in the comments:
A large-ish subreddit (/r/themotte) went offsite. From the announcement
Reddit has become increasingly hostile - we just had a comment removed for discussing the meaning of various types of parenthesis, I'm not making that up, I'm not exaggerating, that's a thing that happened - and if the community is to survive, we need to disengage from Reddit.
More detailed explanation from the comments:
Hmm, maybe I’ll get a comment removed for talking about the people talking about the parentheses.
Our resident Russian made a comment using «these» Russian quote marks. Someone accused him of using them to hint at another unusual punctuation: the triple parentheses, which actually do see use by Nazis.
A third commenter jumped in to ask what the cuss was going on. When a fourth guy tried to explain the Nazi connotation, his comment was deleted by higher powers. His wording is lost to the void, but my guess is that an algorithm or a human pattern-matched it to Nazi apologetics.
As Zorba said, this isn’t coordinated action—it’s that the site tends to assume the worst when anything triggers their detectors.
Also the comment (removed), and archive
Nazis do (((this)))
But « thiis » is just a different type of quotation mark used in French, German, Russian and so on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet
The take I'm seeing is that this is moreso the fault of Jones and his lawyers rather than the actual reprehensibleness (or lack thereof) of his speech. Specifically, this verdict was a default judgment and only happened after Jones missed scheduled court dates, refused to comply with the discovery process, and his attorney simply didn't present any sort of First Amendment defense at all. (And that's not even covering the lawyer sending his text messages, allegedly on accident, to the opponent's lawyer, nor the failure of them to identify it as protected or privileged communication.)
Now, I don't know if that's accurate, but if true then it means free speech isn't legally in danger. Probably.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Magnus should provide proof or stop being a sore loser.
For what it's worth, while Magnus didn't provide anything besides "just a hunch", Chess.com ruled that Hans most likely cheated more than 100 times in a 72-page report (52 of which is just the appendix).
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Made me smile to see my first AAQC. Guess all my weird computer knowledge finally paid off :)
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
I'm not sure if "Mass Formation Psychosis" explains it. I think a better fitting explanation is simply the shifting of the Overton window. Another pandemic-related example is the proposition that the virus escaped from a lab (note, not arguing about whether it was created in a lab or arose naturally, just that it escaped from a lab) being first branded as a nutjob conspiracy theory that only the crackiest of crackpots would believe in, before it eventually turned into something that you could reasonably discuss without fear of being censored. The vast majority of people are concerned about their reputations and will only discuss something once it becomes socially acceptable to do.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
on, say, Twitter
(barf emoji)
Well, that seems to be the main place where people will criticize KF. Along with sites like Discord (but messages there are not easily accessible). Unless you know of another place containing KF critics.
Mumset and Ovarit
Who?
Very gender-critical forums. Very TERFy. Basically, just a subsection of KF's userbase on sites that prohibit doxing.
My read has always been that the number one priority was comedy and the method was schadenfreude. Everything else they did seemed to be in service of that.
That is definitely true. Though, it's hard to separate their comedy from criticism. I doubt that if you're laughing at someone doing something dumb that it's not also a criticism of them having done that dumb thing.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Agreed. One of the things that kind of baffles me about the incident was how Near negotiated with Null, or rather, didn't.
If I was him, I wouldn't have opened with a gambit like "take my $120,000 and delete the thread or I kill myself". That shows your cards too early, that makes it sound like you preplanned this and are hoping to be able to strong-arm him into doing it, and it provides a game-theoretic reason for him to say no (because you shouldn't negotiate with terrorists and you shouldn't negotiate with extreme demands like that).
Secondly, as Null would say on his podcast later, he kind of didn't get why a dead 13-page thread was so harmful to him. One of the things Near said was that a friend of ten years left him, and Null was like "so instead of being mad at them, you come to me for it?" Honestly, I'm still not sure why that thread was so bad to him even if he was actually dead. Other threads on the site allege that people have molested children, abused animals, done all sorts of horrible things (and none of them have attempted or faked suicide) and yet the worst that could be said in Near's thread was that he defended Christopher Handley (a man convicted of possession of drawn child pornography) 12 years ago before he recanted it and said it was a stupid thing of him to have done. There's various conspiracy theories that speculate he faked his death to avoid potential legal action from Nintendo for his emulator development or something, but there's really no evidence for them either and it would still be baffling for him to have done this.
And thirdly, he waited 12 hours after Null's last reply before citing some unknown time limit(?) and deciding to follow through with his plan while Null had (assumedly) gone to bed. To this day I still have no idea what that was about. He didn't even use the time limit as a negotiation chip because he never told him about it.
All of this is to say that if I was in this situation, I probably would have done my homework and figured out the best way to persuade him, and only offer money if things seemed to be going south. But not $120,000 all at once; I'd start with $5,000 at the most. And I wouldn't threaten suicide or institute an arbitrary time limit or anything. If the thread couldn't get taken down then, well, my BATNA is to just get off the internet (or at least social media) at that point.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
But then again, I'm a virtue ethicist and I think people's salad preferences possibly have moral relevance.
I'm genuinely interested in hearing the argument that people's salad preferences possibly have moral relevance, as I can't come up with any plausible-sounding ones on my own.
And frankly, if this thing goes big and the internet just up and DDOSes itself out of existence like some sort of MAD scenario from a video game I would consider that to be the greatest boon to the existence of man since the invention of penicillin. The internet delenda est.
I hate Kiwifarms, I hate what's happening to Kiwifarms. What happened there was immoral, but what is happening to them is immoral too.
Well, at least I can appreciate that you are being consistent on this front.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
How many times is KF's targeting a person causing bad things to happen to them is too many? Twice? A dozen times?
Well, I wish people would just be honest and say "yes, one instance of harassment is too many and justifies complete and total deplatforming of the accused". If they came right out and said it, there's not much I can say against that. I mean, personally I think it's a highly unreasonable cost for questionable benefit with many negative externalities, but if someone truly values a Vision-Zero-like mentality then I can't argue against people's value systems.
I don't have the stats in front of me of how many people ultimately got harassed, but every high profile KF target I know of like Chris Chan has gotten harassed.
I'm not fully up to date on this topic as the main place with receipts is down right now (so bear with me for any inaccuracies). Chris was notable before KF and the majority of his harassment was before the site existed. It's hard to imagine that the harassment would have simply gone away if the site didn't exist because he was discussed on all sorts of places, from 4chan to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Especially since one of the things KF did was form "The Guard Dogs" to protect him. Now, it can be argued that attempting to protect someone and, well, "trolling" them by sending them money is actually harmful to them (if not society) on net, and I agree with that (Null did too; that's why he cut off communication and reported him to the police last year), but it's a far cry from harassment of the sort critics usually blame the forum for.
I see this leveled at KF critics a lot, but it's a huge strawman.
The impression I get from usual KF critics (on, say, Twitter) is that this kind of isn't a strawman. I notice that other sites dedicated to criticism, such as Mumset and Ovarit, prohibit doxing of the sort usually allowed on KF, yet every KF critic I've seen also abhors those sites too. This gives me the impression that their true rejection isn't doxing and harassment (indeed, they do not consider, say, Taylor Lorenz showing up to the house of the woman behind Libs of TikTok to be doxing nor harassment), but rather criticism of figures they would prefer to not have criticized. I have never seen them draw a principled line in the sand and say "Mumsnet and Ovarit are fine but KF isn't". Though, feel free to find a counterexample.
That said, I'm glad you're explicitly not repeating their argument.
KF's obsessive documentation of its targets lives up to and including information that could he used to harass them or worse was the problem, not its criticism.
Just to be clear here, are you considering all documentation as information that could be used to harass them, or just their dox? Because I am struggling to think of how information in general can be used to harass people.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Seconded. Anyone can file a lawsuit for anything and lawsuits are filed all the time; that doesn't mean they'll succeed. Most often a lawsuit is filed just for one to look like they are Doing Something and Taking Action, regardless of whether that something or action will have any actual effect.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Debatable. I would categorize the act of doxing someone as aiding and encouraging harassment or worse. KF knew what it was doing. Telling their readership not to use the information for illegal purposes might have been sure footing the first time, but they apparently didn't learn their lesson. Eventually if you keep doing a thing and it causes another thing to happen, regardless of your strenuous verbal discouragement you own those consequences. To Wit, if you rig up a bridge with explosives and leave a big old 'destroy bridge, do not press' button in public, people are gonna start blaming you for the exploded bridges after morons have knocked down the first few.
So first off, I can see the argument that 'doxing can result in harassment, therefore it's bad'. However, that's not what you seem to have said. You seem to be saying that the doxes on their subjects, without fail, resulted in them being harassed, using an explosives-on-a-bridge analogy (correct me if I'm wrong). And if so, I dispute that.
The vast majority of the time, if someone gets doxed on KF, nothing happens to them. For example, Dream (the Minecraft YouTuber) was doxed and... well, he's still fine. I doubt he was even harassed online by them either (and it's hard to measure the signal from the background noise of harassment you inevitably get if you have 30 million subscribers). There's load of other examples I could find if the site was up, but it's far from "morons have knocked down the first few".
And that's besides the fact that doxing isn't illegal in the U.S., nor is it considered to be "aiding and encouraging harassment" (though I am not a lawyer, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this).
In the US, no. On the internet... like I said, it's the closest thing to illegal.
Well, that's still not the same thing as actually being illegal. It's fine if you qualify it with 'the closest thing to illegal', but just saying "illegal" unqualified (as you did in your earlier post) is a factual error at best and outright lie at worst.
I'd expect someone doing the equivalent in real life to be assaulted on a regular basis.
I have no idea what equivalent you're referring to here. Either way, someone doing close-to-illegal-but-not-illegal-activity does not make it legal for someone to physically assault them, at least in the United States. You can call the cops on them, though, and potentially trespass them, or have other remediations implemented.
Consider also that for CF to explain why they dropped KF would require them to explain a decade or so of internet lore to an audience that didn't give a damn.
I don't see how you got to this conclusion? Their entire explanation should be "we were pressured into doing it by an internet harassment mob, sorry". Failing that, at least a better cover reason would be "we believe that criticism equals harassment" or "the site does not align with the values we uphold as a company" or anything much more grounded in reality than the reason they went with. Or, they could have simply not said anything at all, and dropped it quietly - making a special press release signals to the mob that this is a super special action that was taken as a result of the mob's efforts. Nothing requires them to explain "a decade or so of internet lore".
And, well, the fact that they were pressured into doing it by an internet harassment mob does not bode well for this site, since anyone who decides to target this site can do the same thing, as the person you replied to was pointing out.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
The site is down now so I will have to recall from memory; excuse any errors I make.
The abuses of Yaniv; the fact that a prominent transgender streamer ran a Discord server with sexual interactions with minors and sponsors a website dedicated to supplying DIY homemade cross-sex hormones to minors explicitly without their parents' approval (this isn't just "trans healthcare bad" as the woke might have you believe; there is a very good reason why it's illegal to make and distribute your own medical treatments, i.e. it is very hard to do even if you have the right equipment and you can fucking die if you get it wrong; it reflects poorly that people will sincerely defend this); the boyfriend of the girlfriend of a prominent online artist had sexual interactions with minors and groomed them into sexual intercourse with dogs; people running Discord servers and sexually interacting with minors in them (a common theme on the forum is that kids should never be anywhere near Discord); the zoosadist threads (zoophiles abusing animals); anything Ethan Ralph (notorious right-wing political commentator) has done (they have a whole subforum for him); anything Nick Fuentes has done (a whole subforum for him and America First too); hell even the person who, ahem, "guided" Chris-chan into sex with his mother being a sex pervert, pedophile, having done animal abuse (on Discord, what a surprise) and whose father is a former Navy SEAL and owner of a cybersecurity company. And that's not even scratching the surface of the endless amount of threads on that site.
I haven't seen the Buffalo shooting posts you're talking about but Kiwi Farms routinely mocks mass shooters. One of their own users (and also Encyclopedia Dramatica admin) was William Atchison, a person obsessed with mass shooters his whole life to the point where he decided to shoot up a school himself - only for it to get unceremoniously stopped by a teacher blocking a classroom door with a couch, before he killed himself. He is forevermore known as "couch cuck" and ever since his death, his user page on the Farms ("FuckYou") is frequently posted on by users mocking and ridiculing him. He is memorialized in one of the comics of the site's background, which depicts him in less than flattering terms (he is stopped in the bathroom by a couch with arms and is dunked into the toilet). Obviously that's an exception because he was one of their own, but in general mass shootings (and fedposting activities in general) are treated as not cool and something only braindead idiots do.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Shipping companies banning firearms parts may be unjust (and I agree), but I think the frustration that Null has is that he keeps getting booted off places for reasons that don't match up with what he's actually done. It would be one thing if these companies would simply be honest and just say "Okay, you know what, we have a new policy that criticizing other people on your website is banned due to the many externalities, that's why we banned them." If they were common carriers, they wouldn't be able to come up with bullshit justifications for booting them off. To analogize this to shipping, it would be like if shipping companies secretly decided to ban firearms, but never published a formal policy stating it, and they enforced their policy by banning people known to sell firearms under vague pretenses like "they assaulted and harassed someone to death" despite there being no evidence for that. It's what Cloudflare said about needing to follow the rule of law, before of course they became dishonest, bent the knee to the harassment mob and rendered their own word worthless.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
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.
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.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Null is unable to get legal representation because his lawyers dropped him after five years of business for "ties to russia"
Just to be clear, this is referring to him saying:
Lolcow LLC's agent from WyomingAgents.com - which I have used for half a decade now - is terminating me. Their reason for this is a bullshit "ties to Russia". Their cited sanction only applies to forming businesses for Russian citizens/companies, which I am not. My only ties to Eastern Europe at this point are in Kyiv.
So it seems like his company, Lolcow LLC, doesn't have an agent anymore? I'm not sure if this means he's completely devoid of legal representation. IIRC he hired a different attorney to fight several different frivolous lawsuits filed by Greer and Scott (can't confirm the name), so I'm not sure if his own attorney has terminated him.
Either way, this is extremely worrying and quite frankly, disgusting behavior. The right to have legal representation is quite literally a fundamental right, and it reflects poorly on those who attempt to take it away from others. These people are short-sighted and don't fully comprehend the consequences of enshrining the tactic of "go after people's lawyers" as a legitimate tactic that should be used. The only silver lining is that sooner or later, the harassment mob will probably run up against breaking an actual law in such a legible way as to fully suffer the consequences in court (I'm not a lawyer, but tortious interference probably fits the bill here).
What will themotte do if they ever make an enemy that understands how easy it is to wipe them off the net?
Well, the way I see it, there is probably nothing that can be done unless fundamental internet services are regulated as common carriers. The only defense is that we're small, not notable, and talk in complete sentences. However we've already ended up on a "hate list" by association with TracingWoodgrains, and we've already been ousted off Reddit, so time will tell.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Very good post. I remembered watching Cyberchase as a kid but didn't remember it being so good... until you said that it was only the first 5 seasons or so. I had probably watched the later seasons (I remember an episode with the crux being reading the nutrition labels so the kids avoid drinking some harmful drink devised by Hacker, or something like that). How do I nominate a post for AAQC on this new site?
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Well, it seems like they are implicitly admitting that open, uncensored discussion of the transgender movement with the possibility to criticize it is toxic to the transgender movement.
Shame, then, because I'm trans and found this space perfectly welcoming.
a major win for gun control advocates who say it will help better track suspicious surges of gun sales that could be a prelude to a mass shooting.
This is just . . . something I don't get? The data's going to follow a random curve; how can you tell whether a surge is really a surge or just noise? (Not to mention the sale of the gun could take place many months prior to the shooting, or not even take place on traditional finance payment processor networks at all, or the many other problems with this . . .)
"It's a private company" is a common retort by the side in power whenever the side that is not in power complains about corporate censorship. [...] How much pressure can the government apply before the "private companies" in question are acting under duress, and as such, acting as state actors?
I've never really put much stock into the "it's a private company" retort and always considered it a semantic stop sign meant to justify the speaker's position from whole cloth. Just because a company has the legal right to do something doesn't mean that they (morally) should. Ironically enough, this argument is often invoked to dunk on people arguing for freedom of speech, along the lines of "just because you can legally say something doesn't mean that you should". Regardless, as Scott Alexander points out, there's not a meaningful difference between coercion by the state and coercion by private entities, so any debate that focuses on the legal status of the entity carrying out the action in question (except as to answer a strictly legal question) misses the point entirely.
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
Upvoted for explaining a common libertarian talking point, not so much for me agreeing with said talking point.
Besides the many other differences why I don't think governments are cartels, I would just like to note that "entities violently fighting each other for control over an area" is something that doesn't happen in an area ruled by a government, unless you live in a country currently at war. Furthermore, a lot of governments' founding mythos do not go something like "they forced people to accept their protection for a small fee just because all the other groups were worse". A lot of this comes down to the question of legitimacy, as an entity considered more legitimate is usually correlated with more stability (one of the many reasons cartels are viewed negatively is that their presence implies instability in the region).
InfoTeddy
2yr ago
There is a wealth of interesting ideas to read through, and I sometimes go back through these threads to find new arguments (because the rest of the internet always repeats the same shit ad nauseam). For what it's worth, I don't look for Covid or lockdown or Russia takes, I weakly agree that those are tired subjects. But there's a lot more than those.
This is not that surprising, considering not only the group that the person(s) who trafficked and kidnapped women belongs to, but also that people nowadays don't take physical, material violence seriously and put far more weight on to emotional "violence" (i.e. opinions they do not like) despite the fact that words have less material impact than, you know, actual physical action.
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