Good article on Kiwi Farms shut down, some thoughts

Sociocide
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It provides some of the context of the shutdown. “Null” and some of the membership are quite unsympathetic characters. (not that I claim to be likeable myself) There were free speech absolutists mixed in with, normal people, occasional Nazis, open racists, and people who hate transgender people in general. etc.

However as the article points out, the media claim that Kiwi Farms drove three people to suicide when in one case the name of one of the victims is not even public, is an over-reach. Suicide is, as the article points out, multi-causal. It became a talking point, and in such cases, accurate death investigation requires more detail then “Kiwi farms is linked to this suicide, because Joe had a thread on kiwi farms making fun of him, even if the thread was not active when he killed himself.”

I’m not going to defend Kiwi farms right to free speech generally because quite frankly I don’t know what members administrators, or moderators were actually doing to all the so called LOL Cows they reported on. Moon aka Null claimed that they had a rule that they would simply point and laugh, and not get involved in their “LOL Cows” lives.

I don’t know whether to believe this claim, but assuming that Null is telling the truth, how his staff could actually enforce such a rule on their membership which were very, very, good at discovering personal information about their subjects, is a mystery to me.

When I was a admin on Bullshido.net from 2004-2013 we had a few investigative threads and at least one challenge fight (White Kimbo verses some Ninja guy on the West Coast) go bad, because members would do off the wall crazy things. This must have been magnified greatly in an environment like the Farms where there were a lot less restrictions and the culture was much more influenced by 4 and 8 Chan.

If a mentally ill person publishes derogatory information about themselves on the internet, and then it ends up on a kiwi’s farm thread then republishing it is not nice, but Its also not doxxing IMO. There can be a real open debate on what is doxxing and what is not, and more importantly what doxxing should be permissible.

For example, my personal address was up on, and is up on some government websites. Whereas in the case of a woman attempting to avoid a abusive husband , she would have a much greater claim to privacy, and publishing her address would IMO be evil. because she might get hurt or killed.

So how much damage to people Kiwi Farms members were doing by digging up information on Lol Cows is more complex then what the media (I’m thinking of you Newsweek) says. but it would have to be evaluated on a case by case basis. In my time on Bullshido we only stopped one investigation because of potential harm, and that was in regards to a person who was a known fabricator, but who had been an FBI informant on 1% Motorcycle gangs. If we had published his real name he might have gotten seriously injured or killed.

The whole Null, Kiwi Farms, verses Keffels fight was also more complicated then reported in the media. Null hated Keffels because he said Keffles was helping minors secretly get hold of hormones avoiding parental oversight. If its true that Keffles and one of his buddies were even teaching and encouraging minors how to brew their own such substances, then Keffles was endangering people’s health even more… Then Null had a real reason to publicize Keffles actions.

Null had links on Kiwi Farms he said documented such behavior but Kiwi Farms is now down so I can’t pass on the links.

At the time of its demise, Kiwi Farms also had the best collection of Ron Collin’s court transcripts documenting Ron’s felonous behavor. (Credit for this goes to April Rains and Phil Elmore) Full disclosure, I sent an open email over to Phil to be printed on the thread telling Ron he should drop the Ninja stuff, take care of his mom and get a job once he got out of jail for parole violations. That was in addition to the really insulting shit I said to him about his video taped fight with Icy Mike.

Lastly it is often hard to tell the difference between what Kiwi farms members were doing and what non-members were doing off site. Less then ten days ago someone Swatted Marge Taylor Greene, the right wing Congresswoman. I think anyone who Swats anyone should do time because it is so dangerous. What made the case an obvious set up, was that after the police went to her house, and realized it was a swatting the “member of Kiwi Farms” called them back and claimed credit for Kiwi Farms, which strikes me as an attempt to falsely attribute blame to Null and Co.

Those are my thoughts, as mixed as they are. I came back to edit this post to state that I don’t like or support a lot of the things said there, the question, as a free speech supporter is when you need to pull the plug because people’s safety as verses their feelings are in jeopardy.

The Kiwi Farms story interests me because I, and we, used to investigate martial arts frauds, which did involve some doxxing and we run a much more open speech environment then most forums, though more restrictive then the Farms.

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This is in my view most likely. No one from the farms is going to try and take credit for doing something like that. The first thing you do is not associate any IRL information about yourself, use clean email and username etc. because people like Keffels are always trying to dox people on the farms and connect their posts and activity there with their IRL identities.

The popular line the libs that hate the farms tell themselves is that trolls like KF are just jobless NEET losers living in their parents’ basements, but reality is that a lot of really online people that would do stuff like KF, or dissident RW on Twitter etc. have normal jobs and families and are often white collar middle class people. They will likely lose their jobs because of their speech, especially political speech.

Ironically it’s the people who want to dox them that often don’t have jobs, rely on indiegogo or similar donation schemes, are on welfare, are complete degenerates etc. who don’t care about associating their IRL identity with their online speech and activity.

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Well I’m a Liberal, at least by USA national standards and I don’t assume much of anything about particular posters economic backgrounds on Kiwi Farms unless they power level. (reveal details of their personal life)

Income level is often independent of political views. By for example a lot of Trump supporters who rioted at the Capitol were employed and relatively well off. I’m also been surprised based on arrest records how many Antifa members actually hold jobs.

Of course if you have a Kiwi Farms member, or a member of any internet forum who is regularly posting 30 plus times a day, that’s pretty good evidence they are not holding down a steady job. And sometimes what appears like someone posting under the influence of mental illness, is mental illness, and sometimes its an antisocial online persona.

Returning to my first post, lets run a thought experiment to quote a Fox News Personality I don’t particularly like.

On kiwi farms say there are two threads mocking a person who is mentally ill and has posted their stuff on the internet.

For the sake of discussion, lets say one of these threads is actually harassment, and the other isn’t. How would the reader determine the difference?

The easiest way is if members or even a Kiwi farm staff member is encouraging contact with the person by say ordering COD items sent to their home. I’m still thinking about the other ways this would manifest itself.

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“Domestic terror threat”. All you need to know, the FBI assessment. I posted about this in the Fragile Masculinity thread for a god reason. These are not stupid kids trolling, they are terrorists and they are organizing. If it were Black or Muslim people you’d give a shit. It’s fascists and Nazi incel fucks who can code, what could they possibly damage other than the whole fucking country?

Terrorist websites need to die in fire, nuked from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

If Bullshido was even remotely anything like Kiwi Farms, I would never have registered here.

You want to see the war going on between Kiwi Farmers and the Internet? Go read some Slashdot, and in between all the asciiswastikas you see some shit you might recognize. Mirror Universe evil shit is going on, and you are all in the dark. Time to wake up.

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Agreed. The kulaks (blue collar middle class, skilled tradesmen, small business owners, truck drivers etc.) are a significant right wing base. They are largely a separate group from the online Right Wing dissident sphere who are the kind of people who would engage with Kiwi Farms. If the super online RWer has a job it’s more likely than not an email job i.e. white collar knowledge worker. Hence the difference in persec. A kulak or blue collar working class chud is going to largely have a job, or until very recently had since the battlespace is changing quickly, that is immune to online drama. Email jobs are not.

And certainly ANTIFA black bloc and similar people e.g. DSA types hold down jobs; which often is actually at the center of their grievance as they are in working class jobs when they come from middle or upper middle class white collar families. Which is much more explanatory for the explosion in “left wing activism” since and including Occupy Wall Street. Basically Millennial and some Gen X people with white collar middle class parents were told to go to college and they will get a “good job”. When that didn’t materialize because it is no longer realistic, they saw themselves slipping into the working class and became resentful. It’s the leftist “economic anxiety” so to speak. So they push for debt cancelation (that they took on with the promise of a “good job” by every authority figure they talked to along the way) and what are effectively jobs programs e.g. federal job guarantee.

I’m not trying to personally insult you but this doesn’t really mean anything anymore on an aggregate level. You personally may be Liberal and may hold true to Liberal values, but on the aggregate level Liberals in the US use those Liberal values to rationalize power.

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First off, good post.

Now, here is my take on it. I don’t think kiwi farms is that powerful, just annoying. However to the untrained a “minor” cyber bullying attack can be absolutely devestating. You face joblessness, homelessness and a disruption of the social and family structure to name just a few elements of the attack. And that is enough to legit kill a good percentage of the population through psychiatric distress. I say psychiatric distress instead of psychological because once the stress hits a certain level it becomes a medical issue.

Now, on the issue of morbidity. These attacks are absolutely a factor in the fatalities. I’ve witnessed this multiple times from both sides and as an outside observer.

In my home the attack didn’t make me suicidal but it did my ex driving her literally insane and provoking multiple suicide attempts. In another instance, the enemy, lead by a BJJ man, sadly, found the man’s home and vandalized it. He was dead about a week later. In another instance, we had been beating the fuck out of the enemy. Absolutely hammering them. They started losing jobs and shit and people were telling them to kill themselves. Finally they made a short film begging for mercy, which was granted.

The latter was a particularly interesting case, as by this time in the war, we realized we could use a computer program to calculate the suicide rates among certain demographics and then use OSINT to discover their triggers, which we did via a dead name. We would then calculate the trauma caused by that suicide and then run a suicide chain through their community. Fortunately, I spend a lot of time in church and as fair minded Christians, we decided to shelve that operation.

Another interesting case was Rexxfield and his Googlecide theory. Googlecide being defined as when Google makes you kill yourself. Social engineering at a black belt level does that. I battled his company for hunting down Irvin’s victims. I found the man that did it, exposed him to everyone watching and then delivered his exposure to his boss.

So the morbidity is well documented. Crystal clear. Cyber bullying is wrong and should be illegal.

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On the point of liberals in the USA using liberal values to rationalize power. It’s more complicated then this observation. In most ideologies, the people holding them can be entirely selfless (rare) or using them both because they believe in the social benefit of the idiology while also persuing some self interest. And not surprisingly there are people who are simply out for themselves who use their ideology as a self serving tool.

Politically in America right now, liberals are viewed a squishy because they are not seen as having the hard edge as some of the “progressive twitter warriors” and are seen as being much more interested in procedural propriety upholding the existing social order then in actually creating what I will call social justice. I myself could explain why for some of us this is untrue and as a lawyer I would love to see the justice system reformed, but most people wouldn’t sit still for that explanation.

The test of whether people in an ideology are primarily out for their own power of wealth (often independent of whether the ideology actually works as a governing philosophy and policy) is whether they will do things that directly and substantially contradict the tenants of the ideology to obtain wealth, power, and access.

On the Republican side you can read Tim Miller’s recent book “Why We Did It” which is about the Republican Campaign Operative Class and Various Elected Republican Officials giving up their conservative principals to jump on the Trump train. I don’t know if there is a recent book by an ex liberal or progressive which is a good counterpart.

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I just don’t find that compelling TBQH. “The Trump train” for these Republicans just means moving away from concentrating on the interests of the largely urban white collar Republican political operative and elected officials and daring to even talk about the interests of suburban and rural blue collar kulaks and working class interests. You won’t likely see a similar “tell all” from an equivalent Lib because they are in power and they don’t need to make excuses to their social and economic peers about why they dared to take the side of the peasants and kulaks.

Basically people like Tim Miller, the “Never Trumpers”, and even a lot of the Dissident Right Wing are Burghers.

Trump is/was able to appeal to kulaks and blue collar chuds because he actually acknowledged the issues both care about. Mainstream Republicans are losing their grip on their party because they don’t want to speak to these interests; they are worried about getting run out of town by their peers.

We are in an evolving political situation and the old battle lines of Republican, Democrat, and uninterested masses isn’t working anymore (Independents generally aren’t and consistently break towards their party preference but for whatever reason don’t like a party label). At the center of this change is the totalizing effect of Democracy as a system; in a Democracy everything must be political, every issue a wedge able to be squeezed for some political gain by political actors. And this reaches down into the lives of the peasants and kulaks, not just the Burghers and elites in the cities. So you end up with political activation you would see only in very dangerous times in the past e.g. peasant revolts.

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Kiwi farms looks like another 4chan / 8chan, etc. I don’t see them in the same light you do. Doxxing has been a thing since guys were feuding on IRC. The biggest thing we’ve seen out of that kind of community is marches on the church of scientology. Maybe some of the stuff lolzsec did against HBO gary, but even then it was a small shoot off of a larger community. I think 4chan was the largest movement we’ve seen and they took themselves offline once because they were arguing over who loved and hated boxxy. Hardly high level terrorism. The fact that you get one or two really bad people that go and shoot up a school or a church, doesn’t mean they are a terrorist organization. Terrorist groups don’t hang out on open forums on the surface web. That being said i’m not a fan of that type of rhetoric some of these place promote. Your writing style and over aggressive response to everything has the exact feel of what you’d see on some of these extremists websites … #justsayin.

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Actually 4chan has been involved in some serious high level shit. If I need intelligence that’s a primary source for a deep dive. I know a few anons and they are in fact domestic terrorists.

Speaking of terrorism, January 6th is a prime example of a cyber terrorist attack. I can’t speak for the rest of the idiots there, but what got me into the war was a cyber terror ring that specialized in political violence. What they’d do is doxx their rivals and then smear their names. Once this was done they’d follow up with attacks on their workplaces and homes. When they spoke out against the aggression they were attacked in the streets. The initial kill list I recovered is basically a who’s who of who raided the capitol. What happened was that they militarized in response to the cyber terror attack. So whenever they went anywhere at all, they went with the militia or at least some subset of it. The actual militia only assembled on J6. Rest of the time it was just sub sets.

Point is this bullshit is dangerous as fuck and is getting people killed. With no cyber terrorist attack I’d have been at home sleep not hunting these dudes down in DC.

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Sure, some anon’s might be terrorist, just like some facebook users are terrorists. It’s a leap to say it’s a terrorist platform.

Most campaigns will have some sort of cyber intelligence like unit 8200 in Israel. Point is those are military divisions, or cyber groups that are created for that purpose. I doubt this goes for every anon looking for lulz on 4chan.

Cyber units focused on terrorist activity or organized crime are highly specialized. I think people often don’t understand that world and it’s easy to throw the word hacker around and group everyone under the same banner. I can promise you not everyone on 4chan is a 1337 haxxor …

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Two different points. Not saying 4chan did J6. That was Antifa which is a cyber terrorist organization based on Twitter of all places.

I should also point out that it doesn’t take 1337 military operatives. IBJJF just uses a tangled website which disenfranchises you and a cult. You really just need a platform if that. For advanced cyber terrorism, you don’t even need to know how to code. Basic knowledge of excel and a computer will do.

Let’s say I was to engage in a cyber terror attack. First I’d broadcast that my enemy was the devil himself. This will help cover my activities. Second I’d gather any and all data I can find through word of mouth, social media, etc. OSINT. Then I’d upload that data into two different spread sheets. I then upload that data into gephi. Then I build a map of their social networks. Then I add demographics to that map. Age, race, sex, etc. Then I check the suicide rates for those categories and then use that to calculate edge weights. I then splash heat to find out who has the highest probability of suicide within the heat range of my target. I then pick out that person to cyber bully. I attack their career, their interests, their home life etc. This increases community trauma and the causes a suicide wave. This project was shut down by the church who supports the war effort but isn’t trying to send everyone to what they believe is actual hell. They read our scripture back to me and I had to relent. They also would’ve just disallowed it.

Cyber terrorism, and it is terrorism, is evil. I don’t seen how it’s any different from hunting people in the physical world.

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You know fair point, i guess twitter is in cyber space, maybe my definition of cyber was a bit narrow. The level of risk posed by someone using “cyber techniques” is directly proportional to their level of sophistication. When i think cyber terrorism, i think of things like the power grid, elections, destabilising financial institutions, etc. The line does get blurred though because nation states would look at doing the same thing.

In terms of your approach, not going to comment there, but gathering intel would be the first phase of any attack.

I do still think the term terrorist get’s throw around a lot and often the intent is not that they actually think they are terrorists… anything can be justified against a terrorist …

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Except actual terrorists have been congregating on KF for years. It’s a fact.

Read the news. The war is online. The Russians won’t touch them, but some whores in the Pacific Northwest did for now.

Funny, everything I learned about Kiwi Farms, I learned from reading Bullshito. Turns out you dumbasses a good for something after all.

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Rabbit and I rarely agree.

But, on the matter of Kiwi Farms, we seem to agree, that there are some very bad actors, who have made those forums, their home, and they use that place as a recruiting grounds.

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image

Hi Wrabbit!

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Here’s the thing. You can do a LOT of damage without much sophistication. Look at Antifa. They don’t use anything stronger than gephi, but they clapped cheeks to the point where we damn near lost our country. Several cities were captured or set on fire. DC was almost destroyed. By a couple guys on TWITTER. The current wave is OSINT + Gephi + a communications platform + a small field team and in some cases a militia. The effective cyber command centers are designed like that and are extremely destructive.

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Still wouldn’t call it a cyber campaign. Cyber attacks are usually against digital assets. The fact that they are using technology to co-ordinate the attacks doesn’t make it a cyber campaign IMHO. If they are doxxing people i guess you can consider that a cyber threat, the mitigation would be how you secure what you put out there.

I do think there is a distinction between using technology to communicate and cyber terrorism. I mean if i hit someone with a laptop, it doesn’t become a cyber crime …

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Not exclusively.
(twelve)

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How so? Can you elaborate?

a military campaign will have a cyber component, but it won’t be a cyber campaign.

I guess the nuance isn’t really important to most, but it won’t meet the definition of a cyber attack.

Stuxnet is a great example of a cyber attack.

General definitions tend to follow this kind of trend:

“Cyber attacks aim to disable, disrupt, destroy or control computer systems or to alter, block, delete, manipulate or steal the data held within these systems . Any individual or group can launch a cyber attack from anywhere by using one or more various attack strategies.”

" A cyberattack is a malicious and deliberate attempt by an individual or organization to breach the information system of another individual or organization."

" Cyberterrorism is the convergence of cyberspace and terrorism . It refers to unlawful attacks and threats of attacks against computers, networks and the information stored therein when done to intimidate or coerce a government or its people in furtherance of political or social objectives."

I just grabbed the first few i saw from a quick google search, they tend to be in that vain …

But i guess i’m off topic from the original spirit this thread was created in. Just feel terrorism and cyber this or that get’s thrown around a lot.

If you like the whole cyber thing, darknet diaries is a great podcast …