Simply writing about Kiwi Farms was enough to attract the attention of its users, and that attention was scary enough to dissuade reporters from covering the site. A French-language article on Vice from 2020
describes their methods in depth. To summarize: Potential targets were posted about by individual users. The site’s users would decide as a group on whom to focus for harassment. This harassment included online death threats, rape threats, and name-calling; harassment via email and text messages; and aggressive doxxing. Family members of targets received texts and emails, either harassing them too or falsely accusing their loved ones of criminal behavior. Bosses and co-workers were contacted with similar lies, resulting in job loss for some of their targets, as Vice reported. Users also made false police reports, recruiting police guns into their campaigns of terror in the practice known as
swatting. Some targets’ bank accounts were drained with fraudulent purchases, and on and on. Few people would knowingly risk such potentially ruinous consequences, and so journalists stayed quiet. This helped suppress public knowledge of the site and its tactics, making it easier for Kiwi Farms users to drive the people they decided did not deserve a voice into hiding and, in a few cases, to
suicide, as reported by Vice and the Daily Beast (in the latter case, Kiwi Farms wasn’t named to avoid giving it publicity).
