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What do we do about Kiwifarms?
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What do we do about Kiwifarms?. *CONTENT WARNING : Suicide, suicidal……
archived 1 Jul 2021 12:21:19 UTC
What do we do about Kiwifarms?
*CONTENT WARNING : Suicide, suicidal ideation, online mobbing, stalking and harassment **
This week I heard for the first time about something called Kiwi Farms; a Twitter mutual mentioned in passing that they are awful. As it turns out, the “Worst Website on the Internet” as Gizmodo recently called them are a forum of sorts dedicated to stalking and harassing vulnerable individuals that they refer to as “lolcows” who can be “milked for laughs”; targeting in exceedingly cruel and creepy ways particularly those who are transgender, neurodivergent, disabled or living with mental illness. After a quick Google search, a healthy shudder and Contrapoints’ video on “cringe”, I put the whole thing out of my mind in disgust.
Then yesterday I learned the news: a programmer known as Near /Byuu has died by suicide, after being targeted and harassed by trolls from Kiwi Farms. I learned it from one of my favourite Web cartoonists, Sophie Labelle, who has been, herself, on the receiving end of harassment campaigns by neo-Nazi and transphobic groups originating with Kiwifarms.
Sophie Labelle is a Canadian cartoonist, author, activist and public speaker. You can buy her comics and other creations on her website or follow her Facebook page.
In the comments to Sophie’s Facebook post, someone mentioned that stalkers organised on Kiwi Farms attempted to contact her employer and endangered her job stability. And the worst part: this is not the first time someone loses their life as a result of harassment at the hands of the Kiwi Farms mob. I may have only heard about it because a creator who was highly respected in the gaming community died; and an artist I personally like, with a Facebook following of nearly 60,000 and multiple published books was also targeted. Far more often, they attack people who do not have thousands of fans — or, for that matter, much of a support network. They cruelly go after the ones who are isolated and struggle.
And this is why we need to talk about them. And not just in a “Yeah, they’re terrible, what a cesspool, let’s have a shudder and then forget about it” way. What I propose, instead, are a few helpful practical resources for supporting potential victims, and hopefully preventing such tragedies for happening in the future.
First off : how do we talk about suicide in the media?
Samaritans have put together some guidelines on how we can go about reporting tragedies like this death of Near/Byuu. If you are considering reporting on this story, whether to commemorate their life, to raise awareness of mental health or of online harassment and bulling, I strongly suggest that you read the resource they have prepared.
The main points to take home from it are:
Speculation about the ‘trigger’ or cause of a suicide can oversimplify the issue and, as a general rule, should be avoided. We still ought to condemn unambiguously hate-motivated online mobbing, stalking and harassment, and it is more than clear that they are, indeed, harmful. We can still do this while recognising the complexity of mental illness; the reality of which does not for one moment excuse or absolve those who engaged in harassment.
Deaths by suicide can often be prevented, with the right kind of support. In the UK, you can contact Samaritans day or night, 365 days a year. You can call them for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch. Here are a list of emergency lines worldwide that you can call if you or anyone you know is in immediate danger; and if you are struggling with your mental health please speak to a professional. Your GP, a teacher or school counsellor, a local charity or social worker may be people who can signpost you or help you get access to mental health services. There is help out-there.
Avoid going into the gory details. Including content from suicide notes or similar messages left by a person who has died should be avoided. Again, this is not to protect the bullies or to allow them to escape responsibility. It is to avoid causing distress to grieving loved ones, and to avoid other people out-there who are struggling identifying with the deceased.
Now that we have this cleared, let’s see what’s we can do to help if someone we know is targeted by hate groups.
Understand what online harassment may entail
Kiwi Farms are infamous for obsessively stalking and documenting the lives of their targets, and doxing them (that means- publishing their private information without their consent, for online shaming). They may be hacking their targets’ accounts or use deception tactics to obtain potentially embarrassing information and publish it as public shaming fodder. Harassment may spill from the online into everyday life , with trolls accosting targets in public, sending threats to their home address or contacting their families, friends, employers or professional contacts. For a truly chilling example of what that kind of harassment may look like, you can read Margaret Pless’ article on New York Magazine.
Now, let’s look at a few possible scenarios and what we can do:
If you are an employer or business contact
While not directly related to Kiwi Farms doxing and stalking, this letter and this letter from Alison Green’s “Ask a manager” column have been really useful as a guidance on what to do if somebody contacts you with information about your employee meant to embarrass or harass them.
While you may be tempted to simply ignore the messages, saving both yourself and your employee the embarrassment, your employee needs to know that this is happening- for their own safety and also because they get to decide how to respond and what measures they take to protect themselves. They may need to document what is happening as evidence in a lawsuit, or for obtaining a restraining order.
It is very important, when you have this conversation, to reassure your employee that you have their back, they are not in trouble and they are not their ones who need to justify themselves to you. The things sent to you by stalkers of trolls are of no concern to you — but they are of concern to your employee, and they should be clearly presented as such.
From there on — respect your employee’s wishes on how they may wish to handle it should the situation arise again. Observe confidentiality policies with maximum diligence; you may want to talk to your employee about making a plan for handling stalkers or deceptive callers. From a data security point of view, it would also be good sense not to store any messages received from stalkers or harassers in the employee’s file or anywhere they can be easily seen.
Your employee probably knows that there are nasty people out there who want to cause the harm just for the heck of it and to be mean. By reassuring them that the derogatory things that you just learned about them do not, in fact, jeopardise their job and that you are not judging them and that you are committed to their safety, you take away a lot of the power that the bully has over them.
Similar principles apply if the victim of doxing or harassment is a vendor, a collaborator or business partner. If harassers threatened to crash and disrupt events involving their potential victim, be prepared to take extra security measures or change venues; and consider enrolling the support of your community. For instance, you can read about what happened when British hate group Britain First tried to crash an anti-racism workshop, and how a mosque in Birmingham organised an all-British tea party and food drove to help the homeless, after being targeted by racist protestors. In any case, work with the person who is being targeted and make sure you never make them feel like a burden or an inconvenience because they are being targeted — that is exactly what the trolls would want.
If you are a friend or family member
Being cyberbullied and targeted by hate groups may be one of the scariest things that happen to your loved one.
If you are contacted by stalkers or harassers, the same advice outlined before for employers and professional contacts applies. Talk to your friend or family member in a reassuring, “I got your back” manner and agree together on how to handle such message. For example, you could agree to never respond, and instead only save incriminating messages in a private folder for monitoring purposes, should the need for legal action in the future arise; and you could plan to be extra alert to people who may attempt to obtain their private information by deception, impersonating friends or vendors when talking to you. You can read here some advice that blogger Captain Awkward gave to a reader who received bullying emails from her sister in law’s ex-boyfriend.
If your friend is experiencing mental distress
A few months ago, through my job at workers’ rights charity Work Rights Centre, I have had the great chance to do a Mental Health First Aid training with MHFA England, and if you have the occasion I very strongly reccommend that you get Mental Health First Aid training yourself, it is such an important skill to have!
The core principle of what I learned there was based on something that we call the ALGEE action plan :
ASSESS for risk of suicide or harm.
LISTEN non-judgementally.
GIVE reassurance and information.
ENCOURAGE appropriate professional help.
ENCOURAGE self-help and other support strategies.
This is a step-by-step approach to supporting someone who may be in mental health crisis, and it is important that you don’t skip steps before offering solutions. A non-judgemental ear may feel like a lifeline to someone whose more intimate life details are sprawled without their consent on a hate Web page, for the specific purpose of being harshly judged. By giving the opposite response to what the cyberbullies would have wanted, you diminish their power over your friend.
Another thing you can do is offer practical help. If your friend is in distress about being the victim of online harassment, they may not be in the best headspace to, say, extensively research cybersecurity action plans or be sent from pillar to post in three different phone queues to try and report the harassment to relevant authorities. If you can and if they agree to it, you can try taking over the more emotionally draining, time-consuming or frustratingly bureaucratic aspects of dealing with the harassment.
This could include things like:
Moderating comments on your friend’s social media pages, or triaging their DM’s or emails; filing messages containing harassment away in a hidden folder for documentation purposes, without your friend having to see them.
Flagging and reporting any abusive posts about them posted on social media or third party message boards.
Researching legislation in your country and figuring out what recourse your friend may have.
Researching and contacting organisations that may be able to help them- for example, with legal advice or mental health support.
Online hate mobs like Kiwi Farms target vulnerable people, who may have a harder time defending themselves from the attacks. For instance, a bully egging on someone to commit suicide is far more dangerous to someone who is isolated and already experiencing suicidal ideation than to someone in good mental health and with a strong support system. Someone from a marginalised group — such as a trans person, or a person of colour, or someone living in precarious conditions — may also face barriers to reporting hate crimes against them to the police or other authorities, and reports coming from someone like them may be taken less seriously than from, say, someone who represents a well-respected local business.
If you are better-placed to protect your friend than your friend may be to defend themselves, whether by virtue of a more privileged social position or just by not being directly targeted, do everything in your power to make it so.
If you are a fan or online supporter
The person you are following may be suffering as a result of cyberbulling and targeted harassment — emotionally as well as financially. If their online publishing activity is their livelihood, they may be losing clients, advertisers or donors who were targeted, misled with false information or intimidated by harassers.
Which is why it is extra important that you, as the community existing around a creator, rally around them in response to the bullying. If you can afford it, donate to their Patreon or Ko-Fi, get the paid membership, buy their books, their Etsy trinkets or whatever else they have. And importantly — do so publicly. Trolls engage in targeted harassment expecting to ruin their target’s life. Seeing how their actions ultimately lead to their target receiving more support, more business and making more money could be an effective deterrent.
When doing so, there is a fine balance between supporting the victim of online harassment and giving undeserved, potentially harmful visibility to the perpetrator. For example, British trans poet Jay Hulme wrote on Twitter:
When you quote tweet, or screenshot, or otherwise share, something a transphobe has said, to ridicule it or dunk on them, you probably won’t change their mind - but you probably will put that transphobia into the timeline of a trans person who wouldn’t have otherwise seen it. Trans people have to very carefully curate their spaces on this website - are you someone safe for them to follow? Is dunking on transphobes, and thus sharing their hatred and vitriol, worth becoming an unsafe space for?
When you comment on or report on harassment received by your favourite online creators, in order to show solidarity and support or to condemn harassment, it is important to do so in a way that centers the person you are supporting and your community, rather than the perpetrators of abuse ; and to not frame the person you are supporting primarily as a victim rather than as a valuable community member in their own right.
Compare, for instance, saying: “My favourite Web cartoonist has been targeted by by racist and transphobic trolls lately. Let’s show them that we are better than this! Please order their latest comic book on their Etsy shop and if you can afford it consider becoming a subscriber on Patreon ; otherwise like, comment and share to show support”, versus “My favourite Web cartoonist has been targeted by by racist and transphobic trolls- let me tell you all the gory details and repeat verbatim the very disturbing threats they made, just to raise awareness of how awful some people are”. We surely already have an awareness of the fact that a non-zero percentage of the population are horrible people, and the trolls themselves know well that they are being hurtful and unkind. Exposing as many people as possible to their nastiness is precisely what they want. Instead, let’s respond in a constructive way that practically helps their victims.
What about driving Kiwi Farms and their ilk off the Internet?
There is evidence that deplatforming can be effective. Think, for example, of how Donald Trump’s new blog failed to gain much traction after the former president was banned from Twitter and Facebook.
There is research that banning particularly toxic cesspools can reduce hate speech overall. For instance, after Reddit has banned some of its worst subbreddits in 2017, researchers at the University of Georgia found that the move has resulted in a reduction in less hate speech on the platform. As the TechCrunch article reporting on the study notes, “bigotry is easy and those who cherish it are lazy. Make it difficult and many people may find it more trouble than it’s worth to harass, shame, and otherwise abuse online those different from themselves.”
The situation of Kiwifarms is a bit different: they are already banned from Twitter, their owner Joshua “Null” Moon is banned from YouTube and PayPal, and because of the targeted nature of the harassment they engage in they don’t need a particularly large following for their hate speech to be harmful and dangerous. Furthermore, given the creepy levels of dedication users demonstrate in pursuing targets, collecting their private information, doxing and stalking them, the “bigotry is easy and those who cherish it are lazy” statement may not apply so much.
Nonetheless, there are things that we can do. Kiwifarms is using hosting and security services provided by Cloudflare and domain name registration from DreamHost. One thing you could do is contact these companies, in a public way (such as by Tweet or Facebook comment), asking them to cease doing business with a hate group. Another thing you can do is to promptly report any instances of doxing, harassment or hate speech by individual members you see on social media groups and forums. As discussed in the previous section, avoid sharing, linking to or even screenshot-sharing the hate speech, it would only give it mire visibility and more potential to do harm.
One may argue that trying to get Kiwifarms banned from the Internet is akin to chasing criminal gangs from one neighbourhood to another: they’re are not going to just give up and dissappear; and they may become even harder to trace. According to Rational Wiki, Kiwifarms have already secured a Dark Web domain. However, there is still value in deplatforming, in that it can make it harder for them to organise their targeted harassment campaigns, harder to publicly humiliate their targets (since they are deprived of a public) and harder to recruit and radicalise new people.
If you or someone you know is experiencing cyberbulling you can find some resource for adults here and for children and their parents here. If you are in need of mental health support, check out available resources in the UK, the USA and worldwide.
