The Rise, Fall, and Return of Kiwi Farms After Deplatforming Efforts - Pseudo intellectual article attempts to frame the farms deplatforming as authoritatively retarded as possible

Authors:
(1) Anh V. Vu, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre (anh.vu@cl.cam.ac.uk);
(2) Alice Hutchings, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre (alice.hutchings@cl.cam.ac.uk);
(3) Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh (ross.anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk).

2.1. Related Work
Most studies assessing the impact of deplatforming have worked with data on social networks. Deplatforming users may reduce activity and toxicity levels of relevant actors on Twitter [28] and Reddit [29], [30], limit the spread of conspiratorial disinformation on Facebook [31], reduce the engagement of peripheral members with hateful content [44], and minimise disinformation and extreme speech on YouTube [32]. But deplatforming has often made hate groups and individuals even more extreme, toxic and radicalised. They may view the disruption of their platform as an attack on their shared beliefs and values, and move to even more toxic places to continue spreading their message. There are many examples: the Reddit ban of r/incels in November 2017 led to the emergence of two standalone forums, incels.is and incels.net, which then grew rapidly; users banned from Twitter and Reddit exhibit higher levels of toxicity when migrating to Gab [33]; users migrated to their own standalone websites after getting banned from r/The Donald expressed higher levels of toxicity and radicalisation, even though their posting activity on the new platform decreased [45], [46]; the ‘Great Deplatforming’ directed users to other less regulated, more extreme platforms [47]; the activity of many right-wing users moved to Telegram increased multi-fold after being banned on major social media [34]; users banned from Twitter are more active on Gettr [48]; communities migrated to Voat from Reddit can be more resilient [49]; and roughly half of QAnon users moved to Poal after the Voat shutdown [50]. Blocking can also be ineffective for technical and implementation reasons: removing Facebook content after a delay appears to have been ineffective and had limited impact due to the short cycle of users’ engagement [51].

The major limitation of focusing on social networks is that these platforms are often under the control of a single tech company and thus content can be permanently removed without effective backup and recovery. We instead examine deplatforming a standalone website involving a concerted effort on a much wider scale by a series of tech companies, including some big entities that handle a large amount of Internet traffic. Such standalone communities, for instance, websites and forums, may be more resilient as the admin has control of all the content, facilitating easy backups and restores. While existing studies measure changes in posting activity and the behaviours of actors when their place is disrupted, we also provide insights about other stakeholders such as the forum operators, the community leading the campaign, and the tech firms that attempted the takedown.

Previous work has documented the impacts of law enforcement and industry interventions on online cybercrime marketplaces [20], cryptocurrency market price [52], DDoSfor-hire services [14], [15], the Kelihos, Zeus, and Nitol botnets [53], and the well-known click fraud network ZeroAccess [54]; yet how effective a concerted effort of several tech firms can be in deplatforming an extreme and radicalised community remains unstudied.

2.2. The Kiwi Farms Disruption
KIWI FARMS had been growing steadily over a decade (see Figure 1) and had been under Cloudflare’s DDoS protection for some years.[2] An increase of roughly 50% in forum activity happened during the COVID-19 lockdown starting in March 2020, presumably as people were spending more time online. Prior interventions have resulted in the forum getting banned from Google Adsense, and from Mastercard, Visa and PayPal in 2016; from hundreds of VPS providers between 2014–2019 [55]; and from selling merchandise on the print-on-demand marketplace Redbubble in 2016. XenForo, a close-source forum platform, revoked its license in late 2021 [56]. DreamHost stopped its domain registration in July 2021 after a software developer killed himself after being harassed by the site’s users. This did not disrupt the forum as it was given 14 days to seek another registrar [57]. While these interventions may have had negative effects on its profit and loss account, they did not impact its activity overall. The only significant disruption in the forum’s history was between 22 January and 9 February 2017 (19 days), when the forum’s owner suspended it himself due to his family being harassed [58].[3]

The disruption studied in this work was started by the online community in 2022. A malicious alarm was sent to the police in London, Ontario by a forum member on 5 August 2022, claiming that a Canadian trans activist had committed murders and was planning more, leading to her being swatted [23]. She and her family were then repeatedly tracked, doxxed, threatened, and generally harassed. In return, she launched a campaign on Twitter on 22 August 2022 under the hashtag #dropkiwifarms and planned a protest outside Cloudflare’s headquarters to pressure the company to deplatform the site [59]. This campaign generated lots of attention and mainstream headlines, which ultimately resulted in several tech firms trying to shut down the forum. This is the first time that the forum was completely inaccessible for an extended period due to an external action, with no activity on any online places including the dark web. It attempted to recover twice, but even when it eventually returned online, the overall activity was roughly halved.

The majority of actions taken to disrupt the forum occurred within the first two months of the campaign. Most of them were widely covered in the media and can be checked against public statements made by the industry and the forum admins’ announcements (see Figure 2). The forum came under a large DDoS attack on 23 August 2022, one day after the campaign started. It was then unavailable from 27 to 28 August 2022 due to ISP blackholing. Cloudflare terminated their DDoS prevention service on 3 September 2022 – just 12 days after the Twitter campaign started – due to an “unprecedented emergency and immediate threat to human life” [24]. The forum was still supported by DDoSGuard (a Russian competitor to Cloudflare), but that firm also suspended service on 5 September 2022 [25]. The forum was still active on the dark web but this .onion site soon became inaccessible too. On 6 September 2022, hCaptcha dropped support; the forum was removed from the Internet Archive on the same day [60]. This left it under DiamWall’s DDoS protection and hosted on VanwaTech – a hosting provider describing themselves as neutral and noncensored [61]. On 15 September 2022, DiamWall terminated their protection [26] and the ‘.top’ domain provider also stopped support [27]. The forum was completely down from 19 to 26 September 2022 and from 23 to 29 October 2022. From 23 October 2022 onwards, several ISPs intermittently rejected announcements or blackholed routes to the forum due to violations of their acceptable use policy, including Voxility and Tier-1 providers such as Lumen, Arelion, GTT and Zayo. This is remarkable as there are only about 15 Tier-1 ISPs in the world. The forum admin devoted extensive effort to maintaining the infrastructure, fixing bugs, and providing guidance to users in response to password breaches. Eventually, by routing through other ISPs, KIWI FARMS was able to get back online on the clearnet and remain stable, particularly following its second recovery in October 2022.

(Link/Archive)

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Formatting was fucked from the website so I'm not transferring any of the images. If this has already been posted then help me figure out how I can't find it on the site.

Edit: Sorry if it wasn't clear. This is not the entire article. I just posted over the part where they talk the most about the farms disruption. Check out archive link to see the full autistic hate of the farms on display!

 

[FamicomGorby]

Suffah academoscum

 

[Blewberry Nausea]

Ooh this is extensive autism. Lots of words and graphs and shit

6.5. Limitations and Future Work​

Measuring the link between physical harassment and KIWI FARMS, as well as the cost of actual harm caused by the forum members to real-world victims, would be a valuable contribution. However, we lack ground-truth data about reallife events, which cannot be solely observed from forum discussions. Investigating doxxing-related posts that share real-victim information would be a good start, but the main challenge is validating data posted by untrusted users at scale, in the absence of a robust way to identify users. Our forum data is limited in studying user migration from KIWI FARMS to its competitor LOLCOW FARM as pseudonyms are unavailable on LOLCOW FARM, so it is unclear if some KIWI FARMS members have shifted there.

Our data scrapers are running in near real time, but there is still a chance of missing messages that are posted but removed swiftly thereafter. We expect the number of such missing messages to be relatively small. More insights can be revealed from private or protected posts as people can be more extreme when posting in private. However, we choose not to analyse them due to potential harm, legality, and ethical issues. KIWI FARMS is now back online, and may well succeed in maintaining its accessibility on the clearnet. We will continue to monitor it, and extend our measurement to the more recent incidents in a follow-up report.

 

[Blewberry Nausea]

Formatting was fucked from the website so I'm not transferring any of the images. If this has already been posted then help me figure out how I can't find it on the site.

I just did a sitewide search for the url of the website hackernoon and all that came up was a few posts in the Kiwi Farms reviews thread, you’re good

Post in thread 'Kiwi Farms Reviews'

Apr 30, 2025

The HackerNoon BlueSky account has been spamming KiwiFarms related articles for the past week. 11 articles so far. Most of the data come from the group at Cambridge that LFJ spoke to last year. All articles have been credited to the author, Deplatform.

https://hackernoon.com/u/deplatform

https://archive.ph/VcEQO

• Plum Smuggler

• 
• 
• 

 

[Strix454]

This is only part of the paper, but the fall paper is available via link at the site it was archived from. One of the gems in the full paper is this concerning the dangers the brave researchers faced:

Researchers may be at risk and may experience various elevated digital threats when doing work on sensitive resources. Studying extremist forums may introduce a higher risk of retaliation than other forums, resulting in mental or physical harm. We have taken measures to minimise potential harm to researchers and involved actors when doing studies with human subjects and at-risk populations. For example, we consider options to anonymise authors’ names or use pseudonyms for any publication related to the project, including this paper, if necessary. We also refrain from directly looking at media, which may cause emotional harm; our scrapers thus only collect text while discarding images and videos. Although all datasets are widely accessible and can be gathered by the public, we refrain from scraping private and protected posts behind the login wall due to safety and legality concerns.

The paper's conclusions are also of particular interest. The author regrets the fact that Null was not arrested or "incapacitated" (isn't that a loaded word). They also regret that police didn't attack the farms as part of a "counter-terrorism" effort.


Online communities may not only act as a discussion place but provide mutual support for members who share common values. For some, it may be where they hang out; for others, it may become part of their identity. Legislators who propose to ban an online community might consider precedents such as Britain’s ban on Provisional Sinn Féin from 1988–94 due to its support for the Provisional IRA during the Troubles, or the bans on the Muslim Brotherhood enacted by various Arab regimes.14 Declaring a community to be illegal and thus forcing it underground may foster paranoid worldviews, increase signals associated with toxicity and radicalisation [45, 33] and have many other unintended consequences. The Kiwi Farms disruption, which involved a substantial concerted effort by the industry, is perhaps the best outcome that could be expected even if the censor were agile, competent and persistent. Yet this has demonstrated that merely attempting to deplatform an active standalone online community is not enough to deal effectively with hate and harassment, Especially as the attempt failed to arrest, exhaust, or otherwise incapacitate the forum’s maintainer.

We believe the harm and threats associated with online hate communities may justify action despite the right to free speech. But within the framework of the EU and the Council of Europe which is based on the European Convention on Human Rights, such action will have to be justified as proportionate, necessary and in accordance with the law. It is unlikely that taking down a whole community or arresting its maintainer because of a crime committed by a single member can be proportionate. For a takedown to be justified as necessary, it must also be effective, and this case study shows how high a bar that could be. For a takedown to be in accordance with the law, it cannot simply be a response to public pressure. There must be a law or regulation that determines predictably whether a specific piece of content is illegal, and a judge or other neutral finder of fact would have to be involved.

The last time a Labour government won power in Britain, it won on a promise to be ‘Tough on Crime, and Tough on the Causes of Crime’. Some scholars of online abuse are now coming to a similar conclusion that the issue may demand a more nuanced approach [3, 62]: as well as the targeted removal of content that passes an objective threshold of illegality, the private sector and governments should collaborate to combine takedowns with measures such as education and psycho-social support [112]. And where the illegality involves violence, it is even more vital to work with local police forces and social workers rather than just attacking the online symptoms [109].

There are multiple research programmes and field experiments to effectively detox young men from misogynistic attitudes, whether in youth clubs and other small groups, at the scale of schools, or even by gamifying the identification of propaganda that promotes hate. But most countries still lack a unifying strategy for violence reduction [113]. In both the US and the UK, for example, while incel-related violence against women falls under the formal definition of terrorism, it is excluded from police counterterrorism practice, and the politicisation of misogyny has made this a tussle space in which political leaders and police chiefs have difficulty in taking effective action. In turbulent debates, policymakers should first ask which tools are likely to work, and it is in this context that we offer the present case study.


So I guess the short summary is that deplatforming the site failed. So next time they need to direct the full powers of the police forces of several governments to crush the individuals operating the sites rather than try to attempt to shut down the site itself. Academics being overtly and un-ironically outright fascists again.

 

[Kiwisee]

And it’s all because we say that men cannot become women.

 

[Blewberry Nausea]

Has @Null looked at this bullshit? It’s like he could do a series on these fucking people. Cambridge going full throttle on cheese connoisseur Josh Conner Moon. Lmfao

I am genuinely flabbergasted

There are multiple research programmes and field experiments to effectively detox young men from misogynistic attitudes, whether in youth clubs and other small groups, at the scale of schools, or even by gamifying the identification of propaganda that promotes hate. But most countries still lack a unifying strategy for violence reduction [113]. In both the US and the UK, for example, while incel-related violence against women falls under the formal definition of terrorism, it is excluded from police counterterrorism practice, and the politicisation of misogyny has made this a tussle space in which political leaders and police chiefs have difficulty in taking effective action. In turbulent debates, policymakers should first ask which tools are likely to work, and it is in this context that we offer the present case study.

Acknowledgments​

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the shepherd for their insightful and constructive feedback. We are grateful to Richard Clayton, Alastair R. Beresford, Yi Ting Chua, Ben Collier, Tina Marjanov, Konstantinos Ioannidis, Daniel R. Thomas, and Ilia Shumailov for their invaluable comments. This work is supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 949127).

 

[Lovely Kin]

It's amusing how before tranny fatigue, one single troon could meltdown and everyone would try to obey.

 

[Hitman One]

The Kiwi Farms disruption, which involved a substantial concerted effort by the industry, is perhaps the best outcome that could be expected

But the site is in a better position than ever. All the shit they threw at our Dear Sneeder only served to fuel his dark autistic powers.

 

[Gandhi's Left Hook]

Has @Null looked at this bullshit? It’s like he could do a series on these fucking people. Cambridge going full throttle on cheese connoisseur Josh Conner Moon. Lmfao

I am genuinely flabbergasted

It wouldnt suprise me if he knows about this in the interest of self preservation. I would love to see a MATI session with a deep dive on the people involved in this deplatforming thuggery.

But the site is in a better position than ever. All the shit they threw at our Dear Sneeder only served to fuel his dark autistic powers.

Notice how they only go to the end of 22 with their usermetrics? They know they failed but are still trying to claim victory. Reminds me of the Iranians and Palestinians "Even though the Jews killed all our commanders and flattened our military infrastructure, we totally put the hurt on them more and won guys!"

 

[Made In Wales]

Long may the 'Farms continue!

 

[Null]

The forum admin devoted extensive effort to maintaining the infrastructure, fixing bugs, and providing guidance to users in response to password breaches. Eventually, by routing through other ISPs, KIWI FARMS was able to get back online on the clearnet and remain stable, particularly following its second recovery in October 2022.

You're goddamned right.

 

[Vect]

The forum admin devoted extensive effort to maintaining the infrastructure, fixing bugs, and providing guidance to users in response to password breaches. Eventually, by routing through other ISPs, KIWI FARMS was able to get back online on the clearnet and remain stable, particularly following its second recovery in October 2022.

It gives Null full credit for the work he put in.

Edit: Ninja'd by the man himself.

 

[Crabpuncher]

Ooh this is extensive autism. Lots of words and graphs and shit


View attachment 7751220View attachment 7751221View attachment 7751222

Wait so the tracking and research ends 3 years ago?

 

[WonderWino]

So I guess the short summary is that deplatforming the site failed. So next time they need to direct the full powers of the police forces of several governments to crush the individuals operating the sites rather than try to attempt to shut down the site itself. Academics being overtly and un-ironically outright fascists again.

That method might actually work. After all once they find out about his biggest weakness they'll have him right where they want him - they'll just threaten to ban all imports of his favorite cheeses and replace them with shitty american squeeze cheese. He'll break faster than winston in room 101. All we'll hear is the sound of null yelling do it to the beauty parlor posters, screeching like a madman before SWAT pulls up in all our driveways to arrest us at the same time in the largest coordinated anti troon mass arrest in history

and somewhere in the distance, echoing from the mountains in finland, the sound of chris chan cackling in victory will be heard, announcing his final victory over his most hated enemy

 

[Gandhi's Left Hook]

It gives Null full credit for the work he put in.

Edit: Ninja'd by the man himself.

Yea but that's not because they like @Null . The underlying msg here is that they need to make more inroads on hindering the forum admin for this to work in the future.

A lot of globohomo shit is written this way. The target of "praise" is the next target.

 

[No-Eyed Square Guy]

He'll break faster than winston in room 101.

"Do it to Kirsche!"

 

[I Shidded I Farded I Came]

Researchers may be at risk and may experience various elevated digital threats when doing work on sensitive resources. Studying extremist forums may introduce a higher risk of retaliation than other forums, resulting in mental or physical harm. We have taken measures to minimise potential harm to researchers and involved actors when doing studies with human subjects and at-risk populations. For example, we consider options to anonymise authors’ names or use pseudonyms for any publication related to the project, including this paper, if necessary.

I have seen that woman somewhere before. I am not absolutely sure where from but I think she is one of those WEF "stakeholder" censor you for your own good types. I also grabbed the .pdf if anyone wants to read this shit in a better format.

 

[Made In Wales]

Wait so the tracking and research ends 3 years ago?

They're probably waiting for Patel Pajeet to file a record of 2022-25, not knowing that he spent that time covering his office and everything inside it in poopy.

Oh, and any excuse to play this classic again... amazing what can happen when you parody the song 'Yma O Hyd' by Dafydd Iwan and can see that the struggles of the country of Wales over the years are similar to the many challenges that Kiwi Farms faces today.

Oppression is oppression, whether against a nation over time or a website which shows up the bad behaviour of the senile, mentally retarded and those who should have been swallowed at conception:

 

[Breadbassket]

I feel like this has been posted before.