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!
 
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Totally fair and you’ve convinced me, I will actually read it and try to take it for what it is rather than what my bias says.

here's another part that rings true:

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. [...] 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.

i can say with confidence that all the efforts surrounding trying to take KF down has made me WAY more toxic lmao
 
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DreamHost stopped its domain registration in July 2021 after a software developer killed himself after being harassed by the site’s users.
Just for clarity, that software developer didn't kill himself because of harassment. He:
  • Finished his life's work (an accurate emulation of an obscure 90s video game)
  • Manipulated his husband into driving him to an illegal castration doctor so he could transition behind his husband's back
  • Ran into financial difficulties, and upon discovering his husband needed to adopt his three orphaned nephews, ran away to Japan
  • Isolated himself in an apartment while taking large amounts of illegal prescription medication with no medical oversight
  • Detransitioned and became even more depressed, never leaving his apartment
  • Discovered his online internet friends were getting exposed for being diaperfur paedophile zoosadists on the farms
  • Decided to kill himself while engaging in a doomed-to-fail extortion attempt on the site administrator with a hard deadline that was communicated and landed while the administrator was asleep, in the hopes his suicide would shut down the farms to protect previously mentioned diaperfur paedophile zoosadists
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
Just for clarity that Canadian trans activist was not swatted by Kiwifarms. What happened was:
  • The trans activist groomed impressionable minors (or at least facilitated their grooming) under the guise of running a "Catboy ranch" on Discord, where minors were repeatedly exposed to pornography and sexual discussions with adults, while making BDSM "fart queen" pornography
  • The trans activist also facilitated distribution of illegally sourced and homemade injectable pharmaceuticals (some of which were demonstrably dangerously contaminated with cat hair), encouraging minors to consume them without medical or parental supervision
  • The Kiwifarms collated public data and information shared by the aforementioned trans activist to discover more about their personal life
  • An individual unaffiliated with the farms used this information to swat the trans activist, a move that was condemned by regular users of this site
  • The trans activist then engaged in a disinformation campaign to obscure their involvement with paedophilic grooming and illegal dangerous pharmaceutical distribution, in the hopes of removing the site that was holding them accountable
  • The trans activist then ran defense for paedophiles while using donations (that had expressly been donated for other purposes) to consume large amounts of illegal recreational drugs
  • The negative reaction to the trans activist running defense for paedophiles resulted in them being driven off the internet by their own community, although they briefly attempted to stage a comeback by running a terrible true crime YouTube channel.
I just thought if any of this research team happened upon this thread they may appreciate the clarification, if they wanted to publish an erratum notice in their journal :) Citations can be found in the relevant threads that they're no doubt already aware of if they are mentioning these individuals. I don't know if I'm a "core survivor" or "casual survivor" but I trust this comment does not score too highly on toxicity, identity attack, and threat scores. Although as the methodology for calculating these scores using Google Perspective API has not been shared, I am unable to say for certain.
 
I wouldn't support censoring stormfront either unless there was evidence of actual crimes being planned on their website. Bitching about niggers and saying your prayers to daddy hitler are not a crime.
Agreed. And more people have been killed by users on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter then Kiwifarms or even Stormfront.

The arguments again "extremism" are the thin edge of the axe as it comes down.
 
Agreed. And more people have been killed by users on Reddit, Facebook and Twitter then Kiwifarms or even Stormfront.

The arguments again "extremism" are the thin edge of the axe as it comes down.
Communities dedicated to "extremist" ideologies tend to take better care to keep the fedposting off of their platforms precisely because they're aware of the target on their back.

I don't consider KF "extremist" at all but as a parallel example, because it's seen as a "trolling website", it really cracks down on those trolling plans and stuff in a way that Reddit will never be expected to.
 
"Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that I'm online in an Emergent Cyberthreat situation. I'm watching you on KiwiFarms and I have to shoot through a crowd of website admins to defend myself..."

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They don't care. they think they are inherently right and everybody who disagree with them are all stupid, every "ist" in the book, a nazi, e.t.c.
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Yup. That's them. That's the pesky little Left fascist fuckers.

Evil men would will it that we can only will evil! So I'll fight for total freedom before I'l lfight for total correctness when retards and devils give the name to "goodness".
Oh, I don't know anything about that. I just heard the Supreme Dipshit Overlords were very upset with this place and promised to severely punish anyone and everyone who had anything to do with it.
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So I signed up.

September of '22 to maybe Spring or even Sunmer 2023 were some of the darkest days of the Farms. We were completely fucked for weeks. Had to go into exile on the Fediverse while Null looked for new infrastructure providers and somewhere we could find a domain. We all legit thought it was over.
You didn't consider the problem from their perspective. An extremely unpopular group of malicious assholes enjoy being criminal jerks at the expense of the general population. They get away with it because of their anonymity. A small group of internet autists were determined to document these antics, so the Fruit and Nut Club decided to evaporate this insignificant site and bully and/or screw with anyone associated with it.

By doing so, they elevated the visibility of Kiwi Farm to a global level. All the people these shadowy weasels have been cyberbullying for decades now had a place to go. Anyone who had been screwed with by the loopy Internazi fruitcakes had somewhere to dump their raw data. No matter how successful they were in suppressing the site, people would keep looking for it. Even major Marxist oligarchies with national level assets haven't been able to get a grip on own-goals like this. The mean-spirited and bone stupid overreaction of these relatively powerless and cretinous nutjobs turned an inconsequential annoyance into an existential threat.

So yeah, of course they eventually declared victory and crawled off. They're not suicidal.
 
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What a little faggot.


Hi there! I am a Visiting Researcher at the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, part of the Security Group. I love observing the night sky, and I am part of the Cambridge Astronomical Society. My lovely home is Vietnam where the world's largest cave was discovered. I am proud of our cuisine — don’t miss it if you're visiting the country.


Imagine coming from vietcong to study at Cambridge and doing your research on Kiwi Farms. This man brings shame on his ancestors.
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I mean, we have things like PBS and the corporation for public broadcasting, but from my knowledge, that was funded as-needed from normal taxation, and not from the irritating system of licensure.
Federal funding for PBS was under 15% even before Trump abolished the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So the descent into total wokery (from the classic center-left position with some token Republicans) has mostly been paid for by woke corporations, not the feds.
These people are so fucking hellbent on stopping dissent and they still keep losing.
They're not that hellbent. They're lazy and the fight is going out of them. Otherwise we'd be seeing new articles instead of these clowns just recycling the same lie-filled article over and over and occasionally trotting out some hideous brick faced chink rapist in a bargain rack dress to "present" it from time to time.
 
What a shit paper, their datasets end in 2022, we've gotten significantly more traffic and active members since then.
@neger psykolog Have you considered maybe even someone terminally online doesn’t have time to read every thread or research every iteration of an article and that recent exposure of previous hilarious ‘scientific’ wankery over the deadly KiwiFarms is still hilarious and deserves mocking even if it is old?
It's very valuable to see how these circles think and observe things, cause they will have the ears of people who might use their advice and insight in a more active and offensive role.
I think there is an argument to be made that even though the data sets are old and this is indeed a regurgitation of an older piece of work by lazy academics, the fact that they are republishing it is newsworthy.
It's a matter of some interest that they keep recycling this. Is this literally all they have? And yet they trot out Dong-Gone and re-release it under another name repeatedly?
I think the subtext of what I was trying to point out was:
  • This actual work was done at the peak of #dropkiwifarms autism and actually had indirect input from Liz Fong Jones that was already documented in their thread
  • The only reason this came up again is hackernoon is filling out what look like "subreddits" and using SEO magic to do this. It isn't indicative of any current "movement" and you're basically just giving hackernoon a bunch of attention/success (whether they're a good/decent website is unknown since this could all literally be bot activity)
  • Since the actual work was done during peak #dropkiwifarms it isn't indicative of any actual current effort and indeed is so old that one of the authors literally died of old age/a heart attack - so I get why people are angry but you're putting it towards a paper that was written in a different pre-trump era.
  • To be very clear: you guys are getting minorly MATI at what is basically just SEO padding and isn't some semi-cult. This is just SEO padding for Hacker Noon which now will benefit from a bunch of visits and SEO. They have an entire category on deplatforming and this specific research piece is cited in different ways that can be seen as either pro/anti-KF (they're likely being done by AI). You're literally getting MATI but at an AI effort to pad out Hacker Noon "subreddits" with khantent that was written and only relevant in a very small window a few years ago.
  • I'm not suggesting people shouldn't react to the article or what it suggests but people should keep in mind they're just giving more life to an EU-funded research paper that no one cared about for the past 2 years.

edit: this all reminds me of a very penultimate thread to do with a very penultimately similar topic:
 
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He says what our pope most excellently said: "Freedom is to be free to do the good".
Without freedom, doing good is meaningless because it is not the result of a rational moral choice.
I get the impression that Vietnamese are overrepresented on the mega-bluepilled/leftoid midwits. I don’t know if it’s the education system there or what, but I find it disappointing how many of them are retarded.
Maybe native Vietnamese. Most of the Vietnamese who fled to America after the fall of Saigon absolutely detested Communism for obvious reasons and had often lost friends, family members and property to it. So they had a political outlook pretty similar to Cubans who emigrated for nearly identical reasons.

This zoomer looking nong, actually he literally looks like a baby in adult form, obviously isn't one of these.
but now im stuck here forever even more radicalized than ever mother fuckers
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Looking at their data, it appears that after a heavy counter-advocacy campaign of KF as a place to be gay and do crimes, quite a lot of "newcomers" checked out the site and acted like dumbshit retards. It reminds me of how reddit got overrun by pedophiles around 2010-11 when Anderson Cooper went on CNN and advertised that reddit was a great site for pedophiles. Unlike reddit, it seem like KF survived/recovered.

You can also see this tactic being used on real-world political movements, too. Tea Party, OWS, "alt-right" were all pretty broad-spectrum populist movements in their incipient stages. And then they got hit-pieced by a mass-market legacy media narrative and you had a sudden influx of dumbshit retards who heard about it on the TeeVee and believed everything. At which point the original movements were unrecoverable.

The traffic driven to KF by the hostile advertising campaign was intended to turn KF into what these people fantasize it to be.
It's like an intentionally weaponized Eternal September.
 
Why do SJWs -- and the MSM that they infiltrate -- keep dumping out all these insufferable new soy buzzwords, such as "deplatforming"?
Because they know it would be harder to sell "we want to use political violence and armed government thugs to censor people we disagree with by jailing or murdering them."
 
To be very clear: you guys are getting minorly MATI at what is basically just SEO padding and isn't some semi-cult. This is just SEO padding for Hacker Noon which now will benefit from a bunch of visits and SEO. They have an entire category on deplatforming and this specific research piece is cited in different ways that can be seen as either pro/anti-KF (they're likely being done by AI). You're literally getting MATI but at an AI effort to pad out Hacker Noon "subreddits" with khantent that was written and only relevant in a very small window a few years ago.
I read it on site, I didn't give them any clicks. Fuck them.
 
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By the way there is a more current paper/research by someone else about the "replatformization" of k-farms that looks a lot more into stuff like the $150k fundraise and uses a bunch of academic terms for anyone who is interested:
 
  • I'm not suggesting people shouldn't react to the article or what it suggests but people should keep in mind they're just giving more life to an EU-funded research paper that no one cared about for the past 2 years.
Almost all the news articles about the deplatforming used "facts" originally derived from this article. These articles are the bulk of citations in the Kiwi Farms Wikipedia article. An alarming number of people view Wikipedia as the ultimate source of truth, not even realizing it isn't even minimally reliable and is packed with outright lies and propaganda.

Current and future articles will just openly crib from Wikipedia. AI will give answers partly based on these articles and on Wikipedia. Most people will blindly accept this.

Even a precedential opinion of the Tenth Circuit cited these made-up "facts" in deciding against us in court.

Even if it's recycled garbage it can't simply be ignored. These things have actual real world impact.
 
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