You've maybe heard of Kiwi Farms, one of the most destructive sites online, but what exactly was it? I spent years talking to victims and their friends and family, investigating how it destroyed people's lives and why it's still not dead yet
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What Kiwi Farms did to Keffals (vicious harassing, doxxing, SWATing) was a version of what it had been doing to faceless, struggling people for a long time. if someone was on the edge of poverty, they tried to shove them into it
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If they can, Kiwi Farms will try to socially isolate someone, get them fired and make their life as alienating and difficult as possible "The goal was to kill me," one target told me
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Kiwi Farms justifies all of this with perverted, dystopian idea of free speech. It is the democratic promise of the internet given to those who are alienated, angry, and alone. Unfortunately it's been influential in setting the course for other swaths of the internet
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GamerGate, QAnon, LibsofTikTok, MAGA boomers threatening schools, random butterfly sanctuaries, and pediatric hospitals, wittingly or not, have at least partial lineage from Kiwi Farms
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Kiwi Farms, accordingly, ended up being the expression of a lot its users' anxieties, many of whom kind of hate themselves and use KF as cope for that
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all of this of course was being managed and spurred on by an adult man living with his mother, who devoted his life to obsessing over random, obscure people online
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I wanted to try to explain Kiwi Farms in full, talk to victims, and also speak to the wider influence it has. Anyone can use the internet to make other people's lives hell with very few consequences and that feels like something we should fix
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Kiwi Farms is heavily motivated by virulent transphobia, but reporters have written about other versions of this kind of aggressive internet harassment happening. There aren't good checks for online abuse
nytimes.com/2021/01/30/tec
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People @alibreland follows or mentioned can reply
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also, many many thanks to people like , , (and everyone else!) who have been targeted by Kiwi Farms for their willingness to speak with me for this story.
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If one person stalks a victim, it's a crime. If a community stalks a victim, it's not a crime. Because...reasons? It makes no sense.
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