How Journalists Botched Their Coverage Of #DropKiwiFarms

You can sympathize with the person you are covering without becoming their PR lackey

Hello! A bit of housekeeping: Some of you may already know this, but Blocked and Reported is going on tour next month. 

October 22 — Unconfirmed, but likely a show at a university in New England — stay tuned!

October 24 — Boston, Mass.

October 25 — NYC (sold out, but apparently they reserve some tickets for walk-ins at the last minute — or check the site on the off chance there were cancellations and some opened up)

October 29 — Arlington, Va. (first show sold out, tickets still available for late show)

I would obviously love to see any of you at these shows. I’m also giving a solo talk at the University of Wyoming early next month and another at MIT in November. The one in Laramie is public, Monday, October 3 at 5:00 p.m. in the Union Yellowstone Ballroom. It is about my book rather than internet drama. What a relief!

It’s tempting to look for easy answers to complex problems. But what if trendysolutions to pressing social issues actually hinder the progress we’re trying to achieve? Join us for a live conversation with the author of The Quick Fix. We’ll discuss the challenges of research in an overwhelming media landscape, and how to be responsible information consumers and adept critical thinkers. All are welcome!

I really like live talks and events and I’m hoping to ramp things up on that front, so if you have a connection to a university or venue or conference and think I/we would be a good fit, you know where to find me.

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A few times a year I get deeply obsessed with a story, and that happened this month. The story is #DropKiwiFarms. Despite its outward appearance as little more than inscrutable (and loathsome) Internet Drama, it is actually quite an important story about free speech, internet culture, and how journalism (dys)functions.

I’d offer a few news links to summarize the basic facts, but the reporting has been so bad and so credulous that I’m not really comfortable linking out on this, and will provide a short summary instead, keeping links to a minimum. We went loooong on this on Blocked and Reported, in two episodes (voluminous links there if you want to dig deeper), but this post will be crisper and more argumentative — a lot of this stuff is just easier to understand and process in print, especially if you are coming to this from a place of little prior knowledge of these figures and controversies (which also means you’re living a better life than I am).

I’m going to make sure this following section is public, but everything after that will be for premium subscribers only.

The Basic, Just-The-Facts Rundown That You Can Skip If You’re Familiar With This Story Already

Clara Sorrenti, a.k.a. Keffals, is a 28-year-old (according to the internet) leftist political Twitch streamer usually based in Canada. In early August she was “swatted” — someone sent a threatening email to the London, Ontario local government “from” her, leading to a terrifying, heavily armed response from law enforcement. She was taken into custody and her and her partner’s computer equipment and phones were taken away. Then she was released and her stuff was given back. 

Sorrenti launched a GoFundMe and raised $100,000. She also launched #DropKiwiFarms, a hashtag geared at pressuring Cloudflare to no longer offer DDoS protection to the website Kiwi Farms (I will define that shortly). Along the way, she experienced more doxxing and harassment, and eventually moved to Europe for a bit, where she stayed with her friend and fellow streamer Ellen Murray in Belfast and experienced yet more doxxing, calls for the cops to come where she was staying (though luckily not a full-blown swatting in this case), and an apparent stalker: Someone posted a very creepy image from outside Ellen’s apartment with a threatening note that had multiple Kiwi Farms references. (That image, and the kid who said he posted it, was the subject of our second episode on #DropKiwiFarms.)

There’s some background on Kiwi Farms here — I’d quibble with some of the details and claims but the history is correct, I think — but the short version is that it is a site where people gather to make fun of what they call “lolcows,” or laugh-out-loud cows, which are basically just ridiculous internet figures. 

Kiwi Farms is a very toxic place with a slur-laden argot — it has a lot of folks originally from the legendary/infamous Something Awful forums and the chan sites — but it also contains weirdly meticulous records of the online activities of a group of individuals who you will really only encounter if 1) you cross them on Twitter or some other social media platform; 2) you are already familiar with their internet subcommunity; or 3) you are a journalist or other type of researcher interested in internet bullshit [raises hand tiredly]. Let’s say you get in a fight with a communist furry named @ACABMarxPaw (I haven’t had enough coffee to come up with a more clever example). It’s a small account but a hyperactive one. You’re just blown away at how… off this person is. They have latched onto you and are tweeting at you over and over, obsessively, accusing you of being a fascist because you suggested that in some cases it’s okay to call the cops on someone. With a nervous chuckle, you hit the block button. You try to get back to work but the encounter stuck with you — it escalated so quickly! Eventually, your curiosity gets the best of you and, with a deep and world-weary sigh, you enter a stream of characters into Google that probably shouldn’t exist: @-A-C-A-B-M-A-R-X-P-A-W.

The only thing you’re likely to find is their posts on Twitter and elsewhere. Unless, of course, they have a Kiwi Farms page — in which case you might find hundreds of posts digging into their online history, with details about their real-world life and identity, online and offline associations, and so on. It’s a very strange feeling; you have come across a website that closely monitors someone who 99.999999% of the world wouldn’t think to be worth closely monitoring. 

Some folks call this “stalking,” including in the New York article I linked to above. I don’t think that’s a useful term. You can stalk someone in real life without them knowing it, but cyberstalking is defined as “the repeated use of electronic communications to harass or frighten someone, for example by sending threatening emails” — that is, you reveal yourself to them. Because what is “stalking” someone online if you don’t interact with them? It’s just… reading what they post. I guess there might be weird examples where you, like, gain access to their private online spaces but don’t reach out to them, but often when people accuse Kiwi Farms of “cyberstalking” or “stalking,” usually what they mean is “they keep an eye on this person and post a lot of information about them to Kiwi Farms.”

That’s where this all gets complicated. Kiwi Farms does have fairly strong internal norms against interacting with the targets in real life (“touching the poo”), or harassing them in ways that extend beyond the (often colorfully nasty) posts on the site itself. But as I pointed out on the pod, there’s an element of implausible deniability here: The longest threads on Kiwi Farms extend for literally thousands of pages and tens of thousands of posts, and include users mocking these individuals in the most colorful ways imaginable. “I’m going to kill this person” is frowned upon and, as far as I can tell, will generally get the post downvoted to hell and removed by a mod; “this person is so miserable and fucked up they should end it all, already” is just a normal Wednesday afternoon post. There were at least 50,000 posts about Sorrenti on the site before the two threads in question were locked. The idea that a website that focuses and incentivizes so much hate doesn’t contribute to real-world harassment is laughable, because if even a tiny fraction of Kiwi Farms’ regular users violated the internal norms in question — which they could do without anyone knowing — that could constitute a significant amount of harassment. Plus, anyone can read a Kiwi Farms thread, even if they don’t have an account on the site.

And the targets are often much smaller fries than Sorrenti (who herself isn’t even that popular a Twitch streamer, and who most people reading this probably haven’t heard of prior to this controversy). Kiwi Farms really does sometimes get obsessed with tiny, insignificant targets, many of them with severe mental health problems. It is not an easy place to feel any sympathy toward.

The owner of Kiwi Farms, Joshua Moon, who during the present controversy has taken on the aspect of a supervillain plotting from afar (he lives in Serbia if I’m remembering right, but don’t quote me on that), often emphasizes that nothing that goes on at Kiwi Farms is illegal, and I think he’s almost certainly correct about that. For very important, well-established reasons, a threat posted to a website by some user can’t really be used to cause legal problems for the site itself — if things were otherwise, it would destroy the internet instantly — and I think the fact that violent threats are usually taken down quickly from Kiwi Farms makes it harder to come up with a legal theory for why the site should be shut down. And you know what’s also legal, at least usually? Doxxing — that is, posting the address, phone number, and so on of someone on the internet. Kiwi Farms does that a lot. Some users are uncomfortable with it but big threads always seem to include doxxing. Sometimes KFers take it upon themselves to dox the targets, and sometimes they paste information posted on other sites onto the target’s KF thread.

A lot of horrible, virulent speech is legal! Especially in the States. You can insult someone with transphobic slurs, mock their looks, mock their mental health conditions, mock their family drama, post their address, post the address of their annoying online friend you don’t like, and so on. All this speech is given textbook First Amendment protection, with the exception of illegally acquired information.

The fact that vile speech is First Amendment-protected, however, doesn’t mean that private companies have to participate in publishing it online, or keeping it there. This is where Cloudflare, the company Sorrenti began pressuring to drop Kiwi Farms, comes in. Cloudflare is one of the premier companies offering security and performance services for websites. Perhaps most importantly, it offers a shield against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. According to Cloudflare, “A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of Internet traffic.” These sorts of attacks are illegal under U.S. law.

I am fuzzy on the technical specifics, but it’s harder to find reliable DDoS protection than it is to find a web host. To the best of my understanding, Kiwi Farms is likely always to be able to put its website online. The question is whether it will be able to fend off the inevitable attacks that follow, but there aren’t all that many options for companies that can do so. And those companies can always be pressured to say “no thanks” to Kiwi Farms. So Sorrenti’s argument was that Cloudflare should drop its protection and allow illegal attacks to take down Kiwi Farms.

This worked. The entire mainstream media agreed, showering her in positive coverage that presented #DropKiwiFarms as something of a no-brainer. At first, Cloudflare put out a principled statement which noted that “more than 20 percent of the web relies directly on Cloudflare’s services” and “Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn’t respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character.” (I guess in this analogy the residents aren’t fleeing, but instead are yelling threats at and personal information about @ACABMarxPaw out the window as everything collapses around them.) Days later, a 180: a new statement announcing that things had gotten so bad, so abusive, so dangerous, that Kiwi Farms had to go. The site’s continuing existence posed an “immediate threat to human life,” so Cloudflare was withdrawing its services. Hackers welcome! Anyone who went to Kiwi Farms was blocked and met with incredibly alarming language: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.” On top of that, Kiwi Farms was deleted from the Internet Archives, which, as The Verge points out, is quite unusual — the site’s policy is usually only to delete sites whose own owners ask for them to be scrubbed. 

That’s more or less where we’re at. Kiwi Farms has been jumping from domain to domain, and Sorrenti pressures any site offering DDoS protection to, you know, #DropKiwiFarms. Every new chapter in the saga is followed breathlessly by the media (a Vice film crew is or was following Sorrenti around), and Sorrenti has a moderately sized but very online and very motivated squad of activists and journalists who will rain online hellfire upon anyone who 1) questions the campaign in any way, 2) points out inaccuracies in her or the media’s claims about Kiwi Farms, or 3) attempts to raise broader free speech and open internet issues in even a general manner. (I had a bad time as a result.)

Thursday, after direct pressure from Sorrenti and her followers, Kiwi Farms’ latest security provider, DiamWall, folded, and what had been the most well-functioning iteration of the site since Cloudflare’s decision went down not long thereafter. Moon, for his part, has been consistent in his messaging since that decision: He thinks that in the long run, he’ll be able to prevail and a stable, speedy version of Kiwi Farms will be accessible. In the meantime, it’s been touch and go — accessing the site has sometimes been tricky or impossible, and sometimes even the onion site has been offline. But the site has generally been available over the last couple weeks, if you know where to look and have a little technical savvy, just in a vastly diminished state that would likely repel curious normies unfamiliar with the site, and probably (I’m guessing) even some regular users who don’t care enough about it to jump through the hoops of slow service, disconnects, and constant domain-hopscotching.

Okay, those are the basics as I understand them. On to some editorializing.

The Journalism About Kiwi Farms And Its History Has Been Extremely Lazy And Negligent

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation informs you that “Founded by Joshua Moon in 2013, Kiwi Farms is the forum where the 2019 Christchurch mosque gunman revealed his intentions hours before carrying out the attack.” Except anyone with any familiarity with Kiwi Farms knows that this exceptionally serious charge isn’t true. Rather, the shooter — like some others — posted to 8chan. 

Joshua Moon is a hard-line free speech purist who doesn’t make exceptions for egregiously offensive content. Here’s what really happened, courtesy of Wikipedia (but with plenty of links to see for yourself):

In March 2019, Kiwi Farms republished both the livestream and the manifesto of Brenton Tarrant, the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings. Shortly after, website owner Joshua Moon publicly denied a request by New Zealand Police to voluntarily hand over all data on posts about the shooting, including the email and IP addresses of posters.[17] Moon responded aggressively and mockingly, calling New Zealand a “shithole country”,[21][17] and stated that he did not “give a single solitary fuck what section 50 of your faggot law says about sharing your email”.[56][57] He deemed the request a censorship attempt and argued that New Zealand authorities “do not have the legal reach to imprison everyone who's posted [the video]”.[21] Kiwi Farms was one of several websites blocked by New Zealand Internet service providers after the attack.[58] In New Zealand, those who were caught possessing or sharing images or videos of the attack faced charges that could result in 14-year prison sentences.[59][60]

The present version of the CBC’s article has been corrected to reflect all this, but it was the sort of mistake you can make only if you are unfamiliar with the site and haven’t spoken to anyone who has been tracking or involved with it for a long time. 

At the top of that same article, the CBC also informs you that Kiwi Farms is so vicious, it attacked a trans woman simply for trying to defend a suicide hotline for trans people: 

Software developer and transgender activist Liz Fong-Jones remembers how unsafe she felt the first time she says she was harassed by users of American internet forum Kiwi Farms in 2017.

“I was worried for my life, that someone was going to turn up with a gun and shoot into my bedroom,” she told Day 6’s Saroja Coelho.

Despite never having interacted with the forum at the time, Fong-Jones said she was targeted by some users because she had donated to Trans Lifeline, a non-profit organization serving transgender people in the United States and Canada.

This is an outrageous passage if, again, you have any familiarity with the controversy in question. There is no sense in which Fong-Jones was attacked “because she had donated to Trans Lifeline.” Rather, she was attacked because two women who Kiwi Farms believes she friends with, Trans Lifeline executive director Greta Gustava Martel and director of operations Nina Chaubal, were accused by Kiwi Farms of grifting, and of running a suicide hotline that only rarely actually answered calls and that had no safeguards in place regarding who was allowed to answer calls. (I haven’t looked into whether the three were actually friends.)

And you know what? Kiwi Farms was right. Sometimes they are right. At least about the grifting. Trans Lifeline itself has acknowledged, in its 2017 tax filings, that Martel and Chaubal stole $375,000 from, again, a suicide hotline. (My sense is the organization has now cleaned up entirely, though I don’t know much about it.)

This is not honest reporting. You don’t have to pretend Kiwi Farms is a virtuous place, or that Fong-Jones wasn’t victimized — in fact she did have a thread on Kiwi Farms, and surely that was unpleasant — but you do have to report the facts. It is extremely dishonest for Fong-Jones to pretend, in 2022, that her negative interactions with Kiwi Farms had nothing to do with real-life criminal activity on the part of the service’s executive leadership is ridiculous — that she was targeted merely for defending a helpless and invaluable suicide hotline. It’s a cartoonish storyline that makes her an unalloyed victim and Kiwi Farms an unalloyed perpetrator. (See Corinna Cohn for more on this — it’s a crazy story that included one of the embezzlers allegedly showing up at the house of Joshua Moon’s mother, which is what we would normally call “stalking.”)

All Things Considered had its own Kiwi Farms embarrassment last week. This is from a segment involving Rita Katz, who (somehow) markets herself as a counter-extremism expert:

[NPR NATIONAL SECURITY REPORTER ODETTE] YOUSEF: Well, Rita Katz has been monitoring extremist movements online for more than 20 years, and she puts Kiwi Farms in the same constellation as other platforms like 4chan and 8chan, Gab and Incel. 

RITA KATZ: These are not just hate sites as Cloudflare is trying to pretend them to be, but there [sic — think this should be “these”] are terrorist factories. 

YOUSEF: Terrorist factories. Katz says these inspire and enable violence. And she points to mass shootings at a Pittsburgh synagogue, at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, at a Walmart in El Paso and the recent attempted attack at an FBI field office in Cincinnati. You know, these are places people have talked about violence that they would commit and where that violence has been celebrated. So she thinks disrupting access to these sites can immediately disrupt environments that are known to cause real-world violence. But I will note that it also can lead to a game of whack-a-mole.

Again, this is just false. There are websites where people post their plans to commit violent acts. Kiwi Farms, loathsome as it is, is not one of those places, because violent threats are stigmatized and taken down. The distinction between a website that hosts disturbing content and a website where people come to actively plot violence (one of the disturbing places about a site like 8chan is that when future shooters show up there, they are often egged on) is pretty clear. Or it should be, at least. (I emailed and DMed Katz, politely as always, a few days ago, but didn’t hear back. I also DMed Yousef yesterday. If any of them get back to me, I’ll update the post here.)

I don’t want this section to be a novel so I’ll leave it at that. But briefly, so as not to ignore one of the most serious allegations, I also think the oft-repeated claim that Kiwi Farms directly caused or “was linked to” multiple suicides, is, when presented without any further context, misleading — not to mention an irresponsible way to report on suicide. On this front, I can’t really do anything but link to Moon’s own post on the #DropKiwiFarms controversy. YOU SHOULD NOT ACCEPT HIS CLAIMS AT FACE VALUE. But many of them are easily checkable and clearly true — for example, one of the suicide victims herself blamed her act on homelessness and mental health issues (for what that’s worth), and prior to suicide nothing had been posted about her to Kiwi Farms in six months (Moon says eight, which appears to be incorrect). Of course if you are already struggling with other issues, having a thread on a site like Kiwi Farms could exacerbate your situation, and nudge you toward suicide — “suicide isn’t monocausal” doesn’t mean external factors have no impact on it. But this is being reported in a much more simplistic manner, without much regard for the specifics of these terrible cases.

One more time: None of this means Kiwi Farms is a good or righteous place. But if you’re going to report on an online community, especially in the context of a fight that essentially boils down to whether that community should be allowed to exist anywhere on the internet, these facts matter a great deal.

The Journalism About Sorrenti’s Specific Fight With Kiwi Farms Has Also Been Extremely Negligent, More Like PR Than Reporting

The basic storyline has been that there is this Twitch streamer named Sorrenti, and she tweets about trans rights, and as a result this awful group of transphobes are targeting her. 

This is partly true, but leaves out a huge amount of internet drama context. If you want a lot more details, listen to the podcast, but the short version is that Sorrenti leans into controversy very aggressively — responding to each and every slight she encounters online is a large part of her business model — and has ongoing beefs with many online personalities whose own followings (as measured by Twitch and YouTube subscriptions) probably number in the mid-six-figures, if not higher. She also has been open about her desire to help trans kids who believe they should go on hormones to do so without their parents’ knowledge or consent (if that’s what’s warranted by their personal situation), and she works with an online account named @BobPosting to run a DIY hormone directory geared at this. @BobPosting has bragged about their home bathtub-brewed hormones, and about getting hundreds of minors on hormones. All this controversy is raging around someone whose own opsec practices are laughably bad. She does almost nothing to protect herself. This is a demonstrated pattern.

Neither the fact that Sorrenti is controversial nor the fact that she doesn’t know how to (or refuses to) protect herself online justifies online harassment from Kiwi Farms or anyone else. Not at all. But it does make it harder to know exactly who is to blame for that harassment.

One of the insidious things about internet harassment is that it tends to be anonymous or pseudonymous. You usually can’t say, for sure, where a given abusive post or hack of personal information or swatting came from. So the fact is that Sorrenti does not know that the harassment she has received has come from Kiwi Farms. But because her campaign to ban Kiwi Farms from the internet has, naturally, led to Kiwi Farms focusing on her more, and getting angrier and angrier at her, it seems impossible to imagine that at least some of the harassment isn’t coming from Kiwi Farms.

Some of it probably is. But it’s being treated as an established fact that basically all of it is. That’s ridiculous. For one thing, there are so many other suspects given all the ongoing beefs, and given the way anonymous trolls in places like the chan sites have a well-documented history of watching these beefs from the sidelines and gleefully lobbing mortars into them in the form of false flag attacks. In at least one case (which we’ll get to in a minute), one of Sorrenti’s harassers announced they were with Kiwi Farms, and the person responsible for swatting Marjorie Taylor Green (who is now strange bedfellows with Sorrenti, calling for the site to be shut down) did the same thing. But of course it’s rather unlikely someone invested in the ongoing existence of Kiwi Farms would engage in such an act and openly announce their identity — in cases like these, in the absence of more and better information, the default assumption should be chan-linked trolling.

Let me give a couple quick examples of how bad and myopic the reporting has been on this. On August 21, Sorrenti was sent a bunch of Uber Eats stuff from her own account that she didn’t order — a fraudulent charge. 

Setting aside the fact that the last thing you should do is publicize something like this (which is exactly what the trolls and hackers want and which only incentivizes further shenanigans), note that she immediately blames Kiwi Farms, and uses the incident to inject more momentum into her campaign: Her third tweet is directed at the CEO of Cloudflare, and she says “this is why I want you to drop kiwifarms from @Cloudflare. even speaking up about it has meant retaliation for me. they are going to keep trying to track me down and you have the power to end this[.]”

Sorrenti’s personal information, including her Uber Eats password, was posted to a notorious doxxing site the very next day, August 22, and a known hacker collective took credit. It took days before that information showed up on Kiwi Farms, and when it did the poster specifically credited the other site.

I do not believe the hackers explicitly said they submitted the false Uber Eats order, but they were the ones who acquired and posted her account info, making them a prime suspect, Occam’s Razor–wise: again, the false order is sent in, and then her info is dropped on the site, with very little time between the two acts. Sorrenti’s information has been posted to the top of that site ever since, making it one likely source of some of the harassment. 

But she hasn’t mentioned that site at all, and in a pair of subsequently deleted quote-retweets she actually criticized me for even acknowledging its existence on our podcast and on Twitter: 

Can you please stop making allusions to the site that has the dox of my entire family. I haven’t talked about it and asked journalists not to mention it because I don’t want to put my family at risk. There is no reason for you to be sharing this information. … Actual journalists know what the truth is. I’ve been quite forward about it. You are actively putting my family at risk because you care more about views than human decency. What the hell are you even doing?

I agree that journalists shouldn’t mention this other site by name, let alone link to it, and I haven’t. But you can’t have it both ways: You can’t launch an entire campaign dedicated to ending a website that hosts personal information about you and your family and then complain when someone mentions the existence of a different website that… hosts personal information about you and your family. I do think the other website probably has more personal information about her family and associates, yes, but either the question of who is harassing Sorrenti is an international story, or it isn’t. If it is — and everyone hoping to get companies to #DropKiwiFarms, Sorrenti included, has sought to make it an international story — then of course it matters that at least one of these incidents appears to have had nothing to do with Kiwi Farms. (It’s very striking that Sorrenti appears to have asked journalists not to mention the other site, and that she seems to have succeeded. It suggests she is effectively manipulating them not to focus on any potential source of her ongoing travails other than Kiwi Farms, which is of course a smart PR strategy from the perspective of her campaign. But why should journalists participate in that campaign?)

Along those same lines, and as I laid out in an endless episode of the podcast, there’s very strong reason to believe that the person who showed up outside the apartment where Sorrenti was staying and posted a creepy note to 4chan — a note that promptly caused the #DropKiwiFarms snowball to roll even faster and bigger — has nothing to do with Kiwi Farms. The kid who says he did it, who I spoke with at length via Twitter and Discord DMs, has an extremely long, rich, abusive online history, all linked to the same base username, and he has no genuine connection to Kiwi Farms. In fact, Kiwi Farms thinks he’s a dork and has tried to dig up personal information on him. The kid in question identifies as a “foodist,” meaning a member of a different online community — one centered on a very different brand of trolling and harassment from what Kiwi Farms, or at least most of its regular users, do. His online history backs up this claim.

It’s crazy that this needs to be said, but there’s a difference between reporting on a sympathetic source and acting like a member of their public relations team. 

Journalism Has A Bit Of A “Don’t Touch The Poo” Problem

Here’s the last point I want to make. A lot of the bad journalism about Kiwi Farms stems from the fact that journalists don’t spend much time there and haven’t talked to its users. You can’t really credibly think Kiwi Farms is a site where people go to plot terrorist attacks unless you know very little about it.

I’ve noticed this tendency creeping in to coverage of various other communities disfavored by journalists. A lot of “gender-critical feminists,” for example, hold views of sex and gender that are fairly mainstream. They’re treated in many mainstream accounts, remarkably, as radically hateful bigots, as white supremacists even though this connection doesn’t make a lick of sense — as I noted in a post arguing against the addiction some people have to calling everyone they disagree with a “fascist.” You don’t see a lot of journalists who write about the gender wars interview gender-critical feminists at any length.

Same deal with coverage of “incels” — involuntary celibates, or men frustrated about their inability to find women who will have sex with them. A very small percentage of incels, most famously Elliot Rodger, engage in acts of violence or harassment. But mostly they are this sprawling sad-sack community of disaffected young men with a diversity of views on various subjects, including women. There are creepy men’s rights activist incels, but there are also more straightforwardly tragic ones, hobbled by physical or mental disabilities, who blame themselves rather than women for their shortcomings.

The coverage of this community was so bad! “Incel” came to be synonymous with “terrorist,” to the point where Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, inadvertently posted one of the best tweets of 2018, suggesting, to the extent I can understand it, that tech companies begin making lists of — and monitoring — their virgin staffers.

There have been only sporadic attempts only on the part of journalists — this Reply All episode and the podcast Incel by Naama Kates, which I haven’t listened to as much of as I’d like, are two examples — to treat the incel phenomenon as anything but another thing to get morally outraged about. 

So it has gone with Kiwi Farms. Journalism has adopted its own version of “touching the poo,” so journalists are (apparently) too grossed out even to go to Kiwi Farms threads to fact-check individual claims about the site’s past, let alone interview its users.

This is, to repeat myself for the millionth time, a fundamentally gross site. But it’s also an interesting one. By reporting on it in a manner that includes some degree of nuance — but not sugarcoating — I’ve heard from some folks who have been involved in the community. Let’s read three of their emails, which I’ll present with no editing other than some ellipses, then I’ll make a few points, and then I’ll wrap this up (both this increasingly interminable post and, I hope, my coverage of this entire sorry controversy).

First email:

Hi Jesse,

Huge fan of the pod (I’m a primo) and your work in general. Just saw you on Twitter asking about KiwiFarms, I replied but I thought I’d reach out through email before you guys finished the episode. If you haven’t heard from someone who is very familiar with using the forum, I’d be willing to provide some insight as I’ve read there pretty consistently for the past 5 years or so (not really an active participant but have some experience.)

I think the Farms could use some defence. It represents something that’s been mostly lost on the internet, and I really hope it isn’t gone for good. I’m just a normie Xennial Canadian woman, always been lefty-liberal and don’t really like the slurs on the board, but they’re almost necessary as a trial-by-fire to get the right users. The vast majority of what goes on there is gossip about internet famous people with a heavy dose of irony and dark humour. Surprisingly, I have also seen some of the most thoughtful and productive conversations there, more than anywhere else on the internet in the last several years. I think a lot of people would be shocked by the user base, it is extremely diverse and mostly normies- tons of women, gays, trans people, professionals in every field, from all across the political spectrum. 

Also, I’m sure you’ve come across this info already, but it is totally against board culture to interact with the “lolcows” in any way, let alone harass or threaten. Anyone who does post interactions or threats gets the equivalent of “downvoted to hell” and the mods are quick to delete the worst. Even the “doxing,” - which I think is the most morally questionable aspect of the site- is really only posted to archive and keep track of the subjects, who are all too often shown to be liars, abusers, and grifters, even criminals. The “dox” is also only found using Google, illegal activity is not encouraged, so theoretically someone claiming to be harassed by “KiwiFarms” is just as likely to to be dealing with anyone who can use Google well. (Sorrenti is a twitch streamer, and streamers are quite often “swatted” by their own viewers, there is absolutely no evidence that a regular KiwiFarms user was the one that called the cops on her). In addition, all the talk about pushing people to suicide is incredibly overblown, but I know you’re well aware that suicide is not monocausal. 

Anyway, I just wanted to reach out in case you hadn’t been able to speak to someone experienced w the site. I was just reading replies to Katie’s joke about it, and what people believe about it is crazy.

I’ve posted screencaps of the whole second email on Twitter, but here are some key excerpts, formatting in the original:

I am a KF user ([username] please withhold this if you actually do utilize this email, though I obviously can't really stop you.) responsible for a thread on another Lolcow. I was also involved in the process of doxing that individual. I have been a user on the site since 2017 and lurked for 2 years prior to joining. Since that time, I've become very familiar with the culture of the site and wanted to issue a correction or two though they mostly revolve around where certain inside jokes are coming from and you may not find them particularly helpful. 

…

Alogging has a long history on the site and is attributable to Anthony Logatto. Typically, anyone who alogs long and hard enough gets doxed and gets a thread of some kind. This is the way the site tends to handle people doing shit we don't want them doing. It used to be more aggressive but now users get threadbans, warnings, or outright bans. If they ban evade enough someone will dox them. Also, we can't control off site behavior any more than some streamer saying "pls dont harass" is going to stop one of their fans from carrying out some gay ass fatwa on their behalf. Inshallah, retards. While Destiny [a streamer Sorrenti has serious ongoing beef with -Jesse] may not encourage it, merely by the numbers someone is going to do it anyway. He's no more responsible for it than Sorrenti would be (if Sorrenti policy was don't touch the poop which it clearly isn't).

…

Not allowing doxing would have made it less hated This isn't a correction. I just disagree. Time and again, lolcows discover their threads, many of whom are unknown to the wider internet. We aren't the only site that doxes. More importantly, the vast majority of lolcows I've seen on the site almost exclusively lose their shit that we're talking about them on the site. In fact, I'd argue most lolcows we have get harassed long before they get a thread on the site. I dont think not having doxing would improve the situation, personally. Perhaps I'm just in denial of course and to be fair, I could be.

I should also point out, Jersh doesn't actually like doxing on the site. He has merely said he tolerates it. The reasoning has been that he isn't sure where to draw that line. Doxing can be many things to many people. Lots of people publish their personal information in various ways. Some for professional reasons and others maybe just because they made a mistake. I think that aspect of the site is shifting. Years ago, you could just post a dox openly now. However, when I made my thread for my lolcow, he explicitly told me I had to private tag the dox so non users couldn't see it. Unless it was past page 1. I'm not sure what his future intent is but yeah. Weird change. 

…

I want to take this last bit to talk about the concept of code switching. The site uses terms like nigger, troon, tranny, faggot, retard, etc (pick your slur really. Once I even saw someone use Mick, Goomba, "fucking wop") to refer to pretty much anyone, as you've said in the podcast. These are used, perhaps understandably, to malign the user base of the site. I, personally, have found that the site is perhaps the single most accepting environment of people out there, once you get past the slurs of course. In fact, I'd honestly say I've become more empathetic towards women in part due to my time on KF. Hell I've even become more empathetic towards trans people. That said, I'm still going to use all the slurs. It's the culture and its the way we speak. Groups of people do this all over the world. We just do it in a more "hostile" manner.

Userbase Makeup There's no data on this in particular but my general understanding over the years is we've had influxes of users typically revolving around some big lolcow that gets added. Think Jessica Yaniv or the Zoosadists. Lately we've gotten a shitload of trans (due to Sorrenti and probably Yaniv sagas) people and feminists (terfs as well largely from the Yaniv timeframe). We have far right people, nazis, commies, socialists, libertarians, regular liberals (these were most of the site when it started) etc etc etc. I'm sure we have furries as well but let's just pretend they don't exist. And if I see one more anime avatar fuck join I'm gonna have a aneurysm. 

To close this out, because I feel like I'm making a faggoty ass ted talk,  if the site is done for at the end of the day then so be it. I have a life outside of it. I don't particularly care if it sticks around and honestly this would be the funniest way for it to die. The doorknob dox was epic. I could get into the history of all the genuine huge pieces of shit we've had on the site including people like Nick Bates or the Zoosadism saga, but that seems outside the purview here. Ultimately, we're only the first as the only thing really unique to the site is its ambivalence towards doxing. Slurs are used everywhere and the only other difference is we allow all to hate each other. Whereas other sites only allow you to hate the approved group.

Have a good day,

[username]

(can't a nigga just enjoy some batman and trains?)

Third email:

Hey hey,

I figured I'd offer a perspective on KiwiFarms. I'm a professional in the traditional publishing industry. KiwiFarms is perhaps the only place on the Internet where I can discuss the realities and failures of the industry without risking of having my livelihood impacted. There're fairly major people in some big publishing houses on there! It's what got me involved in the site in the first place. The info and data I've gotten from those people has been some of the most interesting, perceptive and realistic perspectives I've ever gotten during my years in the industry. I'd rather have a drink with the publishing people I talk to on KiwiFarms than any of the ones I interact with on Twitter (some of which, I've noticed, have been attacking Jesse in his Twitter replies - case in point, I'm so sorry) even though I'm sure I'm closer politically to the Twitter crowd than the KF crowd.

I think for a lot of people on KiwiFarms, they'd happily go elsewhere if there was anywhere else you could discuss controversial topics without worry of going against whatever the Twitter flavor of the month is. When James Patterson was pilloried on Twitter and forced to apologize for saying white men are having a harder time getting into the industry, KiwiFarms was the only place it could be pointed out that he was correct. By the industry's own 2020 census, the industry is mostly made up of cis women (74% cis women, 23% cis men.) And, speaking anecdotally, all my direct superiors and coworkers are all white women. Virtually all the agents I've queried have been white women. James Patterson is wildly successful, sure. But, as someone on KF pointed out, Barack Obama was President of the United States - yet no one says that African-American racism is over, do they? Only on KF could there be a discussion about how the industry has a love-hate relationship with white male authors. They tend to outsell everyone else, and yet the industry sees itself as fighting against their influence.

KF is a pretty disreputable place but it only gets as much traffic as it does because everyone knows you have to toe party lines all over the Internet these days. The fact that people are lining up behind Sorrenti of all people is unfortunate -- in a few years, she'll join the ranks of Zoe Quinn and other geek trauma darlings where those defending her now will pretend they never did and you're an idiot for bringing it up, chud. The fact that such a disproportionate focus is put on trans issues is unfortunate. It's pretty clear that some people want it torn down because it's shining a light on the bad things they do. Is that worth the racism, slurs, and so on? I don't know. But I think I prefer it to Something Awful where you get banned for mentioning that Sorrenti maybe isn't a good person.

All the best, keep it up,

I find these emails fascinating, and I think any curious researcher or journalist would as well. The line “I, personally, have found that the site is perhaps the single most accepting environment of people out there, once you get past the slurs of course” stuck with me for days. It’s almost koan-like. Sometimes I think it makes no sense whatsoever, or is a contrived justification for gross online language, but sometimes I can almost get it: Like, if you’re in a community where the norms are such that everyone is just going to be as colorfully offensive as possible to every possible group, and no resources will be spent on tone- or language-policing (except when people make threats), maybe this is a recipe for a unique community where certain types of honesty can prevail? Or maybe they’re all just sociopaths! 

The email from the person in publishing is interesting too, because part of it is undeniably true: Everyone knows publishing is female-dominated, but if you say so in most polite liberal settings, you’ll get absolutely pilloried. Almost every mainstream online social media platform is headed the same direction, both in terms of its regulations and the norms of the community: more strictures on what can be said, or at least on what can be said without risking reputational damage. That’s a big reason my newsletter and podcast have thrived — when even milquetoast opinions are effectively outlawed in some corners of the liberal world, people will seek more honest, open spaces.

So is this a reasonable motivation to hang out in a placelike Kiwi Farms? How common is this dynamic of otherwise normie-ish people being driven there? Are there a lot of otherwise respectable professional types lurking there who would be utterly embarrassed if they were found out?

If you’re interested in internet cultures, these sorts of questions should catch your eye, at least a little. And you can’t really investigate them if the start and finish of your understanding of Kiwi Farms is that it is a fascist “terrorist factory.” But if you’re a journalist, you should have more of an open mind than that. We don’t stigmatize and ostracize journalists and other researchers who interview literal ISIS members. We can’t handle a little bit of actual journalism about toxic websites?

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Questions? Comments? Information about the most recent company to #DropKiwiFarms? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. Image is “Burning rubbish bin in city” via Getty.