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Behind the Aegis

(53,823 posts)
Thu Sep 15, 2022, 12:30 AM Sep 2022

This trolling website targeted transgender people, Jews and the disabled. Here's how it fell.

Even among hate-spewing sites on the internet, Kiwi Farms stood out for its viciousness.

The forum’s homepage featured a “kill count” that tallied how many people the site had hounded to suicide. Harassing threads thousands of pages long each would target a single person who is transgender. It also published the screed of the shooter who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

“This was a website whose entire purpose was to cause people to die,” said Yonah Gerber, an archivist whose entire family was doxxed on Kiwi Farms because Gerber is Jewish and transgender. “It is that simple.”

The website, which was rife with antisemitic content and attracted about 16,000 visitors a day, was shut down by Cloudflare, the website service that hosted it, on Sept. 3.

But websites can find new host servers, and some victimized by Kiwi Farms fear that it could yet revive itself. After it was booted by Cloudfare, it was temporarily hosted by a Russian-based company and then by VanwaTech, before it was disabled on Sept. 8 in an anonymous operation designed to overwhelm its systems.

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This trolling website targeted transgender people, Jews and the disabled. Here's how it fell. (Original Post) Behind the Aegis Sep 2022 OP
No words. sheshe2 Sep 2022 #1
Isn't this a free speech issue? IngridsLittleAngel Sep 2022 #2
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