The endless battle to banish the world’s most notorious stalker website
The anonymous forum, known as Kiwi Farms, keeps popping back online despite a relentless campaign by transgender activists and a former insider September 3, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT Liz Fong-Jones, left, and Katherine Lorelai. (Jackie Dives and Nick Oxford for The Washington Post) Comment on this storyComment When he heard that Kiwi Farms had … Over the past year, a group of internet sleuths, trans engineers and activists have been relentlessly chasing down the world's most notorious stalker website, Kiwi Farms. The group has successfully persuaded more than two dozen companies to drop the site, and its creator, Frederick Brennan, has been helping to free the user base of 8chan from being radicalized. He also revealed the trolls' habit of using the phrase “in Minecraft” to pretend an illegal activity, such as revealing the Social Security numbers of their targets, was just something they did in the online game.
Published : 2 years ago by user in Tech
Over the past year, their little group of internet sleuths, trans engineers and activists has methodically chased Kiwi Farms across servers and networks around the globe, successively persuading more than two dozen companies to drop the site. Despite this laborious undertaking — described exclusively to The Washington Post — the site has endured, showing up for months at a time, sometimes as a “mirror” of itself on an entirely different URL or as a foreign domain in countries such as Poland.
His goal in joining Fong-Jones and Lorelai’s group was to help the forum’s users, he told The Post. He pointed to Frederick Brennan, the creator of 8chan who called for that site to be taken offline after it played a role in mass shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso. Brennan, he said, “wanted to free [the] user base of that site from being radicalized, from going down a darker path. And that’s what I’m sort of doing here.”
Clay could translate this language. He also could show how Kiwi Farms users migrated to Discord servers, where they were more explicit about planning attacks. He led activists to the threads most rife with racism and calls for violence. And he confirmed the trolls’ habit of using the phrase “in Minecraft” to pretend an illegal activity, such as revealing the Social Security numbers of their targets, was just something they did in the online game.