Reaping the Strange Fruits of Kiwi Farms

Finding the lines between harassment, entertainment, and suicide on the infamous internet forum

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On June 29, 2019, Null, the owner of the forum KiwiFarms.net, published the following statement on the site:

The Kiwi Farms is an entertainment site. It is a lighthearted discussion forum that exists to talk about people. It’s not a Jigsaw-esque torture chamber to teach people the value of life. It’s Internet nerds gossiping about their favorite e-celebs. It’s catty women talking about fat girls on YouTube. Sometimes, it’s even anime avatars talking about vtubers. These are ordinary people who are having fun on the Internet, and everyone is welcome to join us.

It was in response to Hector Martin, who, two days earlier, published a Google Doc to Twitter stating that his friend, a nonbinary, autistic game developer who was known both as Near and Byuu, had committed suicide.

In Martin’s note, he blamed harassment originating from Kiwi Farms for Byuu’s death. Byuu would be the third person whose suicide was blamed on Kiwi Farms. But according to Null, there was no evidence that Kiwi Farms users had harassed Byuu. There was a thread about Byuu, but Null pointed out that it was only 13 pages long, quite short for a website where threads often grow to thousands of pages, sometimes ballooning into entire sub-forums.

Byuu had participated in the discussion and was at peace with what had been posted there, according to Null. But, by Null’s own account, days before the suicide, Byuu had offered to pay him $120,000 to remove information about them from the site. Null—who, if we take his words and actions at face value, is a “free speech absolutist”—declined. (Null also famously refused to hand over Kiwi Farms’ user data to the New Zealand government after footage of the Christchurch massacre had been posted to the website.)

It’s hard to sympathize with Null as an individual, and it can be even harder to sympathize with Kiwi Farms as an institution, but there does seem to be a cold consistency to how they operate. 

Null’s response to the death of another subject, Julie Terryberry, also struck me as strange. In a post titled, “How Our Community Handles Death,” Null wrote:

We are also afraid of seeing messages wrought with unnecessary and frankly embarrassing expressions of guilt. You were not important enough in her life to be even partially responsible, and believing you were is [sic] self-aggrandizement. There is enough selfishness involved in the act alone; no one needs you playing up your shitposts as murder weapons to complicate matters.

Was his message aloof but morally engaged, or was he purposely minimizing the role his website might have played in a woman taking her own life? The answer to that is genuinely unclear to me.

It’s much easier for me to put myself in the position of the people who are the butt of jokes, the lolcows, though I’ve experienced it to a much lesser degree.

I’ve experienced the obsessive hatred that has an awful way of finding you when you’re publicly too self-effacing or melodramatic online. It’s more than just hurtful; it will make you crazy. 

It’s one thing if a single person or even a handful of people don’t like you and are gossiping about you. This isn’t comfortable, but it’s a fact of life. It’s another when you can’t even conceptualize the scope of people watching and criticizing you, digging through your digital trash to paint a picture of you that may not map to reality. You have to reckon not only with people saying cruel things and collectively workshopping a projection that may very well shake your self-perception (after all, what if you end up agreeing with their nasty assessments?), but also with the fallout that comes from people finding and consuming it.

We already live in a surveillance culture where snooping is the norm. If you googled a colleague or date’s name and found a Kiwi Farms thread, wouldn’t you read it? Sure, you may take it with a pinch of salt, but not everyone is that disciplined. In my case, the hate is mostly contained on Twitter. It’s nothing compared to what many of the targets of Kiwi Farms experience, and I still find myself wondering what people think of me based on rumors, lies, and assumptions pulled from random internet ephemera. I’ve spent more than a handful of nights wondering if they’re right about me, without a clear idea of who “they” even is.

The reputational hit you take is both persistent and impossible to measure. But as a Twitter personality who very publicly worked to build a career as a writer, I always knew that I’d end up paying this tax eventually. I was aware that some amount of this treatment was unavoidable. I’m also, at least vaguely, aware of how to prevent it from becoming much worse. But people who are thrust into the role of lolcow—especially if they also deal with mental illness—may lack that awareness.

That said, I still think Kiwi Farms has been mischaracterized. I don’t think we can look at the forum as some entity that’s to blame for the deaths of Byuu or other Kiwi Farms subjects who took their own lives, such as Chloe Sagal or Julie Terryberry. Seeing what terrible things people said about them online might have contributed to their decisions, but Kiwi Farms would be at fault for that only if the site set out to facilitate targeted harassment campaigns, and there’s no evidence for that.

Just look at the relevant portions of the site’s rules:  

1. Be civil. Don’t aggressively attack and insult the people or groups we talk about. Don’t get emotionally charged over things that do not matter. If you need to tell people you’re better than someone, you’re probably not.

2. No trolling plans. Don’t use this forum as a place to organize trolling efforts. We cannot control your behavior off-site, but expect to be banned and ridiculed if you do something embarrassing.

3. Be legal. Avoid directly posting private information. Do not break the law trying to screw with people.

I understand—and it seems that Null, also, understands—that even if trolling plans aren’t coordinated on Kiwi Farms, the website certainly gives would-be trolls ammunition. Not only does it act as a list of targets, but also it provides a blueprint for how to harass them by centralizing their personal information, with an emphasis on embarrassing details about their lives.

When I posted about Kiwi Farms on Twitter and Discord, multiple people reached out to me claiming to have had first- and secondhand experience with the site. On Discord, a user I’ll refer to as “B” claimed that they had a friend with a Kiwi Farms thread more than 40 pages long. Although he says he doesn’t believe his friend experienced much harassment directly from Kiwi Farms, he does believe there’s a broader “lolcow harassment community.” He cited the comedy podcast “Pod Awful” as one example.

On Twitter, a person I’ll call “K” claimed he was a user on Kiwi Farms for six years, knew “quite a few of the mods,” and had interacted with Null. From K’s perspective, even if there are bad actors on the site, Kiwi Farms isn’t used as a place for coordinated attacks.

K explained, “My opinion is the reason Kiwi Farms has the reputation it does isn’t because of the users, most of who are detached from much of the site’s inner workings and aren’t really some coordinated mass like people claim they are.”

I haven’t done an exhaustive audit of Kiwi Farms, but it appears to be a repository for gossip, incriminating or embarrassing screenshots, and cruelty. The cruelty can be quite provocative, including racial slurs, misogyny, or making light of people’s personal tragedies, but it’s still just mean gossip. It’s certainly not kind, but it’s not illegal either. Outside of the threads about Chris Chan, I have yet to see anyone break the “troll planning” rule.

What is also clear, though, is that any legally obtained information goes: contact information purchased from data brokers; screenshots of old blog posts or Facebook statuses; publicly aired cries for help; conversations shared by so-called friends.

It brings up an interesting question about the nature of harassment.

Is it harassment if people talk about you behind your back in a way that is exceptionally harsh and cruel? It’s hurtful, but not illegal (with the exception of the distribution of pornographic material, which is a crime in some states). Arguably, it’s also not cyberbullying per se, especially if it’s not said to you directly or not said with the intent that you see it. It’s frustrating, and it’s particularly sticky when vulnerable people, on both sides of the equation, are involved. 

The hard pill to swallow about Kiwi Farms is that in many cases, what happens there isn’t only legal but may not even be harassment, even if bad actors can and do weaponize it. 

It’s just a nasty part of the internet.