Null, the operator of the e-celeb gossip site Kiwi Farms, posts Dec. 5:
Yesterday, I had to comply with the FBI regarding a post by SIGSEGV making a credible threat of violence after the election. This is the second time I’ve surrendered a normal user’s information to police. I have been transparent both times. In both times, the users had made the choice to not take advantage of our Tor Hidden Service. I do not get paid to help, I get compelled to help.
After announcing this, I have received undue backlash. This anger is having me rethink the forum’s relationship with politics. This site has a history longer than most people currently using it know or appreciate.
Keeping this website up has been a struggle for years. Starting in January 2016, the forum has had an escalating series of financial, technical, and legal issues. I have endured personal hardship for it. I very firmly believe that people should be able to say what they want. The users who’ve been here to longest understand that I have been swatted several times. Someone wrote a shooting threat to the highschool I attended in my name, which I was detained over. They wrote a bomb threat to a children’s hospital using my email service, which I was interrogated over.
Between the years of 2016 and 2019, I spent $20,000, my entire life’s savings, to support myself during a time of near-zero income. I moved to Ukraine to reduce my personal expenses. I was banned from PayPal and a dozen different payment networks. We were kicked off RedBubble and other merchandise supply stores. We changed VPS hosts at least 100 times. I eventually spent the last money I had to buy a server ($2000), an IPv4/IPv6 range (a $2000 annual subscription), and a colocation contract ($750/mo, more than my rent).
I did this so I could host my website and let people have fun without being tone policed by retards and trannies. I have done everything I can to protect my users from their governments, because in many countries just making fun of someone is a crime. I have never sent identifying information to a foreign government.
2019 rolls along and we settle into a groove. For the first time ever, I break even money-wise. We start doing merch runs, the hard way. I manage to get some monthly donors of at least $100. Now, things are stable. The last hosting issue was when our colo in New York threw all our hardware into a box and I had to overnight it for $700 to a different datacenter. The hack in 2019 was the last big problem we had. There are now civil court problems, but they will be dealt with, and the community will help.
There are users here, probably the majority of active users, who joined in 2019 or later. These are the people who do not know or understand this story, or the hardship that this community has been through to achieve this stability. It was not given to us, it was earned. It is not easily replaced and it should not be taken for granted.
So when I hear people saying that I’ve sold out to the feds because I won’t allow shooting threats, when I see brainlets who do not understand the difference between hosting a shooting that happened on Facebook and hosting a (theoretical) shooting that could be announced on this website, I get infuriated. I get angry because I saw what happened with 8chan, and I saw how /pol/ and the child model posters took Fredrick’s idea of libertarian speech and pushed it so far that it reached a breaking point. And when Fredrick tried to reign them in, they became arrogant and entitled. After all he did for them, it was never enough, and they were never thankful for it. It broke that site, and it broke Fredrick. He came to the realization that not rocking the boat was profitable and easy, whereas rocking the boat is expensive and difficult.
Imagine we are Sweden. We have a long history. We have a distinct culture. We had to fight for independence. We had to punch up to protect ourselves. We struggled to remain neutral during trying times. And now, in an era of peace and prosperity, the ideologue comes to our doors from the war-torn shithole of Kekistan seeking refuge. Should I think if we let them in they will assimilate? That I won’t end up with my cars on fire and them lugging grenades at me for not obeying their laws? No, probably not.
I don’t yet know how I want to word this change, but we can start here:
– If you post violent threats, you’re gone.
– If you support posting violent threats, you’re gone.
– If you think this site has been compromised by a government entity, I encourage you to leave.