What a bunch of sad excuses for humans. Living only to torment. They could be so much more, yet this is what they settle for.

The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die – Kiwi Farms Mother Jones https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-drop-cloudflare-chandler-trolls/

#PitifulHaters

"Most websites aren’t known for having a “kill count.” Kiwi Farms is. Its victims reportedly include Julie Terryberry, who in 2016 took her life after being targeted by users of the site. Two years later, after years of harassment from Kiwi Farms trolls, Chloe Sagal lit herself on fire in a public park. In June 2021, an American video game developer based in Japan, named David Ginder, took their life amid a campaign of Kiwi Farms abuse.

Kiwi Farms is a forum similar in design to 4chan or 8chan, where anonymous posters gather. But instead of just spreading noxious discourse, Kiwi Farms users turn to the site to plan and coordinate. They work to make the lives of their targets a living hell. Their tactics include doxxing, SWATing, defaming, encouraging self-harm, and stalking, online and sometimes off.

Kiwi Farms harvests anguish. It thrives on pain and revels in death. Users of the innocuously named forum prey on the vulnerable and marginalized—people who are transgender, neurodivergent, disabled, financially struggling—with persistent and twisted harassment campaigns. ...but also because reporters are wary of becoming targets themselves. The users call their victims “lolcows” because their pain can be milked for laughs. The group made its purpose clear on its Twitter page before it was taken down: “Gossip and exploitation of mentally handicapped for amusement purposes.”

Kiwi Farms users deploy slightly different tactics for various victims, but the rough beats are the same. First, the group assembles extensive dossiers. Then they use the information (some true, some contorted, some fabricated) to torment their targets.

When Sagal posted about her suicidal thoughts, Kiwi Farms users sent private messages urging her to kill herself, a friend said. When posters learned that Terryberry, an 18-year-old with learning disabilities, used the internet to make friends, they worked to get her social media accounts shut down while mocking her mental health struggles. They relentlessly tormented Ginder for being nonbinary. One thread went on for more than a dozen pages.

“I’ve been bullied, ridiculed, and humiliated my entire life,” Ginder explained in their online suicide note. “I could only just tolerate it with heavy depression when it was 4chan. But Kiwi Farms has made the harassment orders of magnitude worse.”

Users gleefully imagined Ginder’s death: “Here’s hoping for a +1 to the kiwi kill count”; “Bruh I hope he streams his suicide. Quote me in the articles”; “Don’t give in [and] delete the thread. Everyone will get a point on their counter if he does it, and I only need two more to get free a milkshake.” Such discourse is typical. In threads about other targets, Kiwi Farms users have joked, “See the only problem with making a thread on a tranny post mortem is that we can’t kill them a second time,” and “hope the fat cunt strokes out and dies tbh, stop wasting my fucking taxes.”
...
The first time most people heard of Kiwi Farms was in August 2022, when popular trans Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti said she had a SWAT team sent to her house, a favorite tactic of Kiwi Farms users and other serial harassers. “I was woken up by police officers and saw the assault rifle pointed at me,” Sorrenti explained in a YouTube video. “I thought I was going to die.” (Later that month, a Kiwi Farms user also SWATed Rep. Greene, according to a police report.)

Before then, Kiwi Farms victims had tried to fight back, with little success. But Sorrenti (whose handle is Keffals) had leverage: her large, passionate fanbase—nearly 150,000 followers on Twitter, more than 50,000 on Twitch. She created the #DropKiwiFarms campaign and asked her supporters—who can be as fervent as K-pop stans—to pressure web services and security provider Cloudflare to boot Kiwi Farms as a client, effectively deplatforming the website by inhibiting its ability to fully function. Sorrenti’s followers made sure that every time she tweeted about Kiwi Farms victims, or provided updates on the campaign, her posts got thousands of likes and retweets. National news stories soon followed. For weeks, Cloudflare did not respond. Then, on September 3, the company’s CEO, Matthew Prince, wrote in a blog post that it had “taken steps to block [Kiwi Farms] content from being accessed through our infrastructure.” Major outlets declared the death of “the worst place on the web.” “The campaign is over. We won,” Sorrenti said on September 5."