End Networked Harassment

We've just updated our website to include our 2024 Federal and California filings, as well as our incorporation and exemption documents. See endharassment.net/finances.html and endharassment.net/docs.html The return period covers from our incorporation on August 15, 2024, to December 31, 2024.

Far-right radicalization is increasingly thriving in corners of the internet. Extremist forums and communities are glorifying mass attackers and cultivating violent subcultures tied to real-world violence. Sites like Kiwi Farms repeatedly surface in the backgrounds of attackers & extremist networks.

PSA: operating a bot that interacts with users on another user's behalf, without verifying that the recipient actually wants to receive interaction (eg following the sender) is like operating an open relay or open proxy. don't do it! triply so if you're letting brand new users interact through you.

Curious about the latest set of additions to our blocklist that look like false positives? They're not! The attackers are cloning established profiles after they're caught, to make it look like we're mistaken or malicious. You can vet us by finding identical profiles with different account ages -LF

PSA: please remove 103.114.190.0/23 from your IP blocklists/denylists. It now belongs to a legitimate Australian ISP (lightningbroadband.com.au), and is no longer under the control of Flow Chemical Pty Ltd or any entity known by me to be associated with Joshua Moon or Kiwi Farms.

There will be hundreds of posts on a fringe website claiming the opposite, causing an AI tool to shrug its shoulders and produce an outcome suggesting impropriety where there is none. Needless to say, this is not great and I'm determined to make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else.

These tools have no limitations on "use up to 100 data points from this one website", they treat all the 1000s of correlated data points as independent and give them heavy weight and credence as a majority of the information available rather than a fringe minority that is shrill and repeats itself.

A year ago, Joshua Moon crowdfunded >150k USD into an IOLTA, ostensibly to fund plaintiff-side litigation on behalf of his website Kiwi Farms and its operating entity Lolcow LLC. Instead, he spent "a lot" of it to help Vincent Zhen set aside the 445k AUD default judgment for defamation in Australia.

To my friends: After nearly two exhausting years of litigation, I have agreed to settle the defamation claim I brought against Vincent Zhen and Flow Chemical in the Supreme Court of Victoria. I will be able to share more when all the documents have been signed and exchanged. This is a good thing.

Our 501(c)3 determination letter came through, so we can finally say that we are tax-exempt and eligible to receive charitable contributions (although our present financial needs are covered by @lizthegrey.com). You'll see the details updated in our bio as well. drive.google.com/file/d/1-otV...

Curious why our blocklist often shows as empty? It's because @safety.bsky.app is doing their job. Suspended accounts are removed from the list, and sometimes removal-flagged but not yet fully suspended accounts cause list rendering to choke partway through displaying the list.

Why you don't give bad actors ideas for things to do: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BEANS Yes, there is now a false flag operation going on, it's by the same group of people operating the original KF bots, just keep blocking and reporting them. -LF

This is where our name comes from: we are survivors who aim to end the phenomenon of morally motivated networked harassment through education of the general public and of the service provider ecosystem. We're here to serve those communities impacted by networked harassment however we can. -LF

I'm going to try to post more about papers I read. This morning I read "Stoking the Flames: Understanding Escalation in an Online Harassment Community" dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/.... In the paper, @kejsitake.bsky.social and co-authors look at the harassment community Kiwi Farms.

Don't feed the trolls. That doesn't mean tolerate negative peace or missing stairs in your communities. But if you say things that will get screenshotted and shared on harassment forums, which encourages their trolling, you're feeding the goddamn trolls. Focus on your messaging, not theirs.

We're going to have to walk back doing all additions by hand, responding to botting with human reaction times and human attention spans is not a sustainable approach. bsky T&S show no signs of being able to stem the flood, so we're going to need automatic listing w/ a manual post-facto review.

If you find yourself on this list and are confused (and let's be honest you likely won't be), DM me or email me or something. I'll respond as able unless you're emailing me in bad faith, in which case I won't respond. If you're no longer a KF'r and I believe you, I'll argue like hell to get you off.

A real-life case study in anonymous internet harassment and insider threat: I must sadly retract my endorsement of Kevin Crawley, as I have recently learned he is a Kiwi Farms member. I believe he may pose a safety risk to his colleagues, or even to his employer. www.linkedin.com/posts/efong_...