Is the worst place on the web actually dead?

The MoJo Daily newsletter, Monday through Friday. [View in browser]( [Mother Jones Daily Newsletter](     February 6, 2023 Hi there, [I'm Ali Breland](, your guest newsletter writer for today. On a Monday in 2020, as the workday was ending, a forwarded email from a colleague popped into my inbox with the subject line “Possible story idea for you.” I scanned the body of the message, and what I saw seemed harrowing. The anonymous reporter had started reporting out a story on a little-known but impactful internet community called Kiwi Farms. I had heard of the site, just by virtue of it being my job to be very online, but I knew very little about it. The reporter described a website that didn’t sound real. It was similar to 4chan in its description, but it was heavily focused on targeting trans people and harassing them relentlessly, sometimes to the point of suicide. If this ever happened, it wasn’t a signal to the users that they had gone too far, but instead, something that they celebrated, the reporter noted. Somehow it was allowed to continue, almost completely unencumbered and with no consequences for the harm it was generating. The reporter—for reasons I won’t elaborate on to maintain their anonymity—was no longer in a position to be able to report on the website and was trying to convince other reporters to take it on. But according to them, other journalists were too afraid of reporting on Kiwi Farms out of concern for their own safety. It almost sounded too salacious and too absurd to be accurate, but as I started doing my own reporting on the site, I realized that it very much was. On and off for the next two years, [I spoke with nearly a dozen targets of the site, as well as people close to them](, investigated how it operated, and pored over the forum itself to understand Kiwi Farms as well as I could. In that time, an entire campaign to stop Kiwi Farms finally swelled out of activists' efforts, some of whom had been working for years to try to stop the site’s vicious wrath. One of the biggest web service providers that had been instrumental in keeping it online, Cloudflare, finally caved to pressure and dropped it. Some declared Kiwi Farms dead, but it wasn’t. After some time offline, it came back. This week, [we finally published the story]( that’s the product of years of interviews, investigation, and observation of its supposed downfall and resurrection. It feels niche, but it’s not. Kiwi Farms was the precursor to the worst parts of the contemporary internet. It started before Gamergate (and played a role in it), the sprawling reactionary internet harassment campaign, and the tactics of Kiwi Farms would later be deployed by people like Chaya Raichik, who runs the homophobic LibsofTikTok account as well as MAGA conspiracy theorists in their harassment of a children’s hospital, schools, and even a butterfly sanctuary. If you’re trying to better understand this angry, malcontent riddled portion of the internet, [our investigation]( of Kiwi Farms is not a bad place to start. —Ali Breland Advertisement [House Subscriptions Ad]( [Top Story] [Top Story]( [Relax, New Yorkers. Nobody’s Coming for Your Gas Stove.]( Electrification is much harder than the culture wars would have you believe. BY MAGGIE DUFFY SPONSORED CONTENT BILL PRESS PODCAST   David Corn, Washington bureau chief, Mother Jones "Bill Press is one of the sharpest political observers in the business. Having appeared on his podcast, I also know he's a great, no-nonsense interviewer and an engaging, good-humored conversationalist. If you want to be smarter about politics, listen to Bill." [Listen to the Bill Press Pod.]( [Trending] [For one small town, "forever chemicals" are a nightmare that won't end]( BY JOHN MCCRACKEN   [Study: Dirty air causes chess players to make mistakes]( BY HELENA HORTON   [The billionaire Koch network wants to defeat Trump in 2024]( BY PEMA LEVY   [Republicans have manufactured a controversy over the Chinese spy balloon]( BY PEMA LEVY Advertisement [House Donations Ad]( [Special Feature] [Special Feature]( [Inside the website from hell]( How the trolls on Kiwi Farms hounded people to kill themselves and created the online culture we have today BY ALI BRELAND [Fiercely Independent] Support from readers allows Mother Jones to do journalism that doesn't just follow the pack. [Donate]( Did you enjoy this newsletter? Help us out by [forwarding]( it to a friend or sharing it on [Facebook]( and [Twitter](. [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Donate Monthly]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. To change the messages you receive from us, you can [edit your email preferences]( or [unsubscribe from all mailings.]( For advertising opportunities see our online [media kit.]( Were you forwarded this email? [Sign up for Mother Jones' newsletters today.]( [www.MotherJones.com]( PO Box 8539, Big Sandy, TX 75755