Kiwi Farms is an old fashioned style Internet forum, same as mumsnet is.
It’s based in the USA and thus operates under the constitutional freedom of speech laws that exist there (we do not have the same legal protections).
It’s anonymous and like other interactive websites, different parts of the site have a different culture/character.
As social media has become increasingly censorious, various different groups, some of whom have absolutely nothing in common, have all ended up there, simply because it’s one of the few places on the internet where you can still type out what you are actually thinking.
This has the side effect of some posters using all the words that you can’t say elsewhere, often all at once, in a close to nonsensical way. It’s a bit shocking when you first happen across it.
The site was originally created as a place to document the online shenanigans of an internet ‘personality’ known as Chris Chan.
From there, other strange internet characters have also spawned their own threads. Site owner Josh has a self declared interest in people with unusual psychologies.
The main part of the site is the above. It’s gossiping about weird internet celebs that aren’t particularly well known in the mainstream. Posters screen shot what these characters put out via social media and share it on dedicated threads, mostly to laugh at them. These people are called ‘Lolcows’ because their online presence can be milked for laughs. One of the very few rules on the site is ‘don’t touch the poo’ - ie don’t interact or make personal contact with the ‘lolcows’ (people did historically interact with original lolcow Chris Chan but that began before kiwi farms was a thing).
The thing with serial internet oversharers is they often have mental health issues. A couple of former lolcows have sadly taken their own lives and people who don’t like KF have tried to blame the suicides on the site. However, suicide is multi faceted, it’s perfectly possible for the suicides to be entirely unrelated to the site, certainly the friends and loved ones of the deceased have not blamed the site, apart from one who was an abusive ex boyfriend, whose abuse of his former girlfriend had been documented by the Farmers (!)
It’s perfectly possible for a lolcow to know nothing at all about their KF thread (due to site rule ‘don’t touch the poo’) unless they go looking.
One of the suicides associated with the Farms seems to have been faked anyway (it was an internet persona without a person attached, so pretty easy, and sensible, to just reinvent oneself and leave that online persona behind).
All the swearing and random
slurs make it easy to mischaracterise the thread as a hate site, but actually some of threads are quite supportive and caring about the pet lolcows - farmers tend to be quite strident in support of children and have documented abuse and tried to stop it (farmers have contacted police and/or child protection after witnessing troubling things in a thread subject’s social media posts). The site has also been blamed for coordinating ‘swatting attacks’ but that is definitely not something that is in anyway endorsed (the owner of the site has been targeted this way, as has Mumsnet’s owner, Justine).
In 2020, Reddit kicked a load of subreddits off the site, some of these were on the MRA (Manosphere) end of the spectrum and some were right wing political (eg r/thedonald) some were radical/gender critical feminist.
Lots of now homeless redditors migrated to the farms, which is why you have some areas that seem pretty hardcore feminist and some that are alt right. The site owner has tried to accommodate both new sets of members and the main menu is colour coded, and the moderation is a little different in the different areas (eg a female lolcow in the ironically named beauty parlour area tends to have majority female followers who are annoyed by refugees from r/thedonald popping up regular to say things like ‘wow, she’s (insert insult here) but I’d still shag her’ so that kind of nonsense gets deleted by mods.
in the bottom area of the site menu, it’s a lot more of a free for all frenzy of insults and the site owner has admitted he doesn’t really like it much but tolerates it due to his belief in free speech.
As you can imagine a site where anonymous people can say whatever they like does attract some
bad actors, however there are a few rules and it is possible to get banned. Anything posted has to be legal under US freedom of speech laws (so no incitement to violence, no illegal images) or will be deleted and porn is discouraged (because it’s everywhere else on the internet, pretty much). Critics of KiwiFarms complain of ‘doxing’ (the publishing of a persons address) but to anyone over the age of about 30 who can remember telephone directories in every hallway it’s all a bit ¯\(ツ)/¯
Every KF post has a member reacts function so anyone persistently posting idiotic stuff will end up with a negative member rating overall. Basically it’s like a stickers reward system and if you post stuff that horrifies other posters, even in jest, you’ll lose points from your overall score.
To my mind it’s what the early internet would’ve grown be if all the big tech owners were libertarians rather than authoritarians.
The site has a lot of enemies because the members are akin to being the librarians of people doing dickish things on the internet.
None of that is really relevant to Caroline’s story beyond that the site has a bad reputation (due to all the people who don’t want paedos and abusers and fetishists to be documented collectively smearing the site as ‘far right’) and that it’s anonymous, so Person X who has been harassing Caroline in various ways for some years could theoretically post something terrible and then go to the police claiming it was Caroline who posted it.
The police SHOULD have better things to do with their time but person x is of a special protected group who seem to be able to make the police jump to their tune at will, and Caroline is a boring old Catholic mother of five.
Mumsnet FWR posters are largely sympathetic to the Farms because ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and the same people who harass and hack and launch DDOS attacks on the farms do exactly the same thing to Mumsnet.
The owner of KF has expressed solidarity with Justine of Mumsnet in the past.
You can go read it without signing up - you won’t catch cooties (but the language will probably make your eyebrows rise so high you’ll look like you’ve had a facelift).
(advance apologies for typos and poor grammar, I have mislead my reading spectacles and cannot be arsed to peer at these tiny letters I am typing any longer)