Antipodean fruit growers 2 - Canary in the internet coal mine

[Bosky]

Continuation thread from Antipodean fruit grower statement

A statement from the owner reads in part:

Downtime Update as of August 26th, 2022

"What I fear more than losing my site, being sued, or dealing with police is living in a world where [REDACTED] can [REDACTED] little boys and girls into [REDACTED] and [REDACTED], while normal people are not allowed to even discuss it.

The mob has already planned subsequent targets. Should we stay down, they will then attack 'gender critical' communities - especially those ran by and for women. No place can exist online which allows criticism of their [REDACTED], and nothing would excite them more than this power and domination struggle being inflicted on a female space instead."

I would link to the statement on the Internet Archive aka "Wayback Machine" but it has made all pages archived from the relevant site unsearchable (or deleted?).

Mumsnet does not permit links to the site Archive Today so that is out too.

1st Thread Antipodean fruit grower statement
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4620584-antipodean-fruit-grower-statement

Unsurprisingly the Farms have archived the info on Cloudflare - cloudflare.net/files/doc_financials/2022/q3/dd287e1e-06fc-4ab3-9f0b-8d87a6c40692.pdf (pages 65-66 mention Kiwi Farms).

From the doc:
...and following escalating, direct threats towards individuals in September 2022, we blocked access to Kiwi Farms content through our infrastructure. We received significant adverse feedback for these decisions from those concerned
about our ability to pass judgment on our customers and the users of our network and products, or to censor them by limiting their access to our
products, and we are aware of potential customers who decided not to subscribe to our products because of this.

Note, I originally posted this is a much shorter and less relevant thread here not realising that the mega thread on KiwiFarms had a part 2 thread here. I'm wary of making things worse but that other thread is simply the wrong- place for it so I'm re-posting here.

New front in the war.

So as many here will no (but recap for others), the long and short of it is that Joshua Connor Moon (aka "Jersh", aka "Null" aka "The Ooperator") runs a website named Kiwifarms which has been the target of aggressive and very illegal attacks by trans lobbyists - hacking, DDoS attacks and, whilst I'm not sure what specific law this last one would fall under, attempts to scape them as involved in bomb threats. (IIRC, a Women's Place event in Brighton some years ago were subjected to a similar attempt to silence them).

I'm posting an update because there has for some time now been a sotto voce regard between the Farms and the MN feminism board and because many on this board consider the trans movement to be the biggest current threat to women in the West and the Farms has been one of the biggest chroniclers of this battle.

Not that I think the Farms ever wanted to be. It's just a site for laughing at online people. But because they archive everything and provide a record of bad behaviour and because Josh adamantly refuses to budge or compromise when he feels he is legally and morally in the right, it's targeted like no other. If it goes then a the Internet loses one of the last places you can freely discuss the trans movement without censure. It would also lose documentation of a lot of horrific behaviour which otherwise gets scrubbed from the Internet. Case in point, one Liz Fong Jones. This is the MtF trans who admitted to "a consent accident" but has successfully managed to scrub nearly all records of that off the Internet except for KiwiFarms. But it actually began earlier with Liz Fong Jones, trying to shut down KiwiFarms because it documented that the company Trans Lifeline was embezzling charitable donations (later proven in court).

The farms has been down for around two days now and unlike the hack attempts and DDoS attacks and the time an unknown and long-silent account suddenly posted a bomb threat, then deleted said post a few minutes later, just long enough for a screenshot to be taken and sent to Cloudflare to say the Farms was an "imminent threat to life" (but never reported to police so far as we know by this same person), unlike those previous incidents this seems to be stemming largely from an extra-legal process of personal intimidation, threats of being denounced online as transphobic and word of mouth by having people in the right place with the right connections. All tactics which people on this forum are by now fairly familiar with. It's not legal process, it's "pull".

Jersh has been fighting a herculean battle against this against incredible odds. Which is all the more extraordinary given the guy doesn't particularly want nor seeks to be some champion against the trans movement. He literally just wants to run his website which even has a hands-off policy the people it chronicles.

Anyway, I figured with the weird Odd Couple relationship this forum has had with KiwiFarms over the past couple of years this is definitely of interest to some here. And because the Farms is THE biggest documenter of nefarious doings by politically and socially connected abusers who otherwise manage to memory hole their misdeeds, it's loss would be a major blow to any pushing back at against the TRA movement. Statement by Null issued earlier attached. I've also attached a picture of Liz Fong-Jones. Also sometimes known on the Farms as "Lego Head" due to his almost perfectly square head. Considering his "consent accident" behaviour, it's one of the milder descriptions.

I've become aware that MN resizes images automatically and I can't find a way around that. So if the statement isn't readable, I've also uploaded it here:

Just acknowledging to say I see you on here after having initially clicked on the other thread 👍

(Although like someone said there, I can’t read the text in the screenshot … sorry)

Thanks. Hopefully not too much damage done and the sensible people here can congregate here in the main thread.

And here is a linked version of the full image as I can't stop MN resizing and shrinking the image version:

A consent accident is another demonstration of how men are trying to redefine language to their advantage.

And because the Farms is THE biggest documenter of nefarious doings by politically and socially connected abusers who otherwise manage to memory hole their misdeeds, it's loss would be a major blow to any pushing back at against the TRA movement.

This. Moon has said that if the site goes down permanently he will release the archives so that others can rebuild. The data won’t be lost forever.

The Mango Ranchers have also done similar work which might be unnoticed on here, exposing, reporting and bringing animal abusers to account.

Thanks for the update - I knew the Farms were down and figured it was more of the same but didn’t know the details.

Scyla · Yesterday 23:17

Proof, if it was needed, that the programmer socks wearers would rather we did not take a closer look at the grim reality.

Boys, we work with you, we are your mother, your colleagues, the adults all around you.

The farms has already done the job. Taking it down makes no difference, why, because exhibitionism is intrinsic to your identity isn't it?

You want us to look at you.

You need us to look.

We are looking. It's not going well.

Reposting Scyla's post from the other thread, as I think it's worth keeping.

What is happening to Jersh and KF should worry all of us. But as Jersh has said, if KF goes down, he will release all of the receipts they've got about all of the things which certain people really, really want to hide.

We can see you, we know who you are and what you've done. You can't unring a bell - even if you succeed in destroying KF, beware the Streisand effect.

Indeed. At the moment, hardly anyone knows about KF. You have to go there to see. But if they release it, send it to all the papers, MPs, police, splash screen shots all over Twitter...

Here's the text from the image linked by @OldGardinia, hopefully it's okay to copy it here for readability:

^Freedom of speech on the Internet in the United States will be permanently broken unless alt-tech creates a stronghold together. The underlying infastructure that makes up the Internet has been mapped out and attacked. A single dedicated person can deny thousands of people a platform online. No person or company is safe from this attack vector and it works anywhere in the world.

The Kiwi Farms, as a US-legal web service with its own hardware and Internet resources, is having trouble staying online because of a persistent, line-crossing harassment perpetrated by Liz Fong-Jones with bankrolling and support from Honeycomb, a San Francisco tech company he works for as a C-Level executive.

The Kiwi Farms and my person have never been accused of any crime by any level of US law enforcement. We have never lost a lawsuit. We operate transparently and within the boundaries of the First Amendment and US Law. Despite this, Liz has taken it upon himself, under the banner his company, to do the following:

• Directly contact ISPs to lie about the Kiwi Farms, alleging criminal behavior and insinuating threats unless we are deplatformed.

• If those ISPs do not relent, the family of datacenter employees become targets. I was informed a wife of an ISP C-level executive was contacted directly by Liz Fong-Jones at early morning hours for what he called a "girl talk".

• If the ISPs still don't relent, he then goes after the datacenter directly, and insist the defamatory claims that we are a criminal enterprise, again insinuating threats.

• If those datacenters do not relent, their families also become targets. I am aware an engineer's wife lost her job in a completely different industry because of harassment directed towards her employer.

• If there's no women to attack, he then goes after the other clients of the datacenter, involving them so that they also start complaining and threatening to move as to hurt the business.^

^To the best of my knowledge, this comes almost entirely from Liz Fong-Jones, through paper mail, telephone calls, and his honeycomb.io email, but it is very hard to get direct confirmation. These scare tactics work such that once people cut us off, I am rarely even given an explanation. What I am told is done anonymously through underlings in the company.

Liz Fong-Jones and his company have done a very good job of intimidating people into submission and keeping them quiet.

This effort is to hide a rape accusation. We have archived Liz Fong-Jone's direct admission that a person in Zurich accused him of some form of sexual assault. His strategy was to minimize this sexual assault claim as a mere "consent accident", and downplay it as a bizarre misunderstanding over dog hair. It is not possible to know the specifics of the original claim because all evidence, except Liz Fong-Jones's tweets admitting it happened, have been removed from the Internet.

This crusade started in 2018, when Liz Fong-Jones (then as an employee of Google) used his corporate [email protected] email address to intimidate my email provider. This was to protect Trans LifeLine from evidence we hosted, showing that their company was embezzling money. This claim was true, and the directors were ousted for inuring more than $300,000 of charity funds for personal expenses – a value which has been filed with the IRS under penalty of perjury, confirming what the Kiwi Farms had documented for months, and which Liz Fong-Jones attempted to cover up.

When ISPs want to help us, datacenters can censor them. When datacenters want to help us, Internet backbones (Zayo, Cogent, GTT, NTT) can censor them. When we have an ISP, Datacenter, and contracts with backbones to stay online, the organized abuse towards other customers can still force them to censor us.

There are two possible solutions to this:

1. Legal protections forcing carriers to be content neutral so that when threatened they can claim "I legally cannot deplatform this service", and/or

1. A content neutral carrier platform in the US supported by a collection of alt-tech companies where such threats do not work.

There are various datacenters in the US with dignity, but they have little choice when their careers, companies, and families are under attack by dangerous perverts. Unless alt-tech companies like Rumble, Odysee, Gab, and so on identify a few locations and unionize together against corporate-sponsored anarcho-tyranny, the rot will become so great that no website or startup which defies the will of this mob will ever be allowed to grow.

There is nothing preventing this attack on less offensive services. Given enough time and opportunity, it will happen to you.^

I'll just leave this here

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-drop-cloudflare-chandler-trolls/

A counterpoint to this article: https://destinygg.substack.com/p/keffals-a-case-study-on-internet

The Farmers were our first line of defence. If they succeed with them, it’s Mumsnet next.

The farms have been an important archive resource. Yaniv, presumably Liz Fong-Jones, Challoner, even some of our home grown characters. Stuff that is out there is saved, which enables people to join the dots.

I expect this thread to go. Jersh is amazingly courageous and stubborn. Over the past few years MN has gone above and beyond, but they are a commercial site with employees with families. The idea that you can shut down or censor discussion via threats is awful. I hope Jersh wins through.

It may not be more of the same, unfortunately. For as bad as the DoS attacks and getting them dropped by Cloudflare were (great advertisement for the company: 'we'll protect you unless you actually need us'), this sounds like a lot of personal intimidation of people working at companies, whisper campaigns and threats to ruin business by going after their other customers unless you drop KF as a customer. Null has defeated every legal and illegal attack thrown at him so far, so this one sounds like it's pure word of mouth and having people in the right positions and threatening public harassment campaigns. The sort of stuff that can and will be turned on other sites next because it doesn't depend on the law or on technical capability - just "I have enough influence to shut it down". Something posters on this board have also seen examples of.

@zibzibara Thank you so much for posting that. I would understand MN scaling an image for thumbnails but it appears to scale the whole thing down so I had to link it externally. Really appreciate you getting the full text in here.

@MerlinsLostMarbles I skimmed through the article you linked. Without meaning any criticism of you personally - the article is a hit job and filled with repeated lies about the site. Along with the usual things like calling it a "far right forum" (it isn't), it repeats without question things like "swatting is a favoured tactic of its users" and similar. The Farms has a "hands off" policy towards the people it documents. You're not supposed to interact with the "cows" and @zibzibara has posted a pretty lengthy deconstruction of the Keffel's swatting accusation. And that article itself was written by someone who doesn't like the Farms himself but cares about truth more. What I'd like to do is link you to the Farms own rebuttal threads but I can't because it's currently being denied its right to defend itself. If Liz Fong-Jones succeeds in bringing it down, then all which will be left are the accusations. I can't remember who each of the three "suicides" were but I do recall one being an online account named "byuu" who was supposedly an American programmer living in Japan. He wrote furry porn games. The Farms had an old article on it and Byuu contacted the Farms and offered them $200,000 to remove it and threatened to kill himself if they didn't.

He stopped posting and this became a "suicide". It's a near certainty that he just changed his username to disassociate himself from his furry porn game past. This is a good example of the whisper campaign run by people like Keffels and Liz Fong-Jones: a user who nobody knew their real identity, just an online account stops contributing to a public code repository because the Farms refuse to delete an old thread and this suddenly becomes them seeking out and bullying someone to suicide. And fwiw, Japan documents deaths publicly and no Americans died in Japan in the month he supposedly killed himself.

I can't speak in as much detail about the other accusations because I don't recall them and I can't research them because the farms is down. But just reading through the "Mother Jones" article so many parts of it don't match up with my reading the sight it's a clear hit-piece by someone who is either lying or hasn't spent time reading the site. That the Mother Jones article criticizes the site for documenting a man who raped his own mother, shows by how much it is a hit piece.

People can like the Farms or not, but if they succeed in taking it down, they will most certainly come after others and have an easier time of it because I don't think anyone has fought as hard to keep a website up as Jersh has. If intimidation tactics like calling an employee's wife up in the early hours of the morning et al. are allowed to succeed then being legally in the right wont matter anymore. And that means any place where people with GC views gather, including this specific board on MN, are at risk.

Sorry to see this happen. The tech details are beyond me, tbh, but I hope they can find a way through. Setting up a small carrier sounds like a good idea.

When you are posting links opposed to sites that document the behaviour of rapists you really do have to wonder what the hell you are doing with your life.

Exactly. FFS. 🙄

Quite.

It's that twisted version of morality isn't it?

If it benefits the TQ+ political lobby, it's morally good.
If it does not benefit the TQ+ political lobby, it's morally bad.

Wondering about setting up a universal bullshit translator thread, we're beginning to need one. 'Consent accident' is just one in a whole lot of very thin fig leaves not doing much covering really.

Absolutely

People can like the Farms or not, but if they succeed in taking it down, they will most certainly come after others

this

thank you for posting oldgardinia

Yep

Thank you for posting this

I can’t bear the farms but they’re so important