My understanding is that the IA doesn't actually delete delete things in this sort of situation, but just makes them not public. Although maybe I'm thinking of robots.txt exclusions, which I guess this is a bit different to?
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The wayback machine just makes it so you can visit archived pages. They simply made it inaccessible.
It's still there for research purposes but not to the general public. Which makes sense to me seeing what kind of information they shared on there. Even if publically available, the way it was saved to a central location and used to harass people just for fun is a perfectly fine reason to have it not be available to the general public anymore.
It's essentially a community built around the online stalking and harassment of random people, because their reactions to it are entertaining. The name comes from Chris-Chan (CWCFarms being the original name).
"LOLcows" (as they call their victims) suffering from breakdowns, their entire lives falling apart, and indeed committing suicide are all entirely normal reactions. The community, naturally, takes zero responsibility for it - a famous example is probably a post from the site's founder about how it's completely narcissistic to think their little online community is important enough to be responsible for any of this (even when the victim leaves a note saying as much) and that what they're doing is, in a way, honouring their victims.
Literally no one who has ever had their name posted on the site would agree.
Online hate group that harassed and doxxed trans people, specifically youths and activists.
Jobless, sexless, shrimp dicked, zeta's who aren't skilled or ballsy enough to do good work like anonymous because that might get them in trouble.
Let's make this clear - Internet Archive was subject to a justifiable but incredibly fierce campaign by a Twitter mob. For almost a decade, Internet Archive was archiving KiwiFarms - because that's what they do. They archive. They didn't stop because KiwiFarms was actually violating their policies, they stopped as a direct result of negative attention from #DropKiwiFarms.
No illegal content was present on KiwiFarms. None. Almost all of the personal information was sourced thanks to America's freedom of information laws, which enables websites like Spokeo and White Pages to collect an alarming amount of information from almost everyone in the country.
We could speculate for eternity regarding what people could do with any piece of information on any archived page. I'm of the opinion that it's irrelevant to the job of an archivist. If we simply look at the pages that were being archived - there is nothing illegal. Long winded discussions, images, videos, etc.
Honestly, I don't know how anybody can celebrate this and call themselves a support of archiving at the same time. This is why you NEED to make your own local archives. Do not trust these organisations to safeguard information.
The contents are still archived. They are just not publicly available.
Aye bro- go make this clear- not everything needs an archive, or if you really believe it does- only a handful of people need access. You want to access people’s numbers and shit just do as you said yourself- help yaself to the white pages
Also we couldn’t speculate for eternity about anything. One or all of us would die before then.
There are literally current police investigations into criminal harassment stemming from the site... Almost all the personal info was sourced is a weasel statement, you and I both know that we can't verify all the information was attained legally, and given the nature of the site why take the risk of archiving it, that's just nonsense weaseling around the issue that given the sites contents not being able to verify every bit of information is legal is tantamount to admitting some of it was illegally obtained and then shared with the intent of harassment. People have committed suicide because of the harassment from the site, your weasel words and absolutism is disgusting, if you are going to make a stand on principles actually do it, write down that you think archiving kiwi farms is more important than the lives of individuals harassed to suicide.
Just like how the last president was kicked off Twitter and then launched his own mastodon site there is literally nothing stopping you from hosting your own archive of whatever the hell kiwi farms is.
This is a taste of the future of the archive, we can see a lot more things being removed for smaller reasons.
No illegal content was present on KiwiFarms.
I'm pretty sure stalking and harassment are illegal.
Let's make this clear, ensuring their horrible acts would be viewable forever by anyone is just ignorant. Evil like this needs to be stopped, period.
I never even knew wtf kiwi farmers is. The first time I heard it I thought it was some kids mobile game.
This isn't the only time they've scrubbed a domain. I'll start donating when they stop censoring.
Regardless of what one might think about such forum, this definitely establishes bad precedent. I won't say to not archive things on Wayback Machine, because it's relatively easy, but archive elsewhere as well, preferably having a copy with yourself.
Archived KiwiFarms threads contained personal info on people the users doxxed. Addresses, phone numbers, where they worked or hung out, etc, all of which was used to harass and hurt people. That is not info that should be preserved for the sake of history. People used that info to sic SWAT teams on their targets. They never should have archived it in the first place.
This terrible precedent is not new. They've been honoring retroactive robots.txt requests since at least Pictures For Sad Children falling off the internet. Even though it was the fucking domain squatter that changed the policy.
http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd (dot) onion
and how did any of them think it was going to last there site doing unspekable things to harm other`s and it was only a matter of time that eveyone wood yeet them off the web and now there archive down it will make things a bit more safe for the ones that were bothered by them
I get kiwifarms is a horrible pile of garbage, but I don't agree with deleting the archives. an archive is just showing the information available, it isn't supporting or disagreeing. it's like removing books about Nazi in libraries because it's too violent.
Except you can't use the info in a book written by nazis to doxx and harass Jewish people today. However Kiwifarms has piles of information that can be used to (and already used) to doxx people, their contact info, their home addresses etc etc
I’m of two minds about this. Sanitizing history rarely ends well, but that kind of thing shouldn’t be out there with everything that’s going on. I’d like to see something like that taken down, but then set to be restored in like 20 years or so.
Drinking game, take a shot every time a variation of the word 'censored' arises when discussing the Kiwi Farms.
im very uhh.. happy? that other people share the same visceral emotional disgust at the site as me?
but i'm very uh.. conflicted as to whether straight up wiping all the archives was good?
its like if i was there would probably really want to and i'm glad they really wanted to but I would ultimately relent because censoring the waybackmachine for something thats not like illegal feels a step too far and i'm not sure i- i should stop talking
I don't like the precedent this sets. If this is what it takes to basically unperson someone or something; what's there to stop a government or other entity from just randomly deleting someone or something off the face of the earth?
Like this place was bad, but what if the next place subject to deletion isn't?
So anyone who bullies people into killing themselves or SWATs Congresswomen could be a target for deplatforming?
GOOD! Honestly they'll be lucky to not get prison for all the crimes they've committed.
Fam you can go read like 100 different news articles about kiwifarms or read their Wikipedia page. Nobody was unpersoned, nothing was deleted from the face of the earth, the content is still there just not public. People will still be able to look up the name kiwi farms decades from now, if a very public very documented privating of archived material is what scares you about deleting people from earth I don't know what to say, go to therapy?
We already live in that world. You exist as a legal person by the grace of whatever corrupt government you are ruled by.
But regardless nobody depersoned/deleted the actual users of the site.
That is a strawman. What was deleted was TOS breaking content.
I think driving people to suicide and swatting are way worse than not making kiwifarms pages publically available on some archiving services but maybe that's just me.
Mostly people can't understand what this kind of "censorship" means. Ofc IDK why the site-archive isn't accesible but if it's because a some Twitter user shit... Then why archive sites could be possible? Like delete a excerpt of Wikipedia that doesn't like you... That's no good at all.
why should parents be able to withhold lifesaving medication from their children? parents who do that should be in prison
Hang on. For the record, HRT is just like other forms of medical care. You cannot obtain it from a doctor as a minor without parental consent. It’s very tricky to obtain sometimes even with parental consent.
Pretty much the only situation where a doctor is guaranteed to say yes to care like that for children is in situations of precocious puberty in cis kids, where they’ll prescribe puberty blockers until the usual age, or in situations where (for example) a cis boy has an injury to his genitalia that prevents him from producing enough testosterone, in which case they’ll prescribe supplements.
i don't get why people of reddit will so often post a screencap of some random dude's tweet instead of simply linking to what's being discussed (which is why reddit even exists)
Not sure I agree with removing their toxic posts. We need examples of evil to show people what not to do.
Always, always be careful about the content your web crawlers dig up. If you are archiving an entire website, including the dusty old corners of it, there is the very real possibility your program might dig up some content that you really wouldn't want to have on your hard drive.
According to the rumors floating around in image boards, this is finally what did the onion archive in - it picked up some illegal content that flew under the FA mod team's radar, the archivist didn't notice it, but the FBI did, and now the service has been forced to shut down.
Now, there's no way of knowing if this is true, speculation, or just a troll, but given that the site has gone completely unresponsive for the last week or so whereas the last few times it went down it usually gave a 500 error, it's hard not to find credibility in this story.
If you are planning on making a website archive of this size and caliber, it is very important to come up with a way to filter out illegal content. The best way to do so is through human action. Making your archive publicly accessible and giving people a report option to alert you of illegal content so you can delete it is good practice. Yes, it's not easy, and honestly I'm not even sure it would 100% save you from the feds, but it's one the best shots you have at staying out of trouble without just giving up on the archiving business.
It's really a shame the the guy behind the FA TOR archive didn't do this and most likely suffered for it - that archive used to be one of the most impressively thorough big website archives I've ever seen.
If you want to check on that archive to see if this is true and it's really gone (hey, there's always hope), here is a tor2web v3 onion link, as the old onion links on our wiki page are V2 and as such have been discontinued for a while now. If you don't want to use tor2web proxies, just delete the ".ly" at the end of the link and paste it on your tor browser.
EDIT: wait, nevermind. It seems to be working again. Guess those stories really were just trolls spreading rumors.
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