In March 2020, Spotlight Newspaper posted an article about a National Action, a banned neo-Nazi terror group with international links, including to Ukraine’s ‘Azov Battalion’ (an extreme-right wing ‘Special Operations Regiment,’ accused of numerous war crimes by the UN). National Action openly promote “white jihad,” and advocate for the genocide of all Jewish and non-white people. I also mentioned, at the time, that some of their members had been linked to a number of neo-Nazi forums and one, in particular, Kiwi Farms, had a worrying and sinister track record. The owner of the platform, Joshua Connor Moon, would repeatedly advocate rape and violence against minors and Kiwi Farms members would frequently discuss plots to commit mass murder. Joshua Moon also advocates for Jews to be mutilated and for a “Muslim genocide” and yet, this platform has been allowed thrive and Moon, for the most part, has managed to evade any serious legal repercussions.
In 2015, Kiwi Farms user Lindsay Kanittha Souvannarath, a neo-Nazi white supremacist, was arrested for plotting to commit mass murder at a mall on Valentine’s Day in Halifax, Nova Scotia and some members of the Kiwi Farms forum have actually gone on to commit mass shootings. In December 2017, Kiwi Farms member William Atchison went on a shooting rampage at Aztec High School in New Mexico, killing two children before killing himself. Mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant, the man behind New Zealand Christchurch massacre, which resulted in 51 worshippers being shot and killed, posted details of his sick plan to Kiwi Farms, along with a 73-page manifesto, a mere hours before carrying out the attack and then uploaded live video footage of the shooting to the Kiwi Farms website, immediately after. When approached by New Zealand police, Joshua Moon refused to hand over any data linked to the posts and videos that were circulating across the Kiwi Farms forum.
As a pass time, Kiwi Farms members also enjoy cyberstalking anyone they consider of low worth (which is basically anyone who isn’t able bodied or a white supremacist or a heterosexual male), and then they do every thing in their power to ruin that person’s life. The attacks are direct and ruthless, ranging from doxing (posting people’s personal and private data online), to fabricating lies designed to ruin reputations, get people sacked and destroy relationships. These attacks are so ruthless they have already driven many innocent people to suicide. People like…
19yr old Julie Terryberry, from Ontario
Chloe Sagal, a transgender woman from Oregon
Nicholas McCrary, AKA Baraka
Chance Carmichael, from Longmont, CO
Desmond Amofah AKA Etika
Near Byuu, pioneering creator of the higan & bsnes emulators
This week we’ve been hearing of another tragic suicide being attributed to Kiwi Farms cyberstalking, that of loving father and husband Marshall Scott. Speaking to Spotlight, his wife, Melinda Scott, has been describing a deeply malicious campaign designed to destroy Marshall’s standing in his community, taking away his ability to earn a living and provide for his family and essentially making his life a living hell. Melinda tells us that she and her husband Marshall and their small children lived in an apartment in the Appalachian hills of Southwest Virginia (USA), where Melinda was running a small business and home schooling the kids. One day in 2017, as Melinda was online checking out the design layout for her new website, she discovered a link with her name on it while browsing the net. The link took her to a page that had a fake story about her and her husband Marshall, accusing them of adultery. It was an extremely malicious attack. The author personally maligned Melinda, describing her as being of low intelligence, mocking her business and even referring to her as a ‘slut’. Melinda’s husband was also targeted. The stalker had somehow found out that Marshall had previously been incarcerated and decided to broadcast this to the Kiwi Farms community, who then all piled in and started to make fun of Marshall.
Melinda emailed the owner of the Kiwi Farms website (Joshua Connor Moon) asking for the article to be taken down but he became hostile and point blank refused to remove the post. This forced Melinda to take legal action via the General District Court (GDC). Unfortunately, the court dismissed the case, despite all the evidence presented and Melinda believes this is because the judge was racist. At one point he even asked Melinda where her husband was from because Marshall had dark skin (being half Mexican). Melinda replied saying he was from Los Angeles, which appeared to get the judges heckles up because he became very cold towards them after that. His body language also changed at this point as he slouched back into his chair and folded his arms.
Shortly after this, Melinda discovered that her home address had been posted to the Kiwi Farms website and then she started to get anonymous threatening emails from someone claiming to be speaking on behalf of Kiwi Farms telling her that now they know where she lives they could get to her and her family. They even threatened to target the children by posting pictures of them on the Kiwi farms website. Melinda immediately contacted the magistrate judge in her town but they did nothing. Melinda tells us she’d also previously posted a full length pleading to the Circuit Courts but this too was rejected in December 2017.
The harassment and personal attacks continued and Melinda felt she was running out of legal options locally so she decided to take it to federal level. She asked for an injunction but this was denied on the grounds that you can only request an injunction if you are a victim in a case where someone is being criminally prosecuted for cyberstalking.
In 2018, after some of her neighbours became aware of some of the malicious lies being circulated by Kiwi Farms users, Melinda tells us that she and her family started to get directly targeted. This included attempted physical assaults on Melinda and people screaming “pedophile” at her husband Marshall. Melinda then took the decision to sue for Defamation and Appropriation but, again, the case was dismissed. Apparently, the court decided that the things Joshua Moon had been saying fell into the category of “rhetoric hyperbole” not “defamation”. Melinda admits she was inexperienced in legal matters at that time and that there were some weaknesses in her pleading, so she filed a third time and this time she made sure to explain why Joshua Moon was not immune. The 3rd suit was for IIED and is currently in the Appeals court, along with a request for an injunction.
Sadly, the 5yr fight for civil action and the continuing cyberstalking and harassment of her family took its toll on Marshall. Melinda tells us that in January this year she saw Marshall take his own life. She describes how Marshall had attempted to shoot himself twice previously but unfortunately, this time, she was unable to talk him out of it. Melinda blames Kiwi Farms for her husband’s suicide as they publicly slandered him and sabotaged his reputation, making it almost impossible for him to earn a living. Melinda tells us that Marshall had been repeatedly harassed by his co-workers and that he was being paid half of what his co-workers would earn. As a result, Marshall was struggling to pay child support to his ex-wife and was worried about a looming threat of incarceration as a result. He even tried starting up his own business as a mobile mechanic but was worried that Kiwi Farms would ward off customers and prevent him from building up a client base. The night before he died, Marshall told Melinda that he loved her. Melinda sensed from his previous two attempts that Marshall was torn because he didn’t want to leave her or the children but it seems the fact that he was unable to support himself or his family and was even forced to rely on them was too much for him to bear. Melinda believes that Marshall just lost all hope in the end.
Shockingly, Kiwi Farms now appear to have turned their attention to Melinda and the children. Melinda tells us they’re threatening to stalk the children so she has now also written to two Attorney Generals and the FBI. Melinda describes how Kiwi Farm users have also threatened to steal her property, physically attack her and send people to her home to harass her. They continue to spread false accusations about her publicly and are continuously tracking her whereabouts. They’ve even posted identifying information online (such as Melinda’s home address, car details and the details of her graduate school). Just as Marshall had feared, they’ve even tried to sabotage Melinda’s small business in order to make it difficult for her to trade and earn a living for herself and her children. Sadly, Melinda’s story is far from unique and Marshall is not the first person to have committed suicide as a direct result of a horrific campaign of cyberstalking, personal threats, intimidation, physical attacks and sabotage at the hands of Kiwi Farms users.
As we’ve also outlined above, Kiwi Farms has even spawned a number of shooters, both in the US and abroad, so it’s frightening to think that even the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand didn’t prompt the US authorities into action. Why? Well, one possible explanation might be the fact that Kiwi Farms and similar online neo-Nazi white supremacist groups have been closely linked to Steve Bannon, who appears to have rallied their support during Trump’s 2016 campaign and these groups appear to have other connections in high places as well. Brave Software founder and co-founder of the Mozilla project, Brendan Eich, has been happy to accommodate Joshua Moon with a revenue stream and becomes rather offensive and condescending towards anyone who attempts to point out to him that Moon is a white supremacist who advocates raping and mutilating minors, young women and Jews, as well as the genocide of Muslims and various minority groups. A little while back, Spotlight took the initiative to contact Brendan Eich on Twitter to raise our concerns and got the following responses…
A little background on Brendan Eich to provide some context… Apparently, just days after his appointment as Mozilla CEO in 2014, the company learnt that he had donated $1,000 to a campaign to get same-sex marriage banned in California so Eich was forced to step down as CEO immediately. Eich also donated thousands of dollars to right wing Republican candidates Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, Both men hold controversial opinions about homosexuality, gender relations, immigration and race. Buchanan has made many controversial statements on homosexuality, gender relations, immigration and race over a number of decades. During the Aids outbreak Buchanan remarked how “promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide” and “homosexuals have declared war on nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution”. Ron Paul who is equally homophobic and racist once wrote how he felt that “homosexuals… were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities”. Eich has also refused to Ban Gab’s Browser Extension. Gab is far-right social media platform which critics have referred to as a “hotbed of hate speech”. This in spite of the fact that Firefox and Chrome have both banned it from their add-on stores. When asked if he might change his mind if Brave started to get negative media attention as a result, Eich’s response was simply to say that he’d been “attacked already” and he feels “immunized now.” It would seem from this then that we can assume that Eich sees accommodating far right groups as a way to further his own political agenda. This would also explain why, in his responses to us above, he takes a rather defensive and dismissive tone and a more reactive line in problem solving, rather than a more pro-active stance which would at least have demonstrated he had an interest in engaging with the problem. In fact, at one point he refers to our sharing source material on Moon as “pressure tactics” and even describes us as the “enemy.”
On a positive note, there have been some recent developments as Kiwi Farms appears to have come to the attention of the FBI, who now believe that that they could potentially pose an “increased threat of domestic terror.” Consequently, the internet security provider Cloudflare has decided to drop Kiwi Farms, forcing the site offline. It seems that Kiwi Farms came under scrutiny after a campaign, started by trans political commentator and streamer Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti, began trending. Keffals became a victim of Kiwi Farms when she was forced to flee her home after she and her family had been repeatedly doxed online. This included posting their addresses online, which effectively painted a target on their backs. Kiwi Farms users then launched a number of “swatting” attacks, where they would file false crime reports against Clara, which would then result in local police attending her home. Clara decided to move to Northern Ireland as a result of the attacks but Kiwi Farms users tracked her down within 48 hours and continued with further threats and swatting attacks.
It’s unclear how seriously the FBI are viewing these threats and it’s still possible for Kiwi Farms to simply migrate over to more sympathetic alternative service provider (as they have done previously) but the question many of us are asking now is just how many more people will Kiwi Farms be allowed to victimize, how many more lives will they ruin, how many more suicides and how many more mass shootings will it take before the US authorities finally decide to do something?
I must admit, I’m also wondering, given the fact that Kiwi Farms doesn’t appear to abide by any national boundaries (having demonstrated that they can commit terrorist attacks abroad in places like New Zealand, that they have developed links to white supremacist groups in Europe and that they can launch swatting attacks on people anywhere in the world), if it isnt time that they were correctly labelled as an international terror group. Perhaps a little international pressure might finally persuade US authorities to stop giving them safe harbour?
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