SCP Staff: Thank KiwiFarms
NEWS/OPINION/ANALYSIS — Unless you think virtue signaling is meaningful, KiwiFarms has done more good for the userbase.
If you spend any time around the SCP Wiki community, particularly the emotional day care that is its Twittersphere, you will notice there is an equivalent to the Elephant Graveyard from Lion King; a place you cannot go, that the light does not touch, and that pure evil lurks in wait for some dumb cub to go wandering into. That place is KiwiFarms, an internet 1.0 forum made to laugh at people for being dumb on the internet (“lolcows”) that is constantly the target of cancel culture Karens who can’t believe that the whole of humanity can be as ugly as what that forum makes apparent.
In true Zoomer fashion, members of the SCP Wiki — not all, but again, particularly the Twittersphere — can only understand KiwiFarms in the supplied and irreducible cultural molds afforded to them by the subvegetable minds of bloodsucking billion-dollar corporations in Hollywood; they treat KiwiFarms as someone would Voldemort, or the way a fundamentalist religious figure in the 1990’s would popular music. You aren’t allowed to mention the name, and even typing it out fully is a sin. It is the philosophically SCP-adjacent individual who, when referencing KiwiFarms, will be spooked enough by its mere name to interrupt all its letters by forward slashes or asterisks (“k/i/w/i/f/a/r/m/s” or “k*i*w*f*a*r*m*s” or “k*w*f*rms”) — something that can now be seen humorously and in irony as a widespread inside joke on the forums itself.
What causes such a reflexive, reactive disdain? Well, KiwiFarms is like that gross dive bar that rough and seedy characters hang out in. There are all sorts of opinions on there; the good, the bad, and the ugly. You have transphobia, you also have love for and from trans individuals who are members of the site.
Of course it is the ugly opinions that cause those from SCP Wiki who react in such a spooked fashion and who avoid it so religiously. There is one ugly opinion that is particularly egregious; the transphobia. The transphobia witnessed on KiwiFarms (doesn’t matter by who, or in what thread) is enough for some, and probably all influencers in the SCP space, to nuke the whole site. Because some individuals there are transphobic, and because the site is a bastion of free-speech that won’t censor someone for saying a mean word, the SCP Wiki community believes that it is 100% evil.
They also dislike it for stated reasons such as doxing, while gleefully ripping the IP addresses and personal emails of all who enter their IRC chat without their consent, but that is a hypocrisy covered on this blog plenty & extensively in other places.
This is obvious in that the SCP Wiki Staff have a strong history of banning individuals in their community who can be seen participating on a particular thread of KiwiFarms that is dedicated to the hilarity and insanity that the SCP Wiki often finds itself in. The individuals banned from SCP for the crime of participating on KiwiFarms do not need to say anything transphobic or dox anyone.
In one instance, an individual was banned for pointing out unacceptable pedophilia in the only way made possible by SCP Staff’s informational gulag of multi-platform content control. This individual resorted to KiwiFarms in order to condemn a celebrated tale on the SCP Wiki, “Doctor Doctor Doctor”, which existed for 10 years, openly glorifying underage sexuality (the breasts of a 13 year old girl).
The Staff realized how horrible it was at one point in its history and pressured the author to modify the tale. The modification? It referenced a big dick now instead of nubile kid breasts. “There,” Staff said, “good as new.” The author was not chastised or even cited in a non-disciplinary fashion, but further advanced through the culture as a revered and significant figure.
The other individual, whose “illegal” actions finally took the tale down, was first banned for vandalizing it as a protest-statement, because a nobody just bringing it up to people didn’t bring about any change or care from people. The individual then was permabanned for drawing more attention to it via KiwiFarms. The knowledge of KiwiFarms participation led to the permaban, and was relayed in official Staffspeak as “new information made available”. Popular figures on the site carried the momentum to harvest social media goodie points for the tale’s takedown, while the SCP Staff shat all over the actual activist for interacting with the site that had a history of laughing at them, and exposing some truly awful stuff about them.
The result of the publicity on KiwiFarms was that the SCP Wiki community developed a renewed outrage for “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor”. After, the tale’s rating plummeted in a holistic downvote brigade. It was on a slow, drawn-out, but sure collision course with the usual and very public deletion process. This prompted the Staff to, after over a decade, contact the author to frontrun the embarassment and have it taken down “voluntarily” prior to its total collapse. This sole actor who lit the community fire and acted as the lone voice of morality in an otherwise mass-anesthetized hive-mind was, again, punished for resorting to the information and publicity stockpile of KiwiFarms.
This eruption was in 2021. KiwiFarmers on the SCP Thread had been calling the article out and advocating for its deletion as far back as 2020.
This is not the only incident of massive community change being enacted through KiwiFarms. A year earlier, numerous individuals (including AdminBright, the author of “Doctor Doctor Doctor”) were outed via KiwiFarms as child predators. After years of housing and enabling an underage grooming farm in their community, the SCP Wiki Staff were finally made fully aware of the rank debauchery underneath their own nose by the anti-pedophilia sentiment and research from individuals on the KiwiFarms thread. If one was paying close enough attention, one might even think that the exposé forced the hand of a Staff who knew damn well the sort of people they were protecting out of a sense of brand self-preservation & reputational fear.
Let me expand on that “protecting” for just one second. The SCP Wiki’s religious aversion to a place like KiwiFarms is the result of many things, the SCP Wiki Staff chief among them. Not only do they ban individuals who are known to have gone there, but in their chats and discussions routinely paint KiwiFarms as a place of zero informational capability. Links to KiwiFarms, particularly those that are revealing, are censored from their chats and Discords instantly. Anyone attempting to share revaluations from KiwiFarms to the greater SCP Wiki community are stymied at every turn by attempted shame & information sanitation. Even something posted to the social media satellite communities, such as r/SCP, is scrubbed immediately.
Why the censorship on the basis of where the (accurate) information was revealed? Why did they advocate so hard that it was false, while removing the ability for people to see so for themselves? What could be more egregious on the other side of the scale there than a secret pedophilia festering in your own midst? Transphobia? Doxing? Mean words? You’d have to ask the SCP Staff, as they stand by their censorious decisions & ways to this day.
The sexual scandal that erupted in the SCP Wiki was a direct result from the evidence and journalism on the KiwiFarms thread. It caused more meaningful and positive change on the SCP Wiki than the Staff had managed in years, and have managed since. As a result, numerous individuals were banned, many believe reluctantly. These people had acted like parasites on the site’s mostly underage demographic for years. (Maybe that would have been a good time for Staff to have addressed “Doctor, Doctor, Doctor” voluntarily, but again, it took bad PR from KiwiFarms to get the community & author motivated enough to do it for them.)
The SCP Wiki Staff, for [insert your selected reason here], were not able to put the pieces of the puzzle together themselves. They were unable to detect and deal with rampant child grooming in their own ranks. The “evil” KiwiFarms had to do it for them, kicking and screaming.
In response — too little being way too late — the SCP Wiki Staff, in a frightened reflex of PR management that they would later recognize as a selfish mistake, raised the minimum age limit of the site to 18 in order to numb and amputate any culpability in the fallout. They also began placing “Adult Content” warnings on the literal smut all over the site; stuff that not only had been encouraged and celebrated, but that had in years past been featured by Staff on the front page of the Wiki.
The removal of two child predators, high-profile users Eskobar and Gabriel Jade, was itself a more impactful event than all of these policy changes combined. Two sexual predators were gone. KiwiFarms did that.
What of the SCP’s reactionary, herd-fleeing-in-one-direction response? Well we see now in 2022 that Staff have desperately tried to undo that minimum age limit raise. A year later, and with enough rushing to the entirely opposite side of interpretation to capsize any claims of legitimacy or good intent. It finally caught up to them that the age raise simply criminalizes underage individuals, and cripples them from reporting sexual abuse. They have also recently admitted that they aren’t even sure whose job it is to place those “Adult Content” warnings on the appropriate pages. Priorities.
Furthermore, promises made in the frenzy of the sexual scandal remain unfinished and dusty; aborted due to neglect once the PR heat died down. For example, explicit rules were crafted to punish the act of leveraging one’s clout within the SCP Wiki community for sexual favors. The staff voted on this clause’s inclusion into the site’s Charter, and this vote saw unanimous and fervent approval (fear). This was abandoned after the political theater’s curtains were closed. The language that would criminalize the solicitation of sexual favors has not been added.
The SCP Wiki Staff did all they could to minimize the actions in response to the sexual scandal, in order to avoid more bad publicity. Let me say that another way; the reflection of a pedophile problem on the Staff was more important to them than actually addressing or fixing that underage sexual grooming. For example, the ring-leader of the sexual misconduct, AdminBright, was ignored despite definitive evidence of such misconduct surfacing (i.e. asking his largely underage Tumblr followers for nudes for his 30-something birthday). Amid the growing recognition of this individuals’ complicitness in the culture’s sexual degeneracy, the Staff parlayed with him and asked him to step down, so that they wouldn’t have to ban him and suffer more shame. That individual has since been definitively banned, but for stated reasons that carefully avoid any mention of sexual misconduct, and obviously so.
This individual, while banned, has not been given the same villain treatment from the SCP Staff’s bully pulpits that mere critics of the site get, and so remains interactive with a large portion of the underage demographic through TikTok; an audience of admirers who have not been clearly told of this individual’s predatory & dangerous nature, so that the Staff and brand of SCP can not look as bad. “Protecting their userbase” my ass.
But the deepest issue here, as we can see, is that we have a hive-minded group of individuals who are desperate to preserve their social and political capital above anything and everything else, even the safety of their (majority) underage users. The reason for this is poor leadership that can’t truly be honest or asses itself… until something else forces them to. Something like KiwiFarms. The Staff double down on their own idiocy in order to look virtuous; they prioritize the most superficial political talking points above the ability for their at-risk users to be educated.
Take another recent example of religious poo-poo-ing of KiwiFarms:
Here, a party-line-towing Twitter user seemingly brimming with virtue named BimboPolitic can be seen shunning pixelatedHarmony, someone who has been manufactured by the SCP Staff to be a community villain. The person, BimboPolitic, is throwing stones at Harmony (a trans individual no less) who resorted to using KiwiFarms to broadcast anti-SCP Staff information, as it was the only meaningful place to do so where the bad PR wouldn’t be immediately censored and smeared by that Staff.
As you can guess by now, the SCP community ate pixelatedHarmony’s disingenuous character assassination up unquestioningly… this seems to be the defining trait of SCP’s preferred crop of user… for reasons not wholly unrelated to the already-covered sexual scandal. BimboPolitic is a nice archetype of this sort of individual. Bimbo rejects KiwiFarms in its entirety on the basis of group-based superficial sociological points; a peer-pressure fear of being associated with a sort of political leprosy; selling people on glitzy, hugbox, motivational poster words that would be cringe even hanging on the wall in a daycare.
And yet, come to find out, this BimboPolitic individual has quite an impressive history of absolutely horrible behavior; much worse than the mean messages and retributive brush with KiwiFarms the ex-SCP user is apparently a Hitler-level villain for. To add to the irony, thick enough already for sure, all of this was researched and exposed by KiwiFarms no less. Despite this, the SCP community will vilify the trans person who used KiwiFarms in a similar fashion. They will prefer the actually insane evil person if they nominally satisfy the political checklist that is stamped along the foldless surface of the typical SCP community member’s brain.
Again, the SCP Wiki and community at large are not interested in decrying or removing such an individual from their midst. They are more concerned with the political optics at hand. “KiwiFarms evil” is dogma. “The problem with being pathologically anti-[ideology] or assuming that everyone else is an evil boogeyman is that it leads you to flights of fancy so detached from reality that your version of events has causes and effects literally backwards.” (Quote from a KiwiFarmer!) There is no subtly in discussing anything even slightly deviating from the political fundamentalism of the SCP Staff and core community beyond monoterms of wild intellectual vacuousness such as “transphobe” or “bigot”.
Yet these remain individuals who are more outraged by individuals who criticize them than they are by pro-pedophilic smut on their site. They more fervently attack and publicly shame people who disagree with their egos and politics than they are interested in identifying sexual groomers in their midst. They would rather their community remain ignorant of abuses, including the sexual abuse of children, than suffer reputational set-backs. It is in this way that the SCP Wiki Staff are more interested in the most superficial grooming of their political reputations than they are about the grooming of their own userbase.
The subsequent wholesale vilification of a place like KiwiFarms for purely political and supremely unintelligent reasons, also for the purpose of self-esteem-protection, means that the SCP Wiki Staff — and a majority of their community by proxy — are incapable of self-analysis, even when it is offered to them on a silver platter, already prepared, cooked, and plated. In SCP’s 100% political informational plantation, the priorities of the SCP Staff are apparent: they feel the removal of something like the SCP-173 image is more ethically pressing than addressing the power abuse of their most senior and executive Staff members; the politics of something like pooryoric’s Admin-sanctioned statement on AWCY? Arms that doesn’t hold up to intelligence is more important than fact.
The product from the SCP theater is therefore propaganda, one I’m impressed with when I observe the speed and efficiency that the NPCs there have been propagandised on things like KiwiFarms and pixelatedHarmony, even the recent SCP-173 image removal, where the SCP Staff — intentionally or not — used their media to whip up an anoxic frenzy & in a completely irresponsible way to get what they wanted; again, facts completely aside. They are fine with propaganda, as long as it serves their goals. The users and consumers of this propaganda operate off of information they don’t bother to verify or research. I keep seeing so many takes that would be refuted by the most basic understanding from a cursory glance at something like the SCP thread on KiwiFarms.
Their refusal to understand that there is more to KiwiFarms than unfortunate hate for people means that they demonstrably care more about mean words than the sexual abuse of children. They would rather manufacture a way-over-there bogeymen, idiots who say things that no one needs the supposed moral proficiency of someone like the SCP Staff to identify for them, than call out people within the very demographic they are trying to appeal to who sexually groom other people of that group, in their own backyard.
Because of this, their intellectual worldview is one that expends more energy on removing the ability to be challenged or questioned than to address actual challenges or find answers; they’ll be damned if someone else takes up the task of self-awareness that they refuse to address. So, a place on the internet that will feature such opinions, and also happen to house political takes they disagree with and take offense to, is reason enough to lobotomize their ethical cognition regarding some incredibly deep-seeded and problematic things within themselves — illegal things, things much much worse than the idiotic words of hateful people.
Even the sort of self-analysis and betterment that the SCP Wiki Staff and those adjacent to it are capable of can only rise to the level of what other people have already said for them. Take for example a recent proposal on the SCP Wiki Staff forum to do away with the casual shit-talk channels of the SCP Staff-only Discord. The user who suggests this gives justifications for the removal of these casual chats in the proposal. This commentary is harvested from statements long-since made by other individuals in years past. One such individual who said this in 2019 (me) was at the time mocked by the very person now proposing it.
This individual, Rounderhouse, is an exemplar of the community in many ways; good and bad. Certainly in this is the self-ascribed moral elitism of a community whose offensive & defensive playbooks are limited to sticking their head in the sand to configure an ignorance bubble. He is only able to say such things without mockery & rejection because he is already a celebrated figure; a real catch-22 when it comes to honesty & progress. In truth, Rounderhouse will just as quickly censor and block the individuals with a perceived lesser standing, even those who outpace his intelligence by years. Rounderhouse is a decent writer, and a breath of fresh air to the SCP Staff (at least he pilfers & peddles meaningful criticism he heard from others… not everyone will go that far), but most of all he is a coward in a hidey hole. I’m making a general statement about SCP Staff’s majority mentality: cowardly banning people from a server is not a sign of strength.
We see a similar case of admission-by-last-resort with larger issues and the SCP Staff/community on the whole. The 2021 Town Halls were a disaster that the SCP Staff were forced into conducting as a result of their continuous dishonesty and lies toward their own community. In those Town Halls, the Staff’s actions amounted to the most meager behavioral repetition of what other people had suggested they do. None of the promises have been kept. Very few have noticed. This is in part due to the short term memory of the youthful userbase; like children on a Merry-Go-Round. The other reason is that the SCP Wiki Staff still actively censors anything from any dissenting community. This puts their userbase at an informational deficiency, whereby they cannot hope to grasp the larger forms moving and contradicting themselves within the span of only months.
The adult reality of KiwiFarms is larger than the hate speech you can easily find there, just as the SCP Staff and Wiki are more complex and diverse than the sweeping criticisms I’m making here. KiwiFarms is a throwback to the way the internet used to be, including the good and the bad. The lack of partisan censorship makes it a fine place to look at if you want a diversity of interpretations on a given topic; this is lost on SCP Staff in a backhanded bitchslap of pure irony.
The religious partisanship of SCP representatives — the side that is pro-censorship and with a batting average of zero across all known history — is enough to nuke all potential nuance or subtly regarding a diversity of individuals or information on KiwiFarms. In the uneventful mind of such a person, anyone on KiwiFarms (ever) is necessarily as evil as their uninformed imagination can cook it up to be, by a mutant faith of sheer ignorance.
For example, the low-info individuals who treat KiwiFarms as the Elephant Graveyard might not know that the numerous trans individuals there do the heavy-lifting, the real work, of telling transphobes why they are stupid (not just calling them playground names in retreat). There’s a lolcow thread for Donald Trump there. The general sentiment after the 2020 election was celebratory. For example, the owners of the site changed the CSS theme to Democrat blue and featured the KF logo replaced with Joe Biden eating chocolate chocolate chip ice cream. The general vibe was people laughing at Trump supporters. “We laugh because that’s hilariously stupid” is the ubiquitous mentality that is applied to any and all demographics at KiwiFarms.
And yet… the offense to one of these demographics is enough to pour all the diversity there into the abstract rubric of evil. This is the mark of an idiot. A hopeless, un-helpable moron that barely rises above categorization as mentally handicapped, sad to say. These young adults seem to revert back to their kindergarten ways but with more adult bodies.
Transphobia is an unfortunate fact of life. You cannot force it out of people anymore than you can force feed them, or demand that people admire you. Are these people going to regard all of the human species as evil because some are transphobic? Are they going to turn around and apply the same treatment to their own community and its own issues created by a sexually predatory minority there? Would it be intelligent to assume all SCP Staff members are pedophiles? Of course not. But their intellectual landscape is not level, and there is an incredible amount of astroturfing going on in these people’s desire for acceptance to keep it that way; the way their peers want it before they will accept or praise them.
SCP’s zoo-cage mentality is to fear, boogify, build-up into mythic proportions, and most of all avoid something like transphobia in the shelter of an intellectual prison, rather than stand toe-to-toe with it. They believe that any other demographic can and should be made fun of, but when their own receives what they themselves are quick dish out, they Isaac-Hayes-on-South-Park it, and regard themselves too important, too culturally privileged to tolerate the treatment that everyone else receives.
As it turns out, those who boast the most tolerance are the most isolationist; those who level the most accusations of Nazism are the most fascistic; those who front the cleanest ethics are the most corrupt; those who centralize and cling to power over a userbase are the least interested in doing what is best with that power to those that gave it to them. As it turns out, it’s the SCP Wiki that’s the Elephant Graveyard; the place where no light shines and that cubs wandering into risk being devoured. Is it any wonder why SCP Staff need to resort to such idiocy in order to abscess themselves from criticism?
The SCP Staff can thank KiwiFarms for doing their job for them, and absorbing the low-info vilification that they deserve.
