Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment. Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three people who were victims of harassment by the website.
About three years ago, a thread on Kiwi Farms was opened about me. In the years since, it has grown to about 1,200 posts full of bigots responding to anything and everything I do online with scorn, slurs, and overt bigotry. The thread is full of resources to facilitate harassment, including, among other things, all of my social media profiles, past and present, a history of my residential addresses, my phone numbers, details about my family members, a list of my usernames and password hashes from every leaked database of websites I have accounts on, and so on. Most of my articles or social media posts are archived on Kiwi Farms and then subjected to the most bigoted rebuttals you can imagine. Honestly, it’s mostly just… pathetic. But it’s a problem when it escapes containment, and it’s designed to.
Kiwi Farms is the most organized corner of the harassment which comes my way, but it comes in many forms. On Mastodon, for example, before I deleted my account I would often receive death threats, or graphic images and videos of violence against minorities. I have received a lot of hate and death threats over email, too, several of which I confess that I took some pleasure in forwarding to the sender’s employer.
One of the motivations for this harassment is to “milk” me for “drama”. The idea is to get my hackles up, make me fearful for my safety, and alienate me from my communities, with the hope that it will trigger an entertaining meltdown. Maybe people respond poorly to this kind of harassment – that’s the idea, really – and it often makes the situation worse. Responding to it can legitimize the abuse, elevate it into the discourse, draw more attention to it, and stoke the flames. It can make the victim look bad when they respond emotionally to harassment designed to evoke negative emotions. I have left it unaddressed for a long time in order to subvert this goal, and address it now with a cool head in a relatively quiet period in the harassment campaign.
The harassment waxes and wanes over time, usually picking up whenever I write a progressive blog post that gets some reach. It really took off after a series of incidents in which I called for the Hyprland community and its maintainers to be held to account for the bigotry and harassment on their Discord server (1, 2) and when I spoke out against Richard Stallman’s prolific and problematic public statements regarding the sexual abuse of minors (3).
The abuse crescendoed in October of 2024, when I was involved in editing The Stallman Report. The report is a comprehensive analysis of Richard Stallman’s problematic political discourse regarding sexual harassment, sexual assault, and the sexual abuse of minors, and it depends almost entirely on primary sources – quotes from Stallman’s website which remain online and have not been retracted to this day. The purpose of the report was to make a clear and unassailable case for Stallman’s removal from positions of power, make specific recommendations to address the underlying problems, and to stimulate a period of reflection and reform in the FOSS community. It didn’t achieve much, in the end: the retaliation from Stallman’s defenders was fiercer and more devoted than the support from those who saw the report’s sense.
Myself and the other authors asserted our moral rights to publish anonymously, motivated by our wish to reduce our exposure to the exact sort of harassment I’ve been subjected to over the years. However, I was careless in my opsec during the editing process, and it was possible to plausibly link me to the report as a result, leading to a sharp increase in harassment.
This brings me to a retaliatory, defamatory “report” published about me in the style of the Stallman Report.1 This report is, essentially, a distillation of the Kiwi Farms thread on me, sanitized of overt bigotry and presented in a readily linkable form in order to stalk me around the internet and enable harassment. It’s used to discredit anything I do online and push for my exclusion from online communities, by dropping the link on Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub or Codeberg issues, etc, anywhere myself or my work is mentioned, or used to discredit the Stallman Report by discrediting one of its unmasked authors.2
The report is pretty obviously written in bad faith and relies on a lot of poor arguments to make the case that I’m a misogynist and a pedophile, charges I deny. It also accuses me of being a hypocrite, which I acknowledge in general terms, because, well, who isn’t. The key thing I want people who encounter this report to keep in mind is that this is the “polite” face of an organized harassment campaign.
Most reasonable readers easily dismiss the report because it is rather transparent in its bad faith. However, someone who reads it in good faith, just trying to do their due diligence, might come away from it with some reasonable concerns. Consider the following quote from my long-deleted Reddit account, /u/sircmpwn:
I’m of the opinion that 14 year old girls should be required to have an IUD installed. Ten years of contraception that requires a visit to the doctor to remove prematurely.
This comment was written 13 years ago, and I don’t stand by what I wrote. I was 19 at the time, and I was a moron. My mother had me when she was 23 years old, and the abuse I suffered at her hands during my childhood was severe, and I generalized this experience to all women. When I wrote this comment, I was one year removed from the abuse, living alone and in poverty, and early in a life-long process of coming to terms with the abuse and figuring out how to be a well-adjusted adult after 18 long years of abuse and isolation.
But an explanation is not an excuse. This comment was reprehensible, as were many of the awful ideas I held at the time. Many years later, I can recognize that this comment is misogynistic, denies the agency of children and women over their own bodies, disparages the many, many mothers who do a wonderful job raising children in difficult circumstances, and is based in argumentation which can reasonably be related to eugenics. This comment was just awful – there’s a reason this was deleted. I apologize to anyone who read it at the time, or comes across it now, and is justifiably insulted.
I don’t feel that it’s necessary to rebuke most of the report. But, there is a grain of truth in the report, the grain of truth that led me to retract my shitty Reddit comments and reflect on myself, and that grain of truth is this: in early adulthood, I was a huge asshole.
I have had more than my fair share of harmful ignorance, bad takes, sexism and misogyny, transphobic and homophobic beliefs, and worse. Moreover, I have verbally abused many people and made many of my own arguments in bad faith to support bad conclusions. Some of the people who read this will recall having found themselves at the wrong end of my verbal abuse and harassment.
It’s important for me to take responsibility for this period of my life, and in dismissing bad faith criticisms of myself to carefully avoid dismissing good faith criticisms in the same fell swoop.
I’m not really sure how to deal with this part of my life appropriately. I have apologized to a few people individually, but it’s not a scalable solution and with many people I have no business re-opening wounds to salve my own conscience. I can offer a general apology, and I will. I’ve never found the right moment to say it, but now will do: I apologise, sincerely, to everyone who I have harmed with verbal abuse and with hateful and problematic rhetoric. If you have had a bad experience or experiences with me, and there’s anything you want from me that can help you heal from that experience – a personal apology, for example – please reach out to me and ask.
That said, apologies alone aren’t enough. I believe in restorative justice, in growing and mending wounds and repairing harm done, and I set myself seriously to this task over many years. I have gone to therapy, spoken with close friends about it, and taken structural action as well: I have founded support groups and worked one-on-one with many of the people whose politics and behavior I object to. I want an amicable end to bigotry and bullying, for bigots and bullies like my former self to look forward to, to provide a path that doesn’t require them to double down. It’s not easy, and not everyone manages, but I have to look at myself and see the path I’ve taken and imagine that it’s possible, because what’s left for the likes of me if not?
This part of my past brings me a great deal of shame, and that shame motivates me to grow as a person. In a certain sense, it is an ironic, cruel privilege to have had so much cause to reflect on myself, to drive me to question myself and my ideas, and become a much better person with much more defensible ideas. It has driven me to study feminism, social justice, racial justice, intersectionality, LGBTQ theory, antifascism, and to find the intersections in my own life and strive to act out of a more legitimate sense of justice.
I’m often still a firebrand, but I’ve chosen much better hills to die on. My passion is invested in making a more just world, building safe and healthy communities, elevating my peers, and calling for justice and a just society. I have taken the lessons I have learned and tried to share them with other people, and to stand up for what I can now say I know is right, both online and in real life. Through a process of learning, reflection, and humility, I acknowledge that I have done a lot harm in my youth. To repair this harm, I have committed myself to doing more than enough good now to make sure that the world is a better place when all is said and done. That’s what justice means to me when I turn my principles inwards and hold myself accountable.
So where do we go from here?
The response to my progressive beliefs and activism is reactionary backlash, doxing, harassment, and death threats targeting me and my family, all of which is likely to escalate in response to this post, and none of which is defensible. On the other hand, I understand that the consequences for my own reactionary past is, in some cases, alienation – and, honestly, fair enough.
But I don’t want you to confuse my honest faults with the defamation and harassment I endure for standing up for my honest strengths. If you feel generous and optimistic about who I am today, and you recognize my growth, and wish for an ally in the fight for what’s right, your good faith and solidarity mean the world to me. I would appreciate it if you would express your support and rebuke harassment when you see it, and help keep me honest as I continue a life-long process of learning and growth.
If I’ve hurt you, and you want to seek reconciliation, I make myself available to you for that purpose. If I’ve hurt you, and you simply don’t care to be hurt again, I’m sorry – I understand where you’re coming from, and have made my peace with it.
Please send words of support and/or death threats to drew@ddevault.org.
Thank you.
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I won’t be naming it or linking to it directly, though it’s relatively easy to find. It would mean a lot to me if you didn’t seek it out yourself, or share it with others, to indulge your curiosity. It’s vile and hateful and subjects me to more harassment.
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No one that I’m aware of has ever attempted a rebuttal of the Stallman Report in good faith.
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