Authors:
(1) Anh V. Vu, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre ([email protected]);
(2) Alice Hutchings, University of Cambridge, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre ([email protected]);
(3) Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge, and University of Edinburgh ([email protected]).
Table of Links
2. Deplatforming and the Impacts
2.2. The Kiwi Farms Disruption
3. Methods, Datasets, and Ethics, and 3.1. Forum and Imageboard Discussions
3.2. Telegram Chats and 3.3. Web Traffic and Search Trends Analytics
3.4. Tweets Made by the Online Community and 3.5. Data Licensing
4. The Impact on Forum Activity and Traffic, and 4.1. The Impact of Major Disruptions
5. The Impacts on Relevant Stakeholders and 5.1. The Community that Started the Campaign
6. Tensions, Challenges, and Implications and 6.1. The Efficacy of the Disruption
6.2. Censorship versus Free Speech
6.3. The Role of Industry in Content Moderation
6.5. Limitations and Future Work
7. Conclusion, Acknowledgments, and References
Appendix A. Meta-Review
A.1. Summary
This paper examines the impact of large-scale industry disruption on the online harassment forum KIWI FARMS, as well as its competitor LOLCOW FARM. The authors use a variety of measurement techniques to show a net reduction of activity on the forum.
A.2. Scientific Contributions
• Independent confirmation of important results with limited prior research.
• Provides a new data set for public use.
• Provides a valuable step forward in an established field.
A.3. Reasons for Acceptance
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This paper provides a valuable step forward in the field of harassment measurement prevention by confirming important prior results. This paper examines deplatforming on an internet-wide scale, rather than focusing on one social network – a limitation of most prior work.
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This paper provides a new data set for public use. On request, the authors will provide a very detailed dataset of forum discussions with metadata, Telegram chats, web analytics, and relevant tweets, allowing independent confirmation and future research on harassment sites.
A.4. Noteworthy Concerns
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There is a significant lack of information about how the qualitative analysis of public announcements and press releases was conducted, which makes evaluation of that analysis challenging - details about reliability and how the coding process was done would be useful.
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The discussion does a good job of describing why deplatforming is hard, but does not offer much in the way of suggestions for making this problem easier beyond arresting the people responsible.
This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.
