KiwiFarms Sues U.K. and It’s Awesome : The Other McCain

August 30, 2025

Posted on | August 30, 2025 | No Comments

Regular readers here know that I’ve often praised the online forum Kiwi Farms as an invaluable source of information on “LOLcows,” which is their term for idiots who make fools of themselves online, as I explained in October 2023:

Some of us are old enough to remember when, 15 or 20 years ago, Silicon Valley had a libertarian tilt. Entities like Google were very much in favor of free speech and very much against censorship, but more recently, they’ve gone 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Probably the defining event of this shift — the moment when Big Tech’s pro-censorship regime made clear its intentions — was the episode known as “GamerGate,” beginning in August 2014 with the drama surrounding Zoe Quinn (a/k/a the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg).
#GamerGate was my first encounter with Kiwi Farms, which proved to be useful for research on such personalities as Zoe Quinn, Nicholas Edwin “Sarah” Nyberg, and “Brianna Wu” (a/k/a John Walker Flynt) who were involved in the controversy as left-wing SJWs (“Social Justice Warriors”).
What united the SJWs was the rallying cry of “harassment” — #GamerGate was, according to them, about the misogynistic bullying of women in the videogame industry, and claims of victimhood were amplified to promote that narrative, even though the alleged victims of harassment were relatively obscure people who were, at best, marginal to the industry,

There seems to be an unwritten rule that left-wing activists should be entitled to say or do anything they like without criticism. To criticize such a left-winger is to “harass” them, and this alleged “harassment” then becomes a pretext for silencing criticism of the Left. Kiwi Farms says “to hell with that” and, even though most participants in the forum are not ostensibly political — and I doubt many consider themselves conservatives — they vehemently oppose this kind of censorship.

So the United Kingdom’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) wants to enforce their Online Safety Act’s age-verification requirements. KiwiFarms and 4chan hired lawyers to sue the U.K. over this, and one of the lawyers they hired is my friend Ron Coleman. The filing begins thus:

The Internet is a global system of communication between computer servers, located in data centers around the world. Despite the Internet’s global reach, it is more or less universally acknowledged that the Internet is, predominantly, an American innovation, built by American citizens, residents, and companies, and that the United States has the largest and most thriving technology sector of any G7 member state.
Foreign governments, particularly those in Europe, which have not managed to build technology sectors of their own have, for the past half-decade or more, sought to control the American Internet, and hobble American competitiveness, through a range of legislative and nonlegislative initiatives.
These foreign governments have threatened American and other non-European entrepreneurs with a wide range of coercive threats, including, fines, arrest, and imprisonment, for engaging in conduct which is perfectly lawful in the territories where their websites are based, including in the United States. . . .
The United Kingdom recently joined France in seeking to apply its domestic laws to the rest of the world, with the enactment of its censorship law, the Online Safety Act 2023
(“OSA”). Immediately after the OSA’s substantive provisions entered into force, this censorship law was used to target the free speech rights of American citizens. . . .
This lawsuit seeks to restrain Ofcom’s conduct and its continuing egregious violations of Americans’ civil rights, including, without limitation, to the right of freedom of speech.

AMERICA, BABY! The Kiwi Farmers are very pleased, expressing themselves in, uh . . . colorful language.