Crazy story: My 9yo trans child was so proud and confident that they ended up on the cover of National Geographic Magazine (see my cover pic). It was the "Gender Revolution"! But within days, we were doxxed on KiwiFarms.

— Debi Jackson (@the_debijackson) September 6, 2022

Over the next few days, we spoke to the local police. They sent us to the FBI cyber crimes unit. They contacted federal district attorneys. Folks started investigating. They wanted to help. They wanted to. But they kept running into dead ends.

— Debi Jackson (@the_debijackson) September 6, 2022

Who has the authority? The URL is registered in one state. The hosting is in another. Something to do with Canada. The administration is changing...we might not get federal help once the new President is in place because we all know his real views...

— Debi Jackson (@the_debijackson) September 6, 2022

So I turned to Google. I was connected to folks on their LGBTQ ERG and they helped. After a couple of months, they realized how bad KF was and decided to stop indexing their pages. That meant no more KF pages would turn in up search results for any person they targeted!

— Debi Jackson (@the_debijackson) September 6, 2022

I regularly search our names...just to be sure. I still don't see KF pages.

But @keffals said that search results were showing up for her. I was devastated to read that after all that we had been through. I thought we had done something to keep our trans friends safe.

— Debi Jackson (@the_debijackson) September 6, 2022

Hi! I was one of the people who worked on this.

KiwiFarms stopped turning up in autocomplete for search terms but was still eligible to appear in search results as of 2018. https://t.co/rmNJ7Xzzhi

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

the rationale is that the google web search team views search autocomplete as more of an editorial decision they can change, but that they're very hesitant to reach in and make tweaks with regard to actual SERPs.

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

still, it definitely helped a LOT when "liz fong-jones" stopped suggesting "liz fong-jones kiwifarms'

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

and to be clear, while I was acting on behalf of Trans@Google, the ultimate decision was made by the Google Web Search team and them alone; I exercised no undue influence aside from bringing the issue to their attention through the routine process for unhelpful search behaviour.

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

the team was very clear with me that if I wanted to pursue de-listing of Kiwifarms for any individual, that a court order eg for defamation would be required, and that the court order would then be posted to https://t.co/G20vGLb8qT / Lumen, in a sign of hilarious irony.

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

because nothing says "chilling effect" like having doxxing and stalking lol

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

There's been progress since then, for instance now individual doxxing pages can be denylisted for individual people's names as web search results, but it's page by page and search term by search term; there is no blanket process to denylist by domain or by search term entirely.

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

honestly, I'm relieved to have dealt with this problem at the source rather than needing to policy litigate this through the Google Web Search team, who are almost as resistant as Cloudflare when it comes to marketplace of ideas thinking vs harm reduction tradeoffs in SERPs.

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

ps ahahaha the people thinking that the worst possible thing I did to hurt Kiwi Farms with my google dot com email address was send an email as a fellow member of the internet infrastructure community to another hosting provider once.

ahahahaha. https://t.co/w2CCvQ9kqJ

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 6, 2022

Following on from the Internet Archive, Google now appears to have purged Kiwi Farms from its cache!

— Zoë "Lurking Spychologist" Hamilton (@zoeswipe) September 7, 2022

@ellenfromnowon @keffals @lizthegrey not sure who requested it, or exactly when it was actioned, except that it seems to have been in the last hour or so.

— Zoë "Lurking Spychologist" Hamilton (@zoeswipe) September 7, 2022

Screenshots taken just a couple of minutes ago. I've tested across browsers, logged in/out, and with/without a VPN. Seems to be gone. pic.twitter.com/dqfkAPUIsS

— Zoë "Lurking Spychologist" Hamilton (@zoeswipe) September 7, 2022

Fascinating if true! Will need to dig a little to confirm. https://t.co/BI31vSObcH

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 7, 2022

Cached snippets/content appears to be gone, but individual URLs and titles still are appearing in SERPs for now. pic.twitter.com/GmeLnRuweG

— Liz Fong-Jones (方禮真) (@lizthegrey) September 7, 2022

Even the alternate domains from the last few days are gone! pic.twitter.com/FEKbf1ujee

— Zoë "Lurking Spychologist" Hamilton (@zoeswipe) September 7, 2022