“All Aboard the Ruse Cruise”: A Sampling of the KiwiFarms Lexicon

September 2022 Update: So, I had to come back to update all my sources in this post as the entirety of KiwiFarms has been removed from the Internet Archive, due to recent events. While, I’m leaving my pretty milquetoast disclaimer from like… three years ago, when I first wrote this post, I thought I should probably expand upon it. I wasn’t as familiar then as I am now with the particulars of the type of harm caused by KiwiFarms and its forum culture–while I lurked the site, I didn’t look at more than a handful of threads at a time, mostly those full of people hating on creators I knew. Anecdotally, I also think there’s been a pretty significant uptick in the transphobia on the site since I started looking at it, but I have neither longtime community membership nor actual data to back up this hunch, so take it with a grain of salt.

Over the years, as I’ve continued my research on fringe digital spaces, I’ve become more familiar with the community’s approval and, to be frank, thirst for doxxing people and publishing private information like the deadnames of trans subjects, information on the family members of subjects, and leaked nudes (including the sharing of paid subscription material from subjects involved in online sex work). As I become more involved in the archival of ephemeral web data, I want to make it clear that the preservation of data from sites like this one demand meticulous review and should, frankly, include a degree of editing before said data is made public. Call it censorship if you want to, but there are some things (addresses, leaked nudes (revenge porn), child sexual exploitation material, et cetera) that necessitate rigorous moderation (and yes, sometimes censorship) in order to prevent further extrajudicial harm done to the subjects in question.

To be both even-handed and completely clear on my feelings here:

Not all threads on KiwiFarms contain doxx, deadnames, or other sensitive content. Not all threads are even very long. The site has users from various marginalized communities, including women, people of colour, queer people, and trans people. The culture, while it encourages doxxing (as part of its fastidious documentation of its subjects), also heavily discourages and bans users from “touching the poo” or interfering with subjects.

However, the site’s culture is generally nihilistic, cruel, petty, and typically transphobic. While hardcore white supremacist rhetoric often accrues negative reactions, there are definitely some conspiratorial, dogwhistle-laden posts with positive reactions and replies across several threads. Just as I see people have normal and supportive conversations on the site, I’ve seen a lot of really vile rhetoric targeting all sorts of groups. That’s to say nothing of the targeted harrassment that, while explicitly discouraged by mods and the site’s owner, is absolutely encouraged by the community’s culture. Much of this harrassment can be blamed on members of this community and its leaking of sensitive information. I am most certainly not a Farmer, and I disavow their behaviour. However, I want to preserve the website’s contents (with editing to remove sensitive information) in order to further study communities that contribute to this type of online behaviour and their language. I also think that, if this data were available for journalists, we would have more accurate, even-handed reporting on any goings on that feature KiwiFarms and similar communities, rather than sensationalism and misinformation (well-intentioned or otherwise).

The takeaway: The preservation of data from these communities is necessary to understand them and provide accurate information to experts, educators, and the public. KiwiFarms, like other “free speech” and/or “alternative” online spaces, provides a safe space for radicalization to take place. That is not to say that every user of KiwiFarms is a radical anything, but the fact that the site fosters radicalization of any kind renders it worthy of understanding and further study, in my opinion. The same can be said for 4chan and other anonymous imageboards or forums. For either of these to take place, existing data from these spaces should be archived and preserved, as we have seen how vulnerable these spaces can be to online attacks. That being said, neither the preservation nor the study of said data necessitates the preservation and potential dissemination of deadnames, doxx, or other sensitive content that can harm subjects, regardless of who the subjects are.

A note before I begin: I will take a firm ideological stance on KiwiFarms as a site, because it is filled with edgy people who like to make fun of people. Yes, they make fun of predators, but they also make fun of autistic people (and fat people, and trans people, et cetera). Sure, they make fun of really disgusting, hateful people, but there’s a tolerance for liberal use of the n-word and other hateful speech. It’s not a website full of people that I particularly want to hang around. The point is, it’s all petty and childish and hateful, but the community is itself interesting to observe. The forum is a useful catalogue for catching up on internet drama that isn’t catalogued elsewhere online, and they do document actual harm done to real victims by real predators, which has some merit. However, the argument is circular: they’re hateful and do harm! But they help some people! But they hurt others! It is the opinion of the author that the harm done by this community outweighs the help that they provide, but they are nonetheless an interesting community to study. And study it we shall, albeit briefly.

Some of you may be thinking that that’s a foreboding introduction. What is this awful, terrible place? KiwiFarms is a forum, originally based around publically shaming and mocking Christine Weston Chandler,¹ a public online figure known for her webcomic, “Sonichu,” and her eccentric behaviour online (the website originally was a forum for the CWCWiki, itself an initialism of Chandler’s name). Basically, the site has its roots in making fun of an autistic person who was just kind of doing their own thing. However, the site moved on to document lolcows they further categorized into subtypes of people deserving ridicule.

Lolcows are people and groups whose eccentric or foolish behavior can be “milked” for amusement and laughs.
KiwiFarms

A little extra linguistic info not given on the forums themselves: “lolcow” is a compound word formed from the abbreviation “lol” (given that the site is built around laughing at people) and the word “cow” (a metaphor comparing the milking of dairy cows to the milking of drama or trolling for amusement). Most of the subcategories are suffixed “-cow”: artcow, skitzocow, horrorcow, dramacow. These subcategories as well as information on how to classify the various types of cows can be seen in the flowchart below, taken from the forum itself.

You can already tell that this community is fond of creating new words to index membership, so much so that some of their words and idioms are somewhat opaque to the uninitiated. Other than being an introduction to KiwiFarms for the uninitiated, this blog post is simply a quick lexicon of words and phrases that either originated on KiwiFarms or the use of which heavily index participation in this community.

We’ve covered lolcows, so now you’re aware of the basics of cows and milk, but that brings me to another point. “Milk” is auto-filtered to “t*rd cum” by the forum itself,² so if users want the word to appear at all in their post, they have to censor themselves somehow to bypass the filter (ie say “m.ilk”). Autofilters present an interesting complication to tracking the evolution of language in these spaces, so before I get into the site’s jargon, I’ll first list all of the known autofilter terms. Then, I’ll list other terms that relate to the site itself (particularly, the ratings that can be given to forum posts and the custom forum emoticons), which basically covers all of the other words I plan on looking at.

Filters:³

milk (filtered to “t*rd cum”): because “milk” is an essential component to the lolcow metaphor, I can only assume that the filter itself was put in place to troll the forum’s own userbase. It serves to appeal to the amusement of the userbase both in the fact that it ridicules the mentally handicapped and because, y’know, dirty joke.
lulz/lulzy (filtered to “I HAVE AUTISM PLEASE LAUGH AT ME”): speculative. I’ve been lurking this site for a while without an account and haven’t tried typing all of these words out in context like a good field linguist would, so I’m not sure that this is the exact filter. The suggested replacement of “lulzy” works nicely in sentences like “I don’t see why one word would be more I HAVE AUTISM PLEASE LAUGH AT ME than another.”⁴ (“I don’t see why one word would be more lulzy than another.”) This is also true of the sentence “doing things like writing essays on twitter to them and embarrassing kiwi in the process is I HAVE AUTISM PLEASE LAUGH AT ME.”⁵ (“doing things like writing essays on twitter to them and embarrassing kiwi in the process is lulzy). The term “lulz” itself is a corruption of the abbreviation “lol,” a term often used on sites like 4chan and Encyclopedia in the mid 00s, but the filter may imply that it’s viewed in a negative light (either as a means to distance Kiwifarms from these communities for whatever reasons or due to it being a dated and unfunny term).
*vaccine (formerly filtered to “DIRTY, CRAPPED BRIEFS”):⁶ see comments from Dark Mirror Hole and brooklynbailiff here. Originally put in place re: a campaign against internet user jcrowley, but retired due to the lack of activity in this particular campaign.
r*tard (filtered to “exceptional individual”):⁷ poking fun at what is often referred to as “PC culture” and “participation trophy culture,” which is often derided by conservatives and Boomers alike. References the colloquial/euphemistic use of “special” instead of “mentally handicapped” or “r*tarded”).
*hands (formerly?⁸ filtered to MANOS): a reference to Manos: Hands of Fate, a cult classic film popularized by the show Mystery Science Theatre 3000.

Forum Emoticons for “A-log” and “Ruse Cruise” (from Kiwifarms.com)

Site Words:

a-log: from the KiwiFarms glossary: “Anthony ‘A-Log’ Logatto was an online personality who devoted gross amounts of time to mocking Christian Weston Chandler, despite not being much better than Chris himself. A-Logging is generally taking things too seriously or getting angry at a lolcow..” Has its own forum emoticon (reading “Hi, A-Log!”) and forum post reaction (depicting a black top hat). Example: “I have nothing to add that wouldn’t be a-log to the extreme. What a terrible person and a great show.”
sockpuppet: to make multiple accounts on a website for the purpose of getting around the rules. See forum guidelines: “Don’t sockpuppet. If you create a second account to avoid problems you will be banned and ridiculed. See: handling problems like an adult.”
powerlevel: from the KiwiFarms glossary: “To powerlevel is to reveal information about yourself that is better off being private. Powerleveling is not any personal stories, just embarrassing ‘TMI’.” See forum guidelines: “Hide your powerlevel. Avoid revealing intimate, embarrassing details about yourself. Declaring a post powerleveling does not magically exempt you from this rule.”
white knight, white-knighting: common internet vernacular for coming to the defence of someone perceived innocent by the defender, but irredeemable to the white knight’s audience. There is a rule on the site (rules are inconveniently distributed differently across subforums and there is no one community guidelines page that I can find, so this rule may be unspoken): do not white knight. Example: “Thanks a lot mods for white knighting the cow.”
chimp out: a dramatic outburst or tantrum. The term is generally considered to have anti-Black undertones due to an unfavourable comparison to primates, but it may also act here as a disparaging way to refer to the meltdowns associated with some mental disorders or other disabilities, given that the forum and its community were both built around making fun of an autistic person. See forum guidelines: “Don’t chimp out over people disagreeing with the majority.”
sperg: going on at length and in great detail, usually about something that is of personal interest to the speaker. Alternatively, rambling and raving. A clipping of the word “Asperger’s,” referencing the no-longer-recognized disorder and an association with having specific, restrictive interests. Example: “Check out an old video from Nichole “Nikki Batgirl” D’Mangelo. It spergs on for over a half hour, its pretty un-watchable.”
tugboat: disability payments. Has its own forum emoticon. Example: “She’s of course got that ol’ tugboat well in hand, for “mental health” issues that seem to boil down to an inability to stop living in a fantasyland.”
ruse cruise: a long, arduous journey that ends up being for nothing. Or, the journey one is taken on when they are being trolled by an anonymous user or somebody with a sock account. It has its own forum emoticon Examples 1 and 2: “Is SolidMario a massive ruse cruise or a massive autist?” “All aboard the ruse cruise, right?? Right, guys??? …guys…?”
Islamic content: a negative rating that can be attributed to a post. Reportedly carries connotations of blasphemy.⁹ Related terms include “halal” (acceptable) and “haram” (forbidden). Example: “Islam is bad, ergo, Islamic content = negative rating.”
powerword: someone’s real, legal name, often used in dox. Also used on imageboards and the “satire” wiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica. Example: “Just realised- is there a reason we don’t have his powerword in the thread title?”
troon: derotagory term for a trans person, particularly one that is not acceptable to what the KiwiFarms community considers a legitimate trans person (usually targets Tumblr or Twitter users, often associated with nonbinary people or those who who have not or not yet started HRT). Likely a corruption of the word “trans” or “tr*nny”. Example: “The Rat King forum is great, but it doesn’t really serve an ADF-centric purpose anymore. Right now it’s just about a bunch of troons that like to call themselves women but in reality they’re a bunch of has-been and never-was men with beards.”

A final note: a wealth of words on Kiwifarms can be attributed to other (often toxic and hostile) online communities like Encyclopedia Dramatica and certain imageboards (“lulz,” “poz” or “pozzed” (referincing an HIV-positive status) “degenerate”), or the internet community at large (“weeb,” “furry,” “cringe”). Those words have not been defined here, but some more general use items (“sperg,” “white knight,” “chimp out”) have been included because they either index membership of the KiwiFarms community or are heavily referenced by the community. The most common features of words that index membership in this community are an origin in the Chris-chan saga and/or an institution as part of the site’s culture via forum ratings, emoticons, and other features such as the community guidelines.

Endnotes:

¹Formerly Christian Weston Chandler or Chris-Chan. More information on Christine and her life can be found on KnowYourMeme or other online spaces. Much of the information available online about Christine is not particularly objective and/or from sites I don’t really want to give any further traffic, like Encyclopedia Dramatica, so browse with caution and/or skepticism.

²A side note: Autofilters are also commonly used on imageboards like 4chan. In the case of both KiwiFarms and 4chan, they’re used specifically to be provocative and/or edgy, pointing to possible cultural similarities.

³See Stratochu’s comment here for a list of words that were filtered at the time of posting. *Word as the entry head in the above list indicates that the filter is no longer active. All comments referenced will be screencapped and uploaded as images below their respective footnotes in case they are deleted. I do respect the KiwiFarms doctrine of “archive everything.” (9/29/2022 Update: The previous link appears to be broken, but I’m leaving it up in case it ever works again. The thread, if I remember correctly, was suggesting “archive everything” as a rule for all non-off-topic threads. The same rhetoric of “archive everything” can be seen at the archived link here, however, in the abridged forum guidelines.)