[kstrauser]

I took a continuing ed course on this recently, and it was horrid. You can do some pretty despicable stuff if you convince others that morality is fake and you can do whatever sounds fun. It’s like a cult of sociopathy.

Their general MO was to push a kid on the fringes to do something illegal, then blackmail them into upping the risk and illegality. They collected videos of all those “for lulz”. Various crimes included producing CSAM, torturing animals, and assaulting or killing random people.

It’s rare that I sit my kids down and have them watch training videos with me. With this, I did, to show them what’s out there and help them identify it if they ever came across it.

[iamnothere]

Oh if you’re talking about O9A and the like, those groups are absolutely real and also terrifying. They are like a worse version of Kiwi Farms. KF are actually saints compared to them, as KF seems to have a vague goal of bullying bad people (in their view) off the internet rather than pushing them to terrorism.

My problem with the NVE label is the scope creep, some would like to apply that label to anyone who has a strong opinion and doesn’t fit in a neat box.

(I also don’t think “nihilist” is the right label for these groups. They have beliefs, they just believe in evil.)

[kstrauser]

I could see that. It would be awfully easy to paint any group you disagree with that way. “These people don’t believe in my obviously correct and true moral framework? Nihilists. They marched in a protest? Violent extremists.”

But the OG NVE groups? Freaking yikes.

[akramachamarei]

> KF seems to have a vague goal of bullying bad people (in their view) off the internet

Has KF changed since I last checked? They had an explicit policy of "don't touch the poo"; that is, users mock and ridicule on the forum, but don't try to disturb the lolcows, unless they're committing crimes. That's what I saw; I lurked occasionally in the past. There's been a lot of misinformation about KiwiFarms since it became a minor news story, round about that time of the big DDoS attacks.