Online Censorship's Institutional Power

A person’s most valuable asset is their reputation, and there’s no better place to build one’s cachet than online. For this reason, there is a convergence of extreme wealth, power, and influence building up around the backbone of the Internet like a cancer. Without immediate organization and reaction from the atomized groups considering themselves “anti-censorship”, we will soon live in a less free world with a less open Internet where rich and influential people can dictate their own trustworthiness and slander their opposition with impunity. In the 11 years I have managed my forum, the Kiwi Farms, I have seen firsthand the power in allowing people to talk about people. Anyone who is permitted to freely share what they’d like about another is enabled to punch far above their own weight. When a forum organized like the Kiwi Farms hosts stories, media, and documents that never go away, it can become a permanent blight on a diligently maintained reputation belonging to surprisingly important people. When that demerit is made on someone rich and well-connected, they may dedicate years of their life to trying to erase it. Liz Fong-Jones is a transgender multi-millionaire, formerly employed by Google, but now involved in at least two San Francisco tech startups: Honeycomb and Tall Poppy. His résumé and portfolio has been leveraged to try and deplatform the Kiwi Farms since 2017. What started with a single email has expanded over seven years into a conspiracy targeting the most sensitive and important components of what makes up the Internet. The story of Liz Fong-Jones trying to take down the Kiwi Farms is indicative of what will soon be done to all controversial web content if there is not coordinated effort made to make the Internet, and the companies which compose it, more neutral and accountable.

Liz Fong-Jones and Trans LifeLine On August 18th, 2017, Liz Fong-Jones used his company’s lizf@ google.com email address to send a complaint. The targeted provider hosted my website’s email service. At the time, we used Cloudflare’s security services, and a common way to bypass Cloudflare was to look at the mail server. Cloudflare does not protect email, and often the unprotected mail server for websites will be the same server or provider as the actual protected web server. Fong-Jones complained we hosted personal information, hoping that this would cause our website to go down. The information in question was about Trans LifeLine, a hotline for transgender people in crisis staffed by transgender volunteers. At the time, Trans LifeLine was operated by Greta Gustava and Nina Chabaul. These organizers would post extravagant lifestyle photos on their public Instagrams, meanwhile the Trans LifeLine hotline service rarely had anyone online to accept emergency calls. This led Kiwi Farms users to suspect they were stealing from their charity, so we began documenting both their lifestyle and their hotline’s performance (or lack thereof). Documents leaked to us by people who had worked with them showed that there was almost no organization, no internal support structure, and no training. Transgender people recruited by TLL to be call agents would then be put on lines to deal with immediately at-risk suicidal transgender people with scant information on how to actually help. Some callers reported being hung up on. Operators reported trauma from having to answer life-or-death phonecalls without any idea of what to do or say. Years later, and thanks to information made available only on the Kiwi Farms, they would be ousted from the organization for fraud. Trans LifeLine’s operators would later file under penalty of perjury that Greta and Nina had inured hundreds of thousands of dollars. Liz Fong-Jones tried to cover this up while it was happening by silencing the only people who were, at this point in time, both aware of and capable of discussing transgender issues in a less-than-flattering way without being banned. This would begin the long trend of transgender activists saying “ignore the bad things on Kiwi Farms, they’re made up” with the punchline being that we’d end up proven right over time, and with damage done that could have been mitigated if we were trusted sooner. It would take Fong-Jones 6 years to admit that Trans LifeLine was a scam at the time he was supporting them. He explains he now only donates money to causes where he can directly influence the way it operates. Liz Fong-Jones should be thanking us, but he still holds a vicious grudge because we reported the abuse of his Google work email.

It's necessary to be non-anonymous to the organisations that intermediate your giving in order to get a seat at the governance table and ensure that funds are being appropriately spent. That was a very very painful lesson I learned from the fiasco that was the early days of Trans Lifeline, where the inexperienced initial board did not meaningfully keep the founders in check / insist on audits, and the major donors (including myself) didn't think to ask for board seats to provide oversight, leading to us all getting defrauded.

You will never hear the story of how Kiwi Farms identified fraud in a charity, because it is not written about. There is not a single article from a supposedly trustworthy media source about this scandal. No journalist in the world can catalog what the Kiwi Farms gets right, because the truth is a secondary concern to them, sitting under what is politically expedient.

Liz Fong-Jones from Google to Honeycomb Fong-Jones would continue working at Google for another 2 years. Anonymous reports regarding internal politics within the company where Fong-Jones worked paint a picture of a continuous menace, always looking for new victims to cause problems for. Fong-Jones even finds himself named in the famous James Damore discrimination lawsuit against Google for discriminatory posts made on internal Google forums.

He claims to have resigned in 2019, after the Google Walkout protests he helped organize. Insiders reported that Google does not give severances, unless you are asked to quit. This indicates that Fong-Jones was likely paid to leave, as opposed to his claims he resigned. Trying to fire a person in such a politically protected category, especially when they are as litigious and disruptive as Fong-Jones is, would cost more than the $90,000 he was given just to go away.

During his employment with Google, he had acquired cryptocurrency and stake in the company. It is assumed that Fong-Jones’s net worth is in the millions. Indeed, Fong-Jones has stated he has an interest in finance and wants to make wealth building a part of his career. After leaving Google, he joined tech startup Honeycomb as Chief Field Technology Officer. Honeycomb is a business-to-business software company that sells ‘solutions’ directly to major tech companies, such as Dropbox and Slack, video game companies including CCP (EVE Online) and Behaviour (Dead by Daylight), and finance companies like Vanguard, which is one of the largest investment firms in the world.

Honeycomb is extremely progressive and has stood by Liz Fong-Jones for years, even after he inexplicably announced to the world in November 2019 that he had been credibly accused of sexual assault, which he chooses to refer to as a “Consent Accident”.

You won’t find any information about this online, no matter which search engine you use. Instead, you will find gushing articles, portfolio websites, Wikipedia entries, and more talking about what a successful, important person Fong-Jones is. How can someone accused of rape simply walk way from this without any of the progressive organizations around them caring?

Liz Fong-Jones and Tall Poppy’s Coverup Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of Liz Fong-Jones’s other personal interests, as he enjoys a perfectly pedicured digital footprint. He is an investor and board member of Tall Poppy, a reputation management company.[9] This company is also business-to-business, and advertises itself as “proactive action against online harassment and personal security threats”. The name comes from an expression in Australia and New Zealand, and means that successful people get unfairly criticized: ‘the tall poppy gets cut down’. They have a decent list of investors and advisors,[10] with two names jumping out. Y-Combinator has invested in them. Y-Combinator is the forum which had hosted the negative post about Liz Fong-Jones quoted in this article. This post now exists with Liz Fong-Jones’s name completely redacted, a change which was documented between 23 May and 15 Sep 2023, about 4 years after it was originally created.

Inner Loop Capital is also interesting, as Tall Poppy is outside the usual scope of their portfolio. They list on their website that they invest in “digital infrastructure”, which are generally low-level companies silently contributing to how the Internet runs. These infrastructure companies will be relevant later.

Tall Poppy boasts its customer list, which includes large companies like Spotify, viciously litigious associations like the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), NGOs like the Global Disinformation Index, and Amazon’s extremely influential streaming platform Twitch.

They have received glowing endorsements from Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, Anita Sarkeesian of GamerGate fame, Katherine Maher, former CEO of Wikimedia, and Liz Lee, who has been involved with Twitter and Morgan Stanley (one of the most powerful wealth management organizations in the United States).

Ellen Pao was an interim CEO for Reddit in 2015. She was the head of the company when it decided to ban r/FatPeopleHate. Reddit traditionally had a policy of tolerating free speech, even when upsetting. It may be hard to believe, considering the state of Reddit today, but this was a very unpopular decision. Ellen Pao was even forced to couch these reforms in language like: “we’re banning behavior, not ideas”.

There were many changes she made, all unpopular. Her stay at Reddit was very brief. She was removed and Reddit apologized, saying they would make things right. This never happened.[12] It was clear that Pao was hired to make sweeping changes, setting the stage for the new Reddit moving forward, then step aside during the outrage so that she would take the fall. Not a single policy Ellen Pao implemented was ever reversed by Reddit’s corporate, and they have since been compounded and expanded upon.

Ellen Pao married an openly gay black man, but has been going through a divorce since 2019. Details on this divorce are hard to come by online. It raises questions as to what exactly Ellen Pao has been paying for. Katherine Maher is a former Wikimedia CEO and current CEO of NPR.[13] She is an avid ideologue whose reputation is so incredibly poisonous that her position on the Signal Foundation has raised serious concerns if the beloved privacy app Signal is fundamentally compromised.

This direct connection helps explain how Liz Fong-Jones is able to generate significant positive press for himself, and is permitted to craft narratives on Wikipedia articles he is directly affected by and has incredible conflicts of interests with, including for his company Honeycomb and for the Kiwi Farms. His contributions are made by suggestion only (via the “Talk Pages”),but since he is direct friends with Wikipedia admins who manage these pages, they are always included in as favorable a light to him as possible.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a “free and open” platform for cataloguing the knowledge of mankind. Katherine states here that this is no longer useful, and that “free and open” perpetuates a “White, male, Westernized construct” and is exclusionary to communities “without written tradition”. “These ideas of radical openness … did not live up to the intention”.

Wikipedia is by no measure a free and open platform. You are only permitted to edit Wikipedia using specific IP addresses, meaning anyone concerned about their privacy may not edit Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia admins and Wikimedia C-Level executives may be friends with people trying to ruin your life, this necessitates de-anonymizing yourself to hostile actors to even create an account. Then, you will discover that almost every important Wikipedia page is under special protections, especially controversial pages like the Kiwi Farms, living people such as Liz Fong-Jones, and his companies like Honeycomb. You will need a certain level of reputation within the Wikipedia community to even attempt editing these pages. Protected and high-risk pages like the Kiwi Farms’s are watched for changes by hundreds of bureaucrats continuously. Your edits will be critically scrutinized, whereas the edits of Liz Fong-Jones and his personal Wikipedia admin friends will pass with rubber stamps. One major reason your edits may be reverted is for “original research”. Original research is anything extrapolated from a primary resource. This includes government websites and the Kiwi Farms itself, if you’re writing about the Kiwi Farms. What Wikipedia likes is secondary resources from trusted publications. Trusted publications are explicitly whitelisted news media websites.[16] Kiwi Farms users in 2022 asked Wikipedia to start being impartial on the subject and stop trusting biased news articles. This prompted 10-year Wikipedia veteran editor Bilorv to state, “If Wikipedia had existed when expert consensus was that the Earth is flat then we would have asserted that position as fact”. The men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for discrediting geocentrism now write for Wikipedia. At least Bruno’s executioners got paid; Bilorv’s 38,828 edits were made to Wikipedia for free purely for the self-satisfaction and ego. So, in practice, Maher’s revolutionary “not free, and not open” Wikipedia means that any wealthy technocrat may buy fluff pieces from legacy news websites, and can request these articles be added to Wikipedia articles by their admin friends, specifically to accomplish political goals. Incidentally, the Wikipedia article for the Kiwi Farms is nothing but sloppy accusations citing articles which contain no evidence themselves. Whatever the news writes becomes the truth, and the news writes what Liz Fong-Jones tells them to write....

Online Censorship's Institutional Power

A person’s most valuable asset is their reputation, and there’s no better place to build one’s cachet than online. For this reason, there is a convergence of extreme wealth, power, and influence building up around the backbone of the Internet like a cancer. Without immediate organization and reaction from the atomized groups considering themselves “anti-censorship”, we will soon live in a less free world with a less open Internet where rich and influential people can dictate their own trustworthiness and slander their opposition with impunity. In the 11 years I have managed my forum, the Kiwi Farms, I have seen firsthand the power in allowing people to talk about people. Anyone who is permitted to freely share what they’d like about another is enabled to punch far above their own weight. When a forum organized like the Kiwi Farms hosts stories, media, and documents that never go away, it can become a permanent blight on a diligently maintained reputation belonging to surprisingly important people. When that demerit is made on someone rich and well-connected, they may dedicate years of their life to trying to erase it. Liz Fong-Jones is a transgender multi-millionaire, formerly employed by Google, but now involved in at least two San Francisco tech startups: Honeycomb and Tall Poppy. His résumé and portfolio has been leveraged to try and deplatform the Kiwi Farms since 2017. What started with a single email has expanded over seven years into a conspiracy targeting the most sensitive and important components of what makes up the Internet. The story of Liz Fong-Jones trying to take down the Kiwi Farms is indicative of what will soon be done to all controversial web content if there is not coordinated effort made to make the Internet, and the companies which compose it, more neutral and accountable.

Liz Fong-Jones and Trans LifeLine On August 18th, 2017, Liz Fong-Jones used his company’s [email protected] email address to send a complaint. The targeted provider hosted my website’s email service. At the time, we used Cloudflare’s security services, and a common way to bypass Cloudflare was to look at the mail server. Cloudflare does not protect email, and often the unprotected mail server for websites will be the same server or provider as the actual protected web server. Fong-Jones complained we hosted personal information, hoping that this would cause our website to go down. The information in question was about Trans LifeLine, a hotline for transgender people in crisis staffed by transgender volunteers. At the time, Trans LifeLine was operated by Greta Gustava and Nina Chabaul. These organizers would post extravagant lifestyle photos on their public Instagrams, meanwhile the Trans LifeLine hotline service rarely had anyone online to accept emergency calls. This led Kiwi Farms users to suspect they were stealing from their charity, so we began documenting both their lifestyle and their hotline’s performance (or lack thereof). Documents leaked to us by people who had worked with them showed that there was almost no organization, no internal support structure, and no training. Transgender people recruited by TLL to be call agents would then be put on lines to deal with immediately at-risk suicidal transgender people with scant information on how to actually help. Some callers reported being hung up on. Operators reported trauma from having to answer life-or-death phonecalls without any idea of what to do or say. Years later, and thanks to information made available only on the Kiwi Farms, they would be ousted from the organization for fraud. Trans LifeLine’s operators would later file under penalty of perjury that Greta and Nina had inured hundreds of thousands of dollars. Liz Fong-Jones tried to cover this up while it was happening by silencing the only people who were, at this point in time, both aware of and capable of discussing transgender issues in a less-than-flattering way without being banned. This would begin the long trend of transgender activists saying “ignore the bad things on Kiwi Farms, they’re made up” with the punchline being that we’d end up proven right over time, and with damage done that could have been mitigated if we were trusted sooner. It would take Fong-Jones 6 years to admit that Trans LifeLine was a scam at the time he was supporting them. He explains he now only donates money to causes where he can directly influence the way it operates. Liz Fong-Jones should be thanking us, but he still holds a vicious grudge because we reported the abuse of his Google work email.

It's necessary to be non-anonymous to the organisations that intermediate your giving in order to get a seat at the governance table and ensure that funds are being appropriately spent. That was a very very painful lesson I learned from the fiasco that was the early days of Trans Lifeline, where the inexperienced initial board did not meaningfully keep the founders in check / insist on audits, and the major donors (including myself) didn't think to ask for board seats to provide oversight, leading to us all getting defrauded.

You will never hear the story of how Kiwi Farms identified fraud in a charity, because it is not written about. There is not a single article from a supposedly trustworthy media source about this scandal. No journalist in the world can catalog what the Kiwi Farms gets right, because the truth is a secondary concern to them, sitting under what is politically expedient.

Liz Fong-Jones from Google to Honeycomb Fong-Jones would continue working at Google for another 2 years. Anonymous reports regarding internal politics within the company where Fong-Jones worked paint a picture of a continuous menace, always looking for new victims to cause problems for. Fong-Jones even finds himself named in the famous James Damore discrimination lawsuit against Google for discriminatory posts made on internal Google forums.

He claims to have resigned in 2019, after the Google Walkout protests he helped organize. Insiders reported that Google does not give severances, unless you are asked to quit. This indicates that Fong-Jones was likely paid to leave, as opposed to his claims he resigned. Trying to fire a person in such a politically protected category, especially when they are as litigious and disruptive as Fong-Jones is, would cost more than the $90,000 he was given just to go away.

During his employment with Google, he had acquired cryptocurrency and stake in the company. It is assumed that Fong-Jones’s net worth is in the millions. Indeed, Fong-Jones has stated he has an interest in finance and wants to make wealth building a part of his career. After leaving Google, he joined tech startup Honeycomb as Chief Field Technology Officer. Honeycomb is a business-to-business software company that sells ‘solutions’ directly to major tech companies, such as Dropbox and Slack, video game companies including CCP (EVE Online) and Behaviour (Dead by Daylight), and finance companies like Vanguard, which is one of the largest investment firms in the world.

Honeycomb is extremely progressive and has stood by Liz Fong-Jones for years, even after he inexplicably announced to the world in November 2019 that he had been credibly accused of sexual assault, which he chooses to refer to as a “Consent Accident”.

You won’t find any information about this online, no matter which search engine you use. Instead, you will find gushing articles, portfolio websites, Wikipedia entries, and more talking about what a successful, important person Fong-Jones is. How can someone accused of rape simply walk way from this without any of the progressive organizations around them caring?

Liz Fong-Jones and Tall Poppy’s Coverup Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of Liz Fong-Jones’s other personal interests, as he enjoys a perfectly pedicured digital footprint. He is an investor and board member of Tall Poppy, a reputation management company.[9] This company is also business-to-business, and advertises itself as “proactive action against online harassment and personal security threats”. The name comes from an expression in Australia and New Zealand, and means that successful people get unfairly criticized: ‘the tall poppy gets cut down’. They have a decent list of investors and advisors,[10] with two names jumping out. Y-Combinator has invested in them. Y-Combinator is the forum which had hosted the negative post about Liz Fong-Jones quoted in this article. This post now exists with Liz Fong-Jones’s name completely redacted, a change which was documented between 23 May and 15 Sep 2023, about 4 years after it was originally created.

Inner Loop Capital is also interesting, as Tall Poppy is outside the usual scope of their portfolio. They list on their website that they invest in “digital infrastructure”, which are generally low-level companies silently contributing to how the Internet runs. These infrastructure companies will be relevant later.

Tall Poppy boasts its customer list, which includes large companies like Spotify, viciously litigious associations like the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), NGOs like the Global Disinformation Index, and Amazon’s extremely influential streaming platform Twitch.

They have received glowing endorsements from Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, Anita Sarkeesian of GamerGate fame, Katherine Maher, former CEO of Wikimedia, and Liz Lee, who has been involved with Twitter and Morgan Stanley (one of the most powerful wealth management organizations in the United States).

Ellen Pao was an interim CEO for Reddit in 2015. She was the head of the company when it decided to ban r/FatPeopleHate. Reddit traditionally had a policy of tolerating free speech, even when upsetting. It may be hard to believe, considering the state of Reddit today, but this was a very unpopular decision. Ellen Pao was even forced to couch these reforms in language like: “we’re banning behavior, not ideas”.

There were many changes she made, all unpopular. Her stay at Reddit was very brief. She was removed and Reddit apologized, saying they would make things right. This never happened.[12] It was clear that Pao was hired to make sweeping changes, setting the stage for the new Reddit moving forward, then step aside during the outrage so that she would take the fall. Not a single policy Ellen Pao implemented was ever reversed by Reddit’s corporate, and they have since been compounded and expanded upon.

Ellen Pao married an openly gay black man, but has been going through a divorce since 2019. Details on this divorce are hard to come by online. It raises questions as to what exactly Ellen Pao has been paying for. Katherine Maher is a former Wikimedia CEO and current CEO of NPR.[13] She is an avid ideologue whose reputation is so incredibly poisonous that her position on the Signal Foundation has raised serious concerns if the beloved privacy app Signal is fundamentally compromised.

This direct connection helps explain how Liz Fong-Jones is able to generate significant positive press for himself, and is permitted to craft narratives on Wikipedia articles he is directly affected by and has incredible conflicts of interests with, including for his company Honeycomb and for the Kiwi Farms. His contributions are made by suggestion only (via the “Talk Pages”),but since he is direct friends with Wikipedia admins who manage these pages, they are always included in as favorable a light to him as possible.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a “free and open” platform for cataloguing the knowledge of mankind. Katherine states here that this is no longer useful, and that “free and open” perpetuates a “White, male, Westernized construct” and is exclusionary to communities “without written tradition”. “These ideas of radical openness … did not live up to the intention”.

Wikipedia is by no measure a free and open platform. You are only permitted to edit Wikipedia using specific IP addresses, meaning anyone concerned about their privacy may not edit Wikipedia. Since Wikipedia admins and Wikimedia C-Level executives may be friends with people trying to ruin your life, this necessitates de-anonymizing yourself to hostile actors to even create an account. Then, you will discover that almost every important Wikipedia page is under special protections, especially controversial pages like the Kiwi Farms, living people such as Liz Fong-Jones, and his companies like Honeycomb. You will need a certain level of reputation within the Wikipedia community to even attempt editing these pages. Protected and high-risk pages like the Kiwi Farms’s are watched for changes by hundreds of bureaucrats continuously. Your edits will be critically scrutinized, whereas the edits of Liz Fong-Jones and his personal Wikipedia admin friends will pass with rubber stamps. One major reason your edits may be reverted is for “original research”. Original research is anything extrapolated from a primary resource. This includes government websites and the Kiwi Farms itself, if you’re writing about the Kiwi Farms. What Wikipedia likes is secondary resources from trusted publications. Trusted publications are explicitly whitelisted news media websites.[16] Kiwi Farms users in 2022 asked Wikipedia to start being impartial on the subject and stop trusting biased news articles. This prompted 10-year Wikipedia veteran editor Bilorv to state, “If Wikipedia had existed when expert consensus was that the Earth is flat then we would have asserted that position as fact”. The men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for discrediting geocentrism now write for Wikipedia. At least Bruno’s executioners got paid; Bilorv’s 38,828 edits were made to Wikipedia for free purely for the self-satisfaction and ego. So, in practice, Maher’s revolutionary “not free, and not open” Wikipedia means that any wealthy technocrat may buy fluff pieces from legacy news websites, and can request these articles be added to Wikipedia articles by their admin friends, specifically to accomplish political goals. Incidentally, the Wikipedia article for the Kiwi Farms is nothing but sloppy accusations citing articles which contain no evidence themselves. Whatever the news writes becomes the truth, and the news writes what Liz Fong-Jones tells them to write....