One of the Kiwifarms main and most important rules is that users must NOT contact any individual who is a subject of discussion on the website. Saying that it encourages it is a complete lie and anyone can see this for themselves if they go onto any thread in the site. The only purpose of the site is discussing publicly availiable information that the subjects decided to upload to the internet by their own will.

The descriptions wielded with regularity in this case are all very rhetorically squishy and intended to convey a condemnatory and emotionalized narrative about this site while simultaneously minimizing actual, concrete factual claims about its operations/behavior.

At this point I think it’s largely indisputable that KiwiFarms has been subjected to a coordinated campaign of slander from several angles in major news media (which is precisely why you’re correct that Wikipedia provides very little reliable information about the real situation). There have been media-proliferated insinuations of complicity in mass shootings and terrorist attacks, vague “involvement” in “stalking” and swatting campaigns, unspecified “links” to various suicides, and all manner of vague but grave allegations made, virtually all of them substantiated by essentially no evidence and in some cases provably false with only minimal investigation. The language used in these allegations (if they can even be called more than relayed rumors) is often constructed in a cagey, motte-and-bailey fashion plainly meant to minimize legal exposure in future defamation litigation, which KiwiFarms’ critics clearly believe it does not have the resources to mount in any meaningful form anyway.

But none of that means that KiwiFarms’ apologists and defenders are being entirely reasonable about what the site is or about owning up to the reality that the site’s own behavior is largely the cause of its predicament. It’s pretty deceptive to describe the site as a “mere gossip forum” as people on Twitter have taken to doing. In order to avoid the multitude of misleading meanings instilled in the word “harassment”, the best way to describe to people what KiwiFarms does is probably to just say that it is a site that platforms cyberbullying for entertainment. Ironically, the sequence of events in Greer’s case is pretty informative because it is essentially their modus operandi: they single out individuals with online presences or personas for insults, denigration, and commentated observation, while providing means and encouragement for enterprising users to communicate with and further embarrass the targets through online contact — their behavior broadly is no worse than this (they carefully attempt to suppress illegal and “real-life” interaction, as you mention), but also no better. This sort of practice is not uncommon on the Internet today, and used to be even more common in the old school days of social media under such slang names as “brigading”, but because most normal persons respond to this type of attention with blocks and disengagement, the kinds of people KiwiFarms targets and similar sites would target naturally tend to end up by attrition being people with mental or neurodevelopmental abnormalities of some kind that cause them to never break engagement with hostile online strangers or otherwise to seek attention. Given changing social norms, and especially social norms concerning respect for the emotional well-being of “vulnerable persons”, both practices like “brigading” of individuals and KiwiFarms’ entire operations model have become increasingly socially unacceptable on the Internet.

The most proximate reason for their situation though, and specifically for the coordinated media campaign, is that not only did they target individuals in this bullying manner but specifically targeted a handful of fairly connected individuals who personally know journalists and people involved in the technology sector, and as a result KiwiFarms has built itself an impressive roster of enemies with nontrivial influence in American media and technology. That roster is largely the reason behind their deplatforming (including by Cloudflare, a company that ordinarily has few compunctions with facilitating content that is sometimes, unlike that of KiwiFarms, straightforwardly illegal), and it is also the reason behind the breathless, seemingly coordinated, and casually slanderous treatment by multiple major media entities.

It’s saddening and somewhat maddening that, as Goldman implies, the disproportionate, even unhinged, hatred that certain journalists in particular have developed for KiwiFarms means that Internet regulation and policy will be pushed in a deleterious and more censorious direction in pursuit of “finding [translation: inventing] a legal doctrine” that can take this one specific site offline. At least KiwiFarms can’t be credited with inducing Cloudflare’s trajectory on deplatforming (the blame for that rests much more with the Daily Stormer and 8chan), but KiwiFarms is already generating bad and baffling caselaw like this appellate ruling, which very likely will end up being precedential whether people like it or not. And I anticipate that this situation may well only get worse unfortunately, as KiwiFarms’ opponents realize there is no viable way of taking the site offline continuously in the near-term, even more so in light of the looming restoration of Net Neutrality.