Yay Reddit! Doxxing vs just identifying somebody

Popehat calls out reddit on its doxxing policy, yet again.

Truereddit freaks out, says Popehat doesn't understand the difference between doxxing and identifying somebody in real life.

I can't say I sympathize with the point of view of most of the truereddit posters. I don't think it is that big of a deal to identify somebody no matter where they are. ViolentAcrez was being a horrible person online and stopped once he was identified. Pastor Bell was being a shitty person in real life and deserved to be identified. But reddit's official, administrative policy is that nobody is allowed to be identified.

Basically, linking to a news story that identifies a criminal or suspect would, I think, violate their stupidly broad policies. But as the policy is only there to defend redditors, stuff like this gets a slap on the wrist at best.

After reading Ken's thoughts on Popehat, I think it's really a case of "the rules are to protect us, not them" attitude. If they were really against doxxing in principle, they wouldn't have gone after Bell.

That said, I have to wonder how monolithic an entity "Reddit" is. Were there people against the outing of Bell?

The problem with that is that some "normal" people online are just horrible people who haven't had the chance to be horrible. You say this guy was "horrible", which means a lot of people thought he was horrible and the chances that one of those people were legitimately mentally ill is 100%. So this guy, who may have just been screwing around or having fun in a, let's face it, safe way that wasn't going to hurt anybody, is now in very real danger in real life.

And it's a very real slippery slope: the definition of who "deserves" to be doxxed (?) can change until it's justified in every case. And you're talking about "horrible" as if it has a definition. Online people have recieved death threats for not liking TV shows. I still get phone calls from people angry I trolled them after my identity was found out. I've had to take down two different dating profiles that contained real pictures and real phones numbers and, every once in awhile, a Craigslist ad pops up wherein I'm looking for "my first gay experience be rough please".

This. They key difference is does it impact a member of the community, which determines how many fucks the rule enforcement folks give.

Just so we're clear I'm pretty sure that the guy using the ViolentAcrez nomme de plume was definitely a good fit for the horrible person descriptor as he was likely causing and perpetuating real harm by distributing and encouraging the distribution of pornographic and borderline pornographic pictures of underage or underage appearing women (and in any case largely without their explicit consent). He did this unapologetically and forcefully for years.

I'm not convinced that outing him in real-life as an individual really did much to aid the cause of expunging or taking a flamethrower to those corners of the internet but he certainly wasn't an innocent bystander who made one mistake or something.

Reddit is not a monolithic entity. Its admins are, however. They went after Gawker when they "doxxed" Violentacrez, banned any mention of that article anywhere on reddit, and for a while banned all gawker sites. From what I can tell, they didn't do much about this Bell situation.

And otterloop, when I say "horrible person" in the case of Violentacrez, I mean he was stealing teenage girls' photos and posting them on subreddits called creepshots and jailbait, essentially sexualizing minors. It bordered very near child pornography. The only reason he was able to keep posting these pictures was because reddit admins wouldn't stop him and because he was anonymous. We have a right to free speech in the US, but we also have to face the consequences of that speech. Both VA and Pastor Bell have faced consequences for their speech, and I think that's fine.

Death threats and harassment are not protected speech, however. That doesn't mean we should ignore it or say it doesn't exist, but we can't squelch free speech in order to end harassment.

That's what you say. I hear child pornography is actually illegal, and that the laws that make it so are enforced by authorities even higher than Reddit admins and Gawker employees, if you can imagine such a thing.

I don't know Reddit, is it like demons where you only have power if you know someone's true name?

ViolentAcraz owned a subreddit were he posted pictures of dead children so people could talk about how they were jerking off over them, and would laugh at distraught parents of said children who asked him to take down the pictures. Don't any of you motherfuckers defend him.

No one is defending him, I had no idea who he was.

That being said weren't there options besides exposing him in real life? Couldn't they ban his account, take down his threads without knowing who he was? Again, I'm not sure what Reddit is, I'm really asking why those weren't options.

It was a third party outing him, Reddit sort of imploded over the whole thing and tried to ban links to gawker for a few days in some areas. The reason they outed him was partly to find out who would do such things, and partly because Reddit has been very loathe to censor anything on it's site. Essentially they only react when the media picks up a story about how Reddit is refusing to do anything about *publicly distasteful thing here*.

My problem with Reddit's response to these stories is that basically the entire site falls victim to the idea that freedom of speech is freedom from social consequences of that speech.

Here you go.

Truth.

Holy shit that's fucked up.

Yeah, it was fucked up enough that people actually defended Gawker over something.

That Gawker article is something else. Christ. What a bunch of first class a*********.

See? The PC censor-nazis have already gotten to BF....

slippery slope

This, exactly this. Going the vigilante route and assassinating someone's character publicly no matter how utterly vile he or she is perceived, or how righteous the cause seems to be is never justified, ever. Gawker's yellow journalism on these matters really trouble me, especially since more and more ordinary folks are being targeted. Ultimately it begets ever more exponential acts of retaliation and vandalism, and it is all Internet civility that is being consumed in the process.

Well, at least we still have Hitler, right?

Oh, we can't defend him either now? Shit... how about Andrew Jackson?

How should people report on criminals? Or for example the folks who run websites like isanyoneup or the like?Just ignore it? Throw our hands up in frustration, "well, we can't actually REPORT on who is doing this. It's the internet!"

That's bullshit. If you say something, anywhere, there will be consequences. If you believe in what you're doing, you'll be ready to face those consequences.

For something to be character assassination, it has to be untrue.

First, I don't like that when I see it done, it seems to be with all the grace and the gloating of a Taliban. It too often is the byproduct of a mob mentality. I see it as an egotrip, more than I see it as a desire to bring about true justice.

Second, the problem is also that it's not just about believing in something and being ready to stand up for it, people can become victims of online attacks for the flimsiest of reasons, like Otterloop pointed out. Someone decides he or she doesn't likes you, starts an anonymous blog with your name accusing you of being a murderer or something equally heinous, and the content cannot be removed, and can have potentially very harmful consequences, like the loss of a job. The Internet usually is also relatively perrenial. Suppose someone was legitimately being a jerk. Does that person necessarily deserve to have his or her reputation completely ruined years after the fact? No, it doesn't. Somehow a drunk driver involved in a car accident stealing away innocent lives can be redeemed, but someone who might have made an heinous statement once might still be screwed. And it doesn't even have to be true, which is the worst.

Ultimately the legal system should be the judge of who deserves to be punished, and who doesn't deserve punishment. And yes I am completely against the owner who ran isanyoneup, and anyone who has an equally horrible site, in fact it is exactly the sort of behavior I am against.

Well, from what I know, and correct me if I am wrong, some European countries like the UK view the publication of irrelevant facts cast in the worst possible light as libel, while the American definition isn't as such. And while there might not be a legal basis on all of this, and the Internet seems more or less to make these semantics irrelevant, I persist in thinking that there are moral reasons why it could be considered unacceptable behavior.

So your complaint is that in some scenarios it might be bad, therefore this situation where it was a-ok is bad by association?

Short version of UK libel law is that the person making the claim has to prove it's true rather than the slandered/libelled party proving it false.

In ViolentAcrez case it was all true so no libel. Of course, that just pissed off Redditors even more - it was seen as bad enough when /b/ is calling you out on being an amoral shithole full of paedophiles and SA starts mass-mailing proof to the media and every moral minority group that could be found, but when it turned out to be true it made them look ignorant as well as unpleasant so they retreated to "No doxxing anyone ever for any reason", as if the Internet was some sort of parallel universe where actions don't have consequences.

What violentacrez did was not illegal (for the most part). There was nothing to do to stop him except expose his actions. Seriously, what else would you expect people to do but figure out who he was? He wasn't even really hiding it: he'd come to reddit meetups and say who he was.

The first amendment is not a protection against the consequences of what one says or posts online,nor is it a guarantee of anonymity.
That dickless slime like violentacres, or your average callow teenaged racist tweeter, has their future prospects impacted is a risk they will have to measure against how important they think it is for them to share the odious contents of their soul on the marketplace of ideas.

The fact that stating your opinions in public comes with a cost is not a bug, it's a feature.

Duels weren't always to the death. </pedant>

Yes, that's why it's a terrible shame that lynch mobs aren't the preferred mode of settling accounts any longer. Because there's no possible downside to this concept.

Your post is as problematic and as potentially disingenuous as Popehat's, where he 1) completely ignores the actual sequence of events with the tipping fiasco 2) freely conflates between opinions held by Redditors, policies enforced by reddit admins, and oversimplified, worst-case-scenario monolithic opinions attributed to both. And then it goes on to a sloppy interjection of the violentacrez case, no doubt looking to build on the real problems inherent in that case towards a broader indictment of all of reddit.And that's not even getting into your summary of what "Truereddit" thinks, further building on that weak foundation.

First, what happened with violentacrez was only to a certain degree about the id'ing policy; here's the summary I wrote of it then. The big problem there was the personal connection to the admins and that *this* was how the chicken of "we don't censor reddit unless it's out and out illegal" came home to roost. Thus, when the admins reacted by clinging to the doxxing policy, they had lost any credibility on that front through a personal connection *and* the incredibly wrong content being defended; you can't make an argument from principle if you have personal ties to the main offender. This is not an easy needle to thread for people that work on it for a living, let alone internet freedom of speech kneejerkers, but reddit really missed the opportunity to get ahead of this and put in a good faith effort to screen for terrible content *before* VA was thrown in their face.

None of that has anything to do with what the reddit community thought, which was all over the place. Yes, the pro-VA crowd was loud, and yes, the moderates were not onboard with the BF ethos (which I embrace) of taking into account societal context and the goddamn disaster of the content itself before getting all even-handed about different opinions and who "deserves" to have their name in the limelight. But it was also just as likely you would find many redditors who thought he was terrible, should have been gone ages ago, and that the content itself was unacceptable and should be actively screened for.

Second, what happened with the jesus tipper was not a coordinated witchhunt driven by a reddit hivemind. You had one degree of separation from the aggrieved party (the waitress who took a picture and put it online was not the one who got the shitty tip), and she didn't put it up under the aegis of "find this person and ruin them". By her own account, she thought the signature was illegible and that no one would care anyway. Naive, careless, sure. But it's unlikely she wanted a shitstorm that would surely (see other cases of employers being embarrassed by their eminently replaceable employees) result in termination. So some redditors went out of their way to ID her, the ball got rolling, and while she edited the picture to remove the signature the damage was done.

The personally identifying data was removed to conform with the policy. The policy is not designed to be "pre-crime" and prevent ID'ing from ever happening, as (unlike screening for underage porn) that is not a realistic goal. The goal is to establish a societal norm that will be enforced as needed and discourages witchhunts. For every violentacrez that so richly deserves the poetic justice that may well have been the only way of shutting him down for good, you have a bunch of middling cases like this stupid woman, not to mention people that are mentally ill or have simply been wrongly or maliciously accused before the internet posse flips its shit.

So you have a situation where a nuanced take on the issue, such as that which we would prefer from people when they look at our community here and characterize it on the basis of a single thread or poster or whatever, doesn't reveal so much a contradiction in doxxing approaches as a good policy in general which should clearly be set aside when bigger things are at stake (ie violentacrez). Then you also have what happens in communities when a segment of the population shows their ass on a bigger stage.

I don't expect you to agree with my interpretation. I freely admit that my eyes roll out of my head damned near every time reddit comes up, here right before I watch everyone morph into a stereotypical old man talking about all the evil in them thar intertubes as if we didn't have access to the baseline understanding of technological and metacommunity questions at stake. But at the very least differentiate between specific admin actions, policies per se, and the plurality of opinions in a diverse community before stating an opinion on an item or a trend. Otherwise, it really is just bottom of the barrel feel-good Santoruming out of ignorance.

I can't condone vigilante justice. I just can't. Exposing his real identity to the general public put him in real danger. That's not justice or right.

A lifetime of punishment for one indiscretion, especially a teenage one, is something I can't get behind either.

The best option, I think, would have been to hold the public owners/operator of Reddit's feet to the flame, they were the ones allowing the behavior to go on.

Just as I think it's wrong to treat reddit as one thing, I think it's a mistake to ignore that this is precisely what many people wanted to do and actually did. It's not an either-or when you are talking about thousands of opinions across thousands of people.

What many want, though, is a general consensus that pushes both to protect reasonable anonymity, for better or worse, and to create a climate that discourages the abuse of that to create a toxic environment for women, LGBT, minorities, and all of the other common targets of internet shitheads. Right now, reddit admins only have the first half of that in their priorities, and maybe that's all that they can handle or care about long-term. And maybe they would be awful at anything but bare minimum content guidelines. I don't know. I just think that the often reasonable comments about things that happen at reddit which are unacceptable/questionable would be a lot more useful in terms of discussion if they included a basic grasp of how the community works in terms of mechanics, how an item of scandal evolves, and what specifically was done wrong by differently accountable groups.

I don't understand: what would your solution be? Punish each person individually?
I'm not ignoring that it's other people that are doing it, it's just easier and faster and more effective to attack the landlords and knock down the slum instead of...whatever your solution would be. Kinda like how Charles Manson is still in prison today despite not having committed a single murder himself.

I kind of assumed you saw my post above, from before I replied to yours. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding as to the position I'm advocating if you think I'm promoting more punishment.

LK I love you. Please to be explaining with less words.

It's good to keep a sense of who is saying what and what works, not just in terms of critiquing reddit but in critiquing the critics. The monolith approach to a "redditor position" leaves us with an internet outrage contest, but it's good to be balanced in correcting it.

So I understand the reservations about looking to vigilantes as the corrective, and share many of them myself. But we can't risk conflating the quick revenge stuff with the many people who focused on more appropriate forms of advocacy aimed at the right targets and got shit done, because we risk making the same oversimplified mistakes.

Alright...now smaller words...

LK, my point was that, with the rules outlined as is, the admins should have banned those who IDed the pastor, but let it slide. That the truereddit thread screams REAL LIFE IS FINE TO DOX IN BECAUSE IT ISN'T DOXING, even if it isn't the ONLY response, is a pretty thoughtless one and the one that is upvoted most of all. Hence my link to the thread.

I know truereddit isn't representative of all. reddit communities, but that's supposed to "A subreddit for really great, insightful articles,reddiquette, reading before voting and the hope to generate intelligent discussion on the topics of these articles." Instead, the top comments seem to just ignore Ken's point, that the policy makes no sense and was designed, by the admins, to protect their special misanthrope.