Yay Reddit! Doxxing vs just identifying somebody

Ugh, the right response to someone tweeting racist nonsense is not to ignore them. You're sitting aside and allowing the idea that the internet is for middle-to-upper-class cis straight white men only to continue to fester. You shouldn't get a "you get to actively create a hostile space against minorities" card just because you're a dumbfuck kid.

Exactly. Quite frankly, the Ring of Gyges needs to be thrown into Mount Doom.

My problem is that I'm not sure what this practically means. If I search for racist terms on twitter there is an absolute barrage of tweets every minute, many of them from named accounts, let alone anonymous ones. The only options available to us in dealing with the latter, unless twitter changes its policies, are the following. Start being detectives and track IPs, numbers, addresses, household members and so on until we narrow down who it is doing the tweeting, then attempt to shame them publicly, presumably by contacting people they know who might have influence over them. The other is to block them (however you do that, I don't use twitter) and move on, hopefully starving them of an audience.

I'm not going to lose sleep over anyone choosing the former approach (and I support it if the account in question is harassing other users specifically) but it's not going to transform twitter into a safe space for minorities, or anyone for that matter. That will never happen until twitter decides to stop defaulting policies which approximate first amendment-style free speech. The internet is never going to be a safe space in the meaningful sense of not exposing vulnerable parties to abuse, but it can incorporate safe spaces such as this one. Trying to impose a similar chilling effect over the entirety of twitter just doesn't seem realistic, which is why I think it's best left to cases of direct harm.

Agreed, but it's worth pointing out that twitter (among other social media outlets) has also shown that it isn't just "middle-to-upper-class cis straight white men" doing this festering anymore. The response to such festering needs to broaden in response to the problem.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/10/truth-lies-doxxing-internet-vigilanteism/


I came across this while looking up the term "doxxing". I knew the reddit story discussed here but the phrase was a new one to me. Anyway in reading this article the opening about Harvey Milk outing the guy who probably saved Gerald Ford's life struck me as an odd one. I had never heard it, even living in the area I do I don't remember seeing that story before.

While I think the idea of being anonymous on the internet is a great one in practice it is full of peril. Having that feeling that nothing you say can ever be used against you for any purpose may be liberating, but everything comes with consequences. And there is reason to think your internet/tweeting posting you will ever be linked to the "real" you.

Christ, it is sickening reading the comments on that wired article from redditors. VA was a redditor, so nothing he did was wrong. What VA did was on the internet, so nothing he did was wrong. Stealing and posting naked pictures of women against their consent, taken from vindictive ex-lovers or hackers, wasn't wrong, because, in the words of the community at the time, "sluts should have known better." No one matters except them, and nothing matters until it pierces their personal sphere of comfort. Acrez is like them, a white IT geek, so now, all of a sudden, privacy is incredibly important, and the most important possible thing is that his privacy should have been respected. Not the privacy of the little girls he was using as public sexual fodder, not the privacy of the women being stalked, harassed, photographed, and exploited against their will or without their consent - they were just objects. They don't mean anything at all, and the possibility that their lives were affected by his actions are so irrelevant that no one has even bothered to try and check.

I fucking hate the internet, sometimes.