[content warning: quoted racist comments, brief mention of sexual harassment]
There was recently a kerfluffle about a member of the Internet right-wing named HanAssholeSolo, who made a gif that was retweeted by the president. CNN discovered his identity and did not out him, but made some statements that could be reasonably interpreted as threatening to out him if he didn’t stop being a horrible racist. I think The Intercept is probably correct that some executives decided to put in some lawyerese that happens to sound like CNN is threatening a critic with outing, and then didn’t explain themselves, because fucking executives. So I am going to blatantly ignore the kind of stupid and boring actual issue and instead discuss the much more interesting issue of whether CNN would be right to out horrible racists if this were actually a thing they were going to do.
–and let’s not mince our words here. I’ve seen a lot of people calling HanAssholeSolo a “CNN critic” or a “Trump supporter,” which seems unfairly insulting of both CNN critics and Trump supporters. To quote a Salon article on the subject:
At the same time he appears to have gone on a bit of an editing spree, knowing his posts would be under the microscope he started sanitizing some of his most offensive screeds, deleting the N-word and a comment about killing Muslims, for example. Quartz took screenshots of some of his posts before they were edited.
Despite the edits, there is still plenty of offensive material that HanAssholeSolo has posted that is still on the site (at least for now). The user, for example, posted a link to a meme that advocates running over Muslims with a tank. He or she also posted a meme that identified CNN contributors as Jews using a Star of David. The user also frequently posts racists comments that target African-Americans in particular, in one instance writing that Americans spend less on Father’s Day than Mother’s Day gifts because “most blacks don’t know who their fathers are.”
One might argue, as well, that eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth morality implies outing HanAssholeSolo is at least acceptable. After all, the r/The_Donald/Gamergate/alt-right cluster of the Internet shows no particular compunctions about sharing people’s private infomation, given that some of them are calling the journalist’s wife and parents at home with threatening messages. This is merely the latest in a long string of such incidents, which include getting a Nintendo employee fired for her history as a sex worker.
Nevertheless, I think it would be wrong to dox HanAssholeSolo, and this is why.
First, the eye-for-an-eye argument strikes me as pretty weak. When I have to give an account for my life, I hope I will have something better to say for myself than “I did not behave significantly worse than r/The_Donald.” Like, I am a better person than the average participant in r/The_Donald, that’s why I’m here defending their right not to be doxxed while they’re making unfunny memes about transgender people. (I’m too offended as a fan of comedy to be able to be offended as a trans person.) I promise there are plenty of ways we can punish the expression of horrible racism without using this particular one.
Second, when I think about doxxing, I always think about violentacrez.
Violentacrez was a vile person: among other sites, he moderated r/creepshots (which posted pictures of women’s breasts and asses taken in public without their consent) and r/jailbait (which posted sexualized pictures of women under the age of 18, many taken from their Facebook pages, again without their consent). But he also had a wife with fibromyalgia; when he was outed, he lost his job and his health insurance, putting her health in danger. While the Internet doesn’t seem to know what he’s up to now, Googling his legal name still brings up violentacrez; it seems quite likely that he has found it difficult or impossible to get a job since.
So that’s the question, isn’t it? Are you willing to sit down and endorse the statement “yes, I think a reasonable and appropriate punishment for this man’s actions is that his wife is deprived of the health care that helps keep her alive”?
And it’s not just people’s disabled partners (or, for that matter, disabled selves). It’s their elderly mother they’re taking care of and who has nowhere to go if they lose their home. Or their five-year-old who doesn’t understand anything about Reddit or CNN but does understand that Mommy and Daddy are fighting and there aren’t going to be any presents for Christmas this year. Or the better person they might be, someday, who will always be burdened by the corpse of the asshole they used to be.
It is much easier to judge people when the only thing you know about them is the worst thing they ever did.
In the case of violentacrez, yes, I am willing to bite that bullet. I am not sure that there was any other way to keep him from continuing to violate the privacy of literally thousands of girls, many of them underage. HanAssholeSolo, however, to his credit, has never been accused of harassing or threatening anyone. His comments about wanting to kill Muslims are obviously the same sort of thing as people saying “die cis scum” or “white genocide now” or “people who ship Reylo should be run over with a tank”: like, you obviously shouldn’t go around saying you want to kill people, but for every hundred thousand people who say that there’s maybe one person who actually, you know, means it. HanAssholeSolo’s racist comments were generally confined to r/The_Donald and other such places. It is not exactly a surprise to anyone that if you read r/The_Donald you will encounter racism there.
And– he would get fired. He would have a hard time finding another job. It would hurt anyone who depends on him financially. He would lose friendships and relationships. He would be harassed and sent death threats, because every time you unleash a mob on the Internet they’re going to harass you and send death threats. Maybe he would be a victim of swatting. Maybe he would be threatened or assaulted. And even if he changes, it won’t stop.
Even if you want to look at it from a practical standpoint, without any considerations of justice or mercy, presumably you (like me) want to reduce the number of horrible racists in the world. It seems to me that, to achieve this goal, it is very important that horrible racists continue to have connections with people who disapprove of horrible racism. If the people who aren’t horrible racists get you fired from your job and send you death threats, and the only place you find solace and comfort is with other horrible racists, and becoming less of a racist would not stop the non-horrible-racists from attacking you but would separate you from your source of support– would you stop being a horrible racist? Would anyone?
Those of us who have had the pleasure of having a small mob directed after them, as happens so often on the social justice Internet these days– did this get you to change your mind? Personally, I have sometimes experienced a mob where they were right and I was wrong and let me tell you at the time I would have sacrificed some of my less essential toes rather than admit that maybe the assholes had a point. I don’t know that making the mob be ten thousand people rather than a hundred would have any effect on increasing its persuasive power.
Mobbing doesn’t even consistently shut people up: I mean, sometimes it does, but there are plenty of people who get mobbed online and then respond by saying the same thing again but louder this time, and now they have sympathy including from people who weren’t on their side to start with. I mean, exactly how well has Gamergate done at shutting up Anita Sarkeesian?
Yes, yes, you should stop believing horrible things no matter how much it would personally harm you or how contrary to human nature it would be. I think it is a bit much to base your anti-racism plan on horrible racists universally being saints.
I’m not saying that anyone has a duty to spend time with horrible racists (although it’s a good thing to do if it’s something you’re personally capable of). But I am saying that at the very least one should not cause horrible racists harm in such a way that it increases their chance of continuing to be horrible racists. And that means no doxxing.
Thing of Things 
This seems like an odd argument in this specific case considering that even the threat of getting doxxed was enough for this guy to go through his post history and delete the worst bits. Objectively, the threat of doxxing *did* shut this guy up. So it seems weird to me to say that doxxing doesn’t *consistently* shut people up.
Also: you say “mobbing” doesn’t consistently shut people up, but the problem this guy was afraid of is not, primarily, being mobbed on the Internet. While Internet harassment is no fun, it pales in comparison to the threat of real-life consequences, like losing your job. Anita Sarkeesian has never had to worry about that kind of real life consequence because she works for a feminist organization which she founded, and because her harassers aren’t particular sympathetic sounding to ordinary people besides. This is very different from random dude on the internet HanAssholeSolo.
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It is unclear to me how much the deletion is because HanAssholeSolo had a wakeup call and realized his actions were way out of line. (He did post an apology basically saying that.)
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From the context, does it not seem to you that the apology is coerced and he’s groveling in fear?
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I don’t know the guy or the conversations he had with the journalists. I can imagine both a story in which being contacted by CNN makes him go “wow, shit, I’ve been saying a lot of stuff I really can’t stand behind”, and a story in which being contacted by CNN makes him go “AH HOLY FUCK DELETE EVERYTHING.” I’m not sure it makes sense for me to be speculating about the motives of a complete stranger.
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> I can imagine both a story in which being contacted by CNN makes him go “wow, shit, I’ve been saying a lot of stuff I really can’t stand behind”,
I can’t. He clearly had a strong dislike of CNN; why is a phone call from his enemy threatening to doxx him (whether or not they had explicitly malevolent intent, if CNN calls you up you know you’re at risk of becoming a national TV star whether you want to or not) going to change his mind on a deep, fundamental level?
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>I’m not sure it makes sense for me to be speculating about the motives of a complete stranger.
This strikes me as very wilful blindness on your part. Do you honestly think that being threatened by CNN genuinely changed his beliefs? Do you think that’s how changing beliefs works? Do you think those people who read things in ISIS videos have evaluated the evidence and concluded that Islam is the light, or that they’re scared of the guy with the knife at their throats?
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I think Ozy’s right here, if only applying the logic to the half of the issue that supports their cause. The big problem with taking the ‘No bad tactics, only bad targets’ stance on doing things that you would consider reprehensible if they were done to you is that second order backfire effects are huge.
I mean, Jordon Peterson has become a folk hero in a lot of moderate places because he notably stands up to no-platforming attempts, and remains reasonable while doing so. I’m seeing “Clean your Dragon, Slay your room!” memes cropping up in some places I really wouldn’t have expected. His defiance only has the power it does because other people have caved to similar pressure before.
If big, powerful companies and movements start playing ethically fast and loose by throwing their weight around to silence dissenters, then people are going to start noticing, and they very quickly start to lose the moral high ground. Which is important if your cause is, you know, entirely predicated on occupying the moral high ground.
By the looks of Google Trends, team No-Platform-Peterson is having the opposite effect, and Sargon of Akkad seems to be doing alright despite the Sarkesian restraining order fiasco.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=jordan%20peterson,%2Fm%2F0lz99,%2Fm%2F0h3scgt
The hard part about being the good guys (In this case phrased as being “A better person than the average participant of r/thedonald”), is that you don’t get to do some of the stuff the bad guys do while still remaining on the side of good.
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I think the main problem is that people as a whole don’t have the ability to no-platform people in any way other than doxxing them. If Twitter would do its job enforcing it’s terms of service, then we wouldn’t have a problem with people advocating for genocide and hate crimes on Twitter. They’d be constrained to places like r/The_Donald where they’re much less likely to hurt people.
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“I think the main problem is that people as a whole don’t have the ability to no-platform people in any way other than doxxing them.”
Wait, are you saying individual people should have the ability to take away other’s access to communication based only on disagreeing with their views, because that’s what it sounds like to me?
It’s one thing when people openly advocate a crime or threaten people, or when they violate the TOS (like you mention), but beyond that I’m not sure where you’re going with this or what limits?
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Well, I can (and do) take away people’s ability to talk on my blog purely because they annoy me, and I don’t think this is particularly ethically dubious. The right to free speech does not imply the right to speak on every platform. That said, it does seem wise to have some platforms that won’t delete things based on content.
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Ozy: precisely. The phrasing suggesting no-platforming *people* is what makes me leery, as it seems to imply the latter state, but it could also be me mis-interpreting their words, so I’ll await clarification
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@ozymandias Curation isn’t the same thing as no-platforming. Curation is when you decide what you want to put on your own platform. No-platforming is when you try to coordinate to put pressure on third parties to exclude particular people or views from any platform. Sure, there’s a lot of grey area in between, but “I should be allowed to curate my blog” isn’t an argument that no-platforming is OK. They’re at different ends of the spectrum.
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Ozy,
lorenzianheteroceran’s demand and the demand of no platformers in general is that a small group should get to hound people with the wrong opinions off platforms, even if those running the platform are fine with those opinions being shared.
I think that this makes a huge difference. It’s one thing to provide a platform and decide who gets to use it, but something different altogether to want to decide for other people who they should let on their platform.
If Twitter gets to decide who uses their platform, then those who disagree can make their own platform. If you want universal limits on free speech, the appropriate way is to get a law passed, so that decision has democratic legitimacy.
Vigilantes have no democratic legitimacy. Why should lorenzianheteroceran’s standards of decency be the ones we should adopt and not the standards of any other random citizen? I don’t think that the ability to get a mob together provides that legitimacy and it will inevitable result in various groups forming their own mobs and engaging in warfare.
We invented democracy and liberalism (where Twitter gets to make their own rules within the law) to get away from vigilante ‘justice’.
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@Aapje
You’ve got it backwards. Democracy doesn’t confer legitimacy on the freedom of speech. Freedom of speech confers legitimacy on democracy.
Russia is a “democracy” but we put it in quotes because the state controls the media and jails and murders journalists and political opponents. A democracy without freedom of speech cannot itself be legitimate. And an illegitimate, criminal government cannot confer legitimacy on it’s own censorship laws.
Most of the west is confused about this, thinking that a little bit of government censorship is legitimate if its against the right kind of people. Only the USA gets this question entirely right.
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@Lawrence D’Anna
You are treating freedom of speech as a binary. In reality, plenty of speech restrictions still allow sufficient dissent to be able to hold the government accountable.
The US doesn’t have freedom of speech, it has freedom of some speech.
Lots of people are confused about this because this topic is discussed with simplistic memes like ‘America has freedom of speech,’ which is a statement that destroys all nuance and which put the specific set of free speech rights and restrictions that the US has on a pedestal, not to be debated.
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@Aapje
You’re right; of course it’s not a binary. I went too far to say “entirely right”.
What I should have said is that the US gets it much more right than Canada and the UK and France and the rest of them.
Accountability and legitimacy are also not binaries. The government of Canada isn’t wholly illegitimate because of their moderate failings on free speech, but they are less legitimate for them.
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> I think the main problem is that people as a whole don’t have the ability to no-platform people in any way other than doxxing them.
Then I guess you don’t get to no-platform people any more. Oh well!
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I think the problem with your argument about violentacrez’s wife and children is that it’s essentially about hostages: a situation where a terrorist sets up a situation where harming them in the attempt to stop them from doing bad shit will also harm innocent people. Now, I don’t know what the best way to deal with hostages situations is. Game theorists keep saying “ignore hostages, never pay ransom – they will harm far fewer people before understanding that blackmailing you is useless, and giving up than they will if they know that you give in to threats,” but the problem here is that it’s not really achievable in practice: you’ll always find someone who can’t stand watching their loves ones at the gunpoint and not doing anything for the sake of discouraging terrorists. But your solution seems to be “never harm anyone who has hostages,” which doesn’t strike me as particularly great either. So, I don’t know what the solution should be, but it’s probably more complicated than either of these.
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I mean, I assume people are not deliberately having children or elderly mothers or disabled spouses as an attempt to keep others from doxxing them on the Internet. If someone is like “yeah I totally married this woman with fibromyalgia so you’d feel too much compassion for her to out me to stop me from posting creepshots”, then the game theoretical arguments apply, and I would have way fewer compunctions about outing the person (…and telling his wife to DUMP THE MOTHERFUCKER ALREADY). If they married their spouse for more usual reasons of being in love and wanting to spend their lives together, then they are clearly not holding hostages. You don’t get to ignore every negative consequence of your actions on the grounds that people who are not completely uprooting their lives to ensure your actions don’t have negative consequences are blackmailing you.
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Isn’t that an argument against punishment for everyone who’s ever done anything bad and gotten caught though? Most criminals we send to jail have wives, mothers, kids. But you still enforce the law because the alternative is worse.
Nobody is suggesting sending horrible internet racists to jail. But at the same time, if the consequences of saying vile things on the internet is that people know you said vile things on the internet and act accordingly, I’m not sure that the existence of their loved ones is any more argument against inflicting that consequence than it is in the case of every other consequence ever, just or not.
I mean, if someone goes to Klan rallies and enthusiastically supports racist policies with their mask on, are we meant to feel bad if their identity is revealed and they suffer the consequences of being a known Klansman? How is this different?
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MrApophenia – I can see both sides. On one hand, I do think people should have the courage to stand behind their words. But the problem is that, in modern society, expressing a view which is merely unpopular (even if not incorrect) can have severe negative consequences, all the way up to being physically assaulted and loss of livelihood, far disproportionate to the “crime” of having the wrong views, with the intensity determined primarily by how many people yell how loud.
In RL and places where my name is attached (e.g. Facebook), I censor myself because of the possibility of career-ending retribution because I pissed off the wrong people (which, for me, would be life-ending, since without this job, my calling, there’s no further point in living), even if I’m damn sure I’m right.
That’s the problem, it’s real punishment for expressions (not action), and it’s based on who can mobilize the most pissed-off howler monkeys to throw feces, not careful discussion of the statement’s validity and logic.
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@Cerastes
And that kind of self-censorship leads to a situation where most people are unwilling to call out injustice or otherwise challenge the status quo, while those who do are going to be the ones with little to lose. So the extremists and the status quo’ers get empowered, while the kind of people who are most likely to have ideas that will improve society will shut up.
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You do realize that people who disagree with you have actual lives, right? They aren’t just strawmen? They’re real people with hopes and dreams, who fall in love, who love their kids and pets, etc. Yeah, maybe they’re racists, but that isn’t ALL they are – they aren’t a 2-dimensional cartoon villain.
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I mostly agree, but I disagree with your objection to the eye-for-an-eye argument. Playing tit-for-tat in response to defection doesn’t make you as bad as the original defector (it might not be bad at all). There’s a norm of not doxxing your enemies, and obviously it’s bad to violate it (as it is generally bad to escalate disproportionately), but it’d be proportionate to use the same tools against the violators.
The real problem with eye-for-an-eye in this context is that it’d be disproportionate escalation against the relatively innocent. HanAssholeSolo isn’t responsible for the actions of others in his cluster, so it’d be wrong to doxx him even if it were right to doxx initiators of doxxing.
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Also don’t forget the 4chan cluster uses the exact same eye for an eye rhetoric.
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An eye for an eye, and a rhetoric for a rhetoric.
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In a toy model where the only possible actions you can take are “dox someone” and “don’t dox someone,” that works, but of course in the real world it is possible to engage in many social interactions which are not doxxing, many of which are suitable social punishments for doxxing people. (Personally, I’m a big fan of widespread shame and condemnation.)
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We live in the age of the internet. Speaking of shaming and condemning people, you’d figure people might start shaming and condemning people under their usernames. Like, I’m not saying that’s strategically a good idea, as it would seem to invite not just one but many trolls to double-down in a conflict. I’m surprised so few people have tried it though. At the very least, shaming and condemning someone under their internet pseudonym seems an outlet for expressing indignation, however righteously or not, without the social backlash one would face for doxxing internet bullies.
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There’s a more general problem with eye-for-an-eye, and that’s the problem of clarity.
Eye-for-an-eye works perfectly fine if you are clear about what you are doing — that what you are doing is exceptional, that it’s retaliation for some other exceptional act or a response to exceptional conditions, and that it will end as soon as the “debt” is repaid or as soon as the exceptional conditions end (which ideally is fast).
The attempts at retaliation I typically see in these “culture wars” however don’t do any of that. So instead you just get escalation, because retaliation is interpreted as “just how things are” rather than an exceptional state (open-ended warfare rather than strictly delimited punishment).
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I find the “it was the executives” excuse baffling. “Oh it wasn’t our reporters that wrote the threat, it was our VP of News Standards and Practices, so it’s fine”. That doesn’t make it fine!
It’s like the the Rule of Goats. If you threaten to dox someone, but you only really did it because your VP for ethics thought that this was somehow the right thing to do, then you still threatened to dox someone.
It doesn’t matter what their intentions were, because what they wrote only had one plausible interpretation.
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HanAssholeSolo himself apparently does not feel threatened, which IMO is the crucial issue here– if the person you’re apparently threatening doesn’t feel threatened, it is not a very good attempt at threatening people. If it’s the executives, then it’s really not the journalist in question’s fault (it seems unreasonable to demand that journalists go against executives’ dumbass orders every time executives make a dumbass order, particularly since this might get them fired as impossible to work with). And executives are shitty fucking writers and can totally accidentally threaten people as part of an attempt to cover their asses– like, it does seem relevant if CNN actually isn’t going to out the guy.
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HanAssholeSolo apparently *claims* he does not feel threatened. Not the same thing. And that claim obviously has zero credibility given the circumstances.
The journalist did:
* pursue a line of investigation whose entire point was to dox someone
* personally take the initiative to defend the threat on twitter
* previously take part in the Justine Sacco fiasco
So while the guy isn’t responsible for the wording of the threat, he is still a contemptible scumbag. He’s at least as culpable as the 4channers who harassed Sarkisian, and for much the same reasons. Maybe more so because harassing people online is apparently his job, and they’re losers who don’t have jobs.
I’d be a lot more receptive to “it was an accident” if the accident maker wasn’t the VP whose job it was to get this kind of thing right. It’s an incredibly careless accident by the person who’s entire point is to take care that accidents like that don’t happen. It reflects incredibly poorly on CNN whether it was an accident or not. But yea, it probably was.
It is relevant that CNN didn’t actually out him, but it’s also relevant that they’re making that decision after even Vox called them out on the threat. Yes it would be worse if they dug in their heels, but what they’ve done is barely adequate, not laudable.
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Definitely it reads like something the suits dreamed up (“he’s hurting our brand! revenge!”) and I can’t believe their legal people let them phrase it like that, because it sounds like a threat of “we are holding this sword of Damocles over your head; if you displease us in future, CHOP!” but I imagine some senior VP went full steam ahead on this and never consulted the lawyers.
You’d expect working journalists to be more thick-skinned and to write proper stories, not some half-baked “we know whodunnit but we’re not saying because…” bafflegab, which points very strongly to interference from the management and accountancy, not editorial, side.
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The usefulness of doxxing or mobbing is very much a case by case basis. Many people who are doxed or mobbed are going to have martyr or persecution complexes. The doxxing or mobbing is going to just convince them of the rightness of their cause and continue. They might even get some pleasure out of it. In these situations, doxxing or mobbing becomes useless.
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The argument about violentcrez’s wife (and the general point about third party dependents) also applies to other kinds of punishment, e.g. imprisonment. That doesn’t make it invalid — I think it *is* something the legal system should consider when deciding on punishments — but it shouldn’t have too much of an effect. We don’t let people get away with anything because they have seven children who will be sad if we lock them up, and we definitely don’t (or at least shouldn’t) give people leeway because hundreds of people depend on their company for employment.
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I do, in fact, support criminal justice reform, in part because of the effects of a person being imprisoned on their family and dependents.
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“The argument about violentcrez’s wife (and the general point about third party dependents) also applies to other kinds of punishment, e.g. imprisonment. ”
Yes, but to warrant imprisonment you have to do something a lot worse than “say bad things that people on the internet don’t like”. Part of the problem with doxxing is that the punishment can wind up being massively disproportionate to the crime.
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Agreed, it sounds more like an argument for improving the social safety net.
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I really appreciate you using this approach of like, looking at the various effects and possible effects and then discussing things you think where it’s justified vs things where it’s not, and what the difference is and why you have that determination about each case.
Especially given mostly running into either ‘it’s fine to do this because these people are awful’ or ‘it’s not fine to do this because it’s awful’, I appreciate this kind of take, and seeing it.
(Relatedly but also it’s own thing, I wasn’t expecting you to say that about the violentcrez thing after I read the beginning of it and was going to go argue, but then you did say what you said, so, well, wanted to express upvote type things).
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Excellent post!
The key point IMO (aside from the potential for hurting people close to the offender) can be boiled down to this: in order to stop bad behavior it’s really essential to empathize with those who behave badly so that we can assess what might actually get them to change their ways. And the problem, I think, is that so much of the time, people confuse empathy with sympathy, or approval. (This is a general point I find myself coming back to in a lot of contexts.)
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Situations like violentacrez’s are one of the reasons why I support UBI and other broad benefits: the ability to have basic needs met shouldn’t be dependent on how good a human being you are. Relatives keeling over due to lack of coverage or having to skip meals to pay for their medicine and the like are something that would be classified as torture if we did it to prisoners. Regardless of the morality of doxing, striving towards a society in which at least the material impact would be reduced is vital.
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I entirely agree, and that’s why I’m a. socialist.
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I purposely keep far away from details of the latest Outrage Of The Moment, so I know nothing about the cartoon Trump tweeted.
But CNN calls itself a journalism outlet. If this is a legitimate news story, then either they publish the name or they stick to the “anonymous sources/sources close to X told us”.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a news story that went “Although we know the identity of the executive who signed off on substituting cheaper and inferior building materials, which were responsible for the massive loss of life in the fire, he has written us a very heartfelt letter of apology and we won’t be publishing his name – unless he does something naughty again in future”.
Which makes it sound like CNN was sulking in hurt pride over the cartoon and went looking for the perpetrator so they could threaten some kind of lawsuit. I don’t think there was any notion of “we are doing a story on internet racism and oh look guess who popped up?” If he hadn’t had that skeleton in his cupboard, it could have been something else. Or nothing else at all, just one stupid cartoon that pricked a media outlet in its vanity.
This also rings very false, given all the media attention back with Charlie Hebdo and even before that with the original Danish cartoons about Muslims and Islam – so what happened to the principle of “anyone has the right to draw offensive cartoons and you have the right to feel hurt but you can’t shut them down, that’s not how free speech in a democratic society works”?
It only applies to cartoons mocking religion, not cartoons mocking the media?
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Worth noting that the guy is psuedonymous, not anonymous, and they did (obviously) publish the psuedonym. The bullshit threat stuff was over threatening to de-psuedonymizing him. I don’t think it’s quite comparable to outing anonymous sources; breaching the psuedonymity of an already extant internet persona is its own thing in the modern world.
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Most platforms do not support true anonymity in that sense. If i don’t build up any big internet identity, but do have to type a string into the username field, that should not suddenly make me fair game for doxxing.
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What is the meaning of doxxing if not “breaching the psuedonymity of an already extant internet persona”? That was always my understanding of the term — linking someone’s online account to their real-world identity.
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The Kotaku link does not say what you say it does, and in that case you are wrong. She got fired before the crowd (out of Nintendo at least) figured out she was a sex worker. Shameless self-link .
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“It is much easier to judge people when the only thing you know about them is the worst thing they ever did.”
Truer words were never spoken.
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Pingback: Rational Feed – deluks917
“yes, I am willing to bite that bullet”
Then I hope you don’t complain when someone does the same to you.
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…yes in the event that I wind up posting nonconsensually obtained, sexualized pictures of underage girls I won’t complain a bit if people out me.
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I haven’t seen any evidence that gg, the alt right or the donald tried got rapp fired for being a sex worker.
She was fired at the end of march. I didn’t see any word or even rumor of her being a sex worker until april.
And anyways, the earliest place I can find it is kiwifarms (but still after march), and they hate everyone, so if someone told nintendo then sat on it for a few weeks, it wasn’t gg alinged.
Oh, and gg shouldn’t be “clustered” with the donald/alt right. GG is the same group that people complained about being “berniebros” before the_donald was a thing. GG is a group of people who value good game systems over using games a lever for social change reacting to an intrusion into their community by people whos’ priorities are the opposite.
Yes, they share common ground with the right wing by virtue of the fact that its people on the left that is currently trying this.
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I’m not so sure your argument about violentacrez disabled wife is really that strong. In particular, I think it’s apparent strength is largely an effect of salience bias.
When violentacrez losses his job presumably that job doesn’t disappear but goes to someone else. It seems equally possible that whoever gets that job in the place of violentacrez has a disabled wife dependent on them or an elderly mother etc… Now it is certainly true that whoever gets that job in place of violentacrez no doubt would have a slightly worse job otherwise (not be unemployed) but presumably one could trace the chain of people with slightly better jobs as a result of this chain all the way down.
For your argument to be really persuasive it would need to be the case that it is particularly bad when people who had high paying jobs are suddenly dropped to the bottom end of the job market. I think this is plausible (people become used to a certain level of care/luxury and it is worse to lose that then never have it) but this argument is less emotionally appealing. Alternatively, I suppose you could appeal to the loss to society at large by having violentacrez job be performed by someone slightly less qualified but this seems pretty weak.
I think your point about what reduces racism/sexism/etc.. is directly on point. Indeed, a big factor I see in people I know who have become neo-nazi sympathizers or other kinds of extremists is the harsh push back they got for making non-PC comments (sometimes slightly racist other times just statements that might seem to be advantageous to racists but might even be true). Indeed, I think this is why we see famous figures like Sam Harris or Bill Maher gradually migrate from principled and justified critics of certain sacred cows on the left drift into statements that (even if not so intended) seem to justify hate, racial animus etc.. (its hard to remember the importance of qualifying your remarks and denouncing hate when on the left is screaming about your racism while the right applauds you).
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As an aside, however, I think we should distinguish outing someone’s real name from doxing. Doxing, in the sense of deliberately releasing hard to find or private details to make someone feel unsafe/threatened or otherwise hurt them by revealing private details about their lives is pretty much never justified. In contrast, there are cases, though not this one, where I think a good case can be made for identifying the individual making anonymous comments, e.g., if they hold a position of trust or influence.
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Revealing someone’s real name is often the same as revealing enough details to male them unsafe.
Regarding your last sentence:
Great idea! Especially when their secret behaviour is grossly incompatible with the trust or influence.
For example if they are gay, or happen to have sexual congress with someone they are not married to!
That was obviously a reminder that you do not get to set what other people judge to be outrageous and incompatible with holding a position of trust or influence.
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Most of us are consequentialists here and therefore it is totally acceptable to say that an action is okay if it has good consequences and bad if it has bad consequences.
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In a literal sense, I agree. But I think I also maybe missed your point in one section. Maybe this is all a fallacy on my part, that of mood affiliation. However, could you please explain where I misunderstood?
In your sixth paragraph, starting with “First, the eye-for-an-eye,” you made a point that I think is quite anti-consequentialist.
You said it is bad to behave badly, even if it has good consequences.
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ozymandias, I’m a little confused. Was that comment in response to my comment (which it appears under)? I made a consequentialist argument that the expected harms of ‘doxxing’ someone are less than one might think as there is no particular reason to think that the doxxed person is doing anything more beneficial with their money than whoever takes their place.
In other words, factored across the whole economy, the net harm is merely the loss of economic efficiency as a result of the doxxed individual being replaced with someone who is (in expectation) slightly less good at that job. You are approaching it as if the net harm was doxxed current earnings – doxxed earnings after exposure. That’s wrong because the money doxxed is earning doesn’t just vaporize it goes to someone else.
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For the other two “feminist celebrities” , you can have a point, but Sark was never doxed. Someone sent her a threatening letter at some university venue, which was interpreted as a proof of GG harassement. There were also some case with some asshole Brazilian journalist, but that was long ago and I don’t remember the details.
Alison happened way later, when no one cared about not being the villain.
Also, T_D cannot dox on their grounds, as it’s against Reddit rules. Obviously, they can do it on personal Discord, but ya gotta be exact.
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Ozy,
Here you equate HanAssholeSolo with groups that you decides he belongs to and then hold him responsible for the actions of some members of that group, which is very dangerous. It’s one thing to punish/attack someone for something they did, but something very different to punish/attack a person for something that another person did, where the person you punish probably had no hand in that bad behavior. This is a recipe for rapid escalation of mutual violence as well as horrible crimes. By the same logic: ‘one Jew killed a Christian, now Christians get to kill all Jews’.
If you seriously believe that it is just to hold people responsible for the actions of everyone who you see as part of the same group, you must also support it when the same tactic is used against you. Americans tortured Muslims after 9/11. Would you consider it fair if a Muslim tortures you in revenge, rather than seek to get the actual perpetrators punished?
By saying this you imply that eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth morality is legitimized if there are no other ways to get your way. However, there are many situations where people should not get their way when they want someone else to be silenced. In this entire post, you are assuming that the person who wants to silence someone else is right. However, we all have opinions that some others want to silence. Who gets to decide when a desire to silence is valid?
Do you want people who believe that LGBT ‘propaganda’ turns people gay and destroys society to be able to silence you? Do you want to live in a culture where it is acceptable for people to do whatever it takes to get their way?
In democratic society you can try to get a law passed to criminalize the behavior if it isn’t illegal already. This requirement to convince others is very important, because many people have bad fears and/or anger. By requiring those with fear or anger to convince others, we prevent great damage being caused to stop imaginary or relatively minor harm.
Standards for vigilantism/justice shouldn’t just work in situations where those who seek to punish/silence others are right, but they should also deal well with cases where they are wrong. This is missing in your post, which makes it very dangerous. You are pushing people towards a mental model where they do the minimum amount of damage to get their way, but are still willing to do whatever it takes to get their way.
Civilization/liberal society requires limits on what people will do to get their way and that many people accept that they won’t get their way, even if they feel very strongly about it.
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Your argument seems to be that there is no behavior it is acceptable to punish without involving the government, which to my mind is quite untrue. Just because something is bad behavior does not mean the appropriate way to punish it is by using state violence against the perpetrator.
Ex-gay supporters most certainly do punish expressions of my beliefs about gayness all the time: they shame, criticize, and insult pro-gay people and attempt to make expressions of pro-gay sentiments unacceptable in their churches. To the extent I think this is bad, I think this is bad because they are factually incorrect (as is agreed even by most LGBT Christians who hold to a traditional sexual ethic). I’m a consequentialist! I’m allowed to say something is bad because it has bad consequences!
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No, my argument is that when the punishment is above a certain level of severity, you want it in the hands of the government. At a certain point, you are no longer just using your voice on par with everyone else in society, but you are using terrorist methods that destroy the social fabric.
If you want all of society to not post pictures of underage women then you have three options:
1. Convince people not to produce/consume that content by appealing to their reason/empathy/etc in open debate
2. Coercing people by punishing them yourself and silencing people who argue that this should be allowed
3. Coercing people by having the government punish them
1 is the solution that favors those with the best arguments. 2 is the solution that favors those with the most immoral supporters. 3 is the solution that favors those who can convince most people. If you favor justice and truth, it seems very wise to strongly discourage the option that favors those who are most immoral and which favors memetic power over truth the most.
Destroying liberalism has many bad consequences, especially for those who are marginalized. My point is that your post is cherry picked based on the assumption that the anti-liberalism targets those whom you consider nasty and ignores that if you make anti-liberalism the norm, your enemies will do the same things. Furthermore, groups start escalating in response to the other side doing this, causing death spirals.
It’s like arguing that we need to get rid of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ because it will let off some criminals, while ignoring that the standard protects innocents as well and provides a major check on a police state.
A norm of liberalism doesn’t just keep people from doxxing, but also keeps people from using violence and seeing oppression as the only possible way to ensure their own safety.
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I think there’s a much more parsimonious way to state the principle underlying all your problems with doxxing: doxxing is a tool whose power is inversely proportional to the social and economic power of the target. If you’re a working class person with a sick wife, doxxing is devastating. If you’re Anita Sarkeesian, i.e., a bourgeois person ensconced in a supporting milieu, it is scary but survivable. If you plan to spend the rest of your life living off the billion dollars you got from selling Minecraft, you’re utterly impervious.
Doxxing exploits the social and (especially) economic vulnerabilities of its targets, or else it doesn’t work at all. It is therefore an inherently regressive tactic, and it should never be used by anyone claiming to be a part of the left.
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It should never be used by anyone claiming to be a *liberal*. There’s no shortage of regressives on the left. (or the right).
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No, I chose my words very purposefully.
It’s easy to justify doxxing from a liberal perspective. It’s just more information, more free speech. The old line about how “the first amendment only protects you from the state” is true instead of trite in liberal philosophy. Liberalism has no problem in letting the market decide the fates of people, and it doesn’t take sides in management vs. labor.
It’s the left, that doesn’t accept markets as a source of human value, that takes the side of labor, that doesn’t see free speech as axiomatically good, that cannot justify a tool that is structurally biased against the dispossessed.
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@ herbert herbertson
Oh, good point. I misunderstood you.
So “the left” in your sense means the economic left? I didn’t realize that’s what you meant by it, even though you did use only economic language, not identity language. When I hear “left” I usually think people mean “the coalition of socialists and left-identitarians”. Your argument against doxing is strong from the socialist perspective but I don’t think he left-identitarians would accept it.
I still maintain that no liberal should endorse doxing either. Liberalism isn’t thrilled about letting the market decide people’s fates, it’s just also wary of letting the government decide their fates instead. A true liberal shouldn’t just be concerned with cultural liberalism as well as a liberal government. For example a society that systematically women who are promiscuous isn’t liberal, even if the government takes no part in it. A society that systematically excludes a certain race from housing and employment isn’t liberal, even if the government takes no part. And a society that systematically engages in censorship isn’t liberal, even if the government takes no part.
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ugh I’m terrible at editing
A true liberal should be concerned with cultural liberalism not just having a liberal government. For example a society that systematically slut shames women who are promiscuous isn’t liberal, even if the government takes no part in it. A society that systematically excludes a certain race from housing and employment isn’t liberal, even if the government takes no part. And a society that systematically engages in censorship isn’t liberal, even if the government takes no part.
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Yeah, I think a big problem with our discourse right now is that some of the people who center questions of identity who are liberals and some are socialists, but the different camps are not clearly identifiable or even necessarily self-aware and it creates lots of contradictions and confusions.
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@herbert herbertson, are you American? The definition of “liberalism” you’re using is rarely used here, at least since the 1930s or so. I understand that it’s still the common definition in many other countries.
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I am an American. I believe the definition of liberalism is actually fairly consistent across the world, and that the apparent disjunct is due to the fact that American politics is right-shifted and that accordingly our leftward major party is the ideological cousin of what would constitute the center-right in most countries.
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I find so many things about this situation baffling.
I find it odd that HAS is considered in any way relevant to Trump. He made a meme that someone else transformed, and then through some uncountable number of steps Trump tweeted the non-HAS version of the meme. It’s as if Trump’s playlist contained “Ice, Ice, Baby,” and people decided this was a prime opportunity to discuss what a terrible person Freddy Mercury was.
I find it odd that people are willing to accept that HAS is a racist. If Salon, Quartz, or the Morris Dees Lifestyle Enrichment Fund labels someone as an extremist, the only truth that can be reliably extracted from such a statement is that the “extremist” is not currently employed by the DNC.
I find it odd that people are accepting bare statements of fact as being indicative of someone’s moral character. Ken White uses the n-word, but he uses it in the context of criticizing alt righters. I don’t understand the entertainment value of transgression-for-transgression’s sake, but I know it is a thing that exists, and I don’t think that makes them bad people. There is a whole, decades long tradition of horror entertainment (which again, I don’t like or understand) but I know enough people that have Stephen King on their shelves or VHS tapes of “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies to believe that their entertainment choices reflect on their virtue.
Is anyone who thinks that posting on r/imgoingtohellforthis makes one a racist willing to say that watching Saw makes one a psychopath?
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This strikes me as being analogous to the whole controversy about outing back in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. I think the consensus developed that outing was acceptable only when it was a gay person actively advocating or promoting homophobic policies or laws – in other words politicians, clergy and maybe government officials in non-political capacities.
How would that apply here? I don’t know. Maybe that’s where the analogy breaks down.
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Ultimately I think it comes down to proportionality. Getting someone fired, which is what most doxxing mostly boils down to, is grossly disproportional to being an arsehole – which it is what doxxing normally in response to.
A sudden and unexpected job loss carries with it very real dangers, sick wife or no sick wife. Where doxxing is needed to prevent or punish actual harms it can be justified. That fact, I think, has been abused by people working to expand the accepted conditions of “harm”.
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