Whatever Your Side, Doxing Is a Perilous Form of Justice

Last Saturday, Logan Smith, the man behind the Twitter account @YesYoureRacist, began posting photos of alleged white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia—and gained over 300,000 followers in a single weekend, some of whom helped him expose the identities of the protesters. One of the people Smith outed has since been fired from his job at a Berkeley, California, hot dog stand. Another, pictured screaming and holding a tiki torch, claims he's been misrepresented as an “angry racist.”

Another was disowned by his family. Another, Kyle Quinn, was more than 1,000 miles away from Charlottesville at the time of the protest—a case of mistaken identity that brought a wave of threats and accusations of racism so large that Quinn felt unsafe in his home. Still another was James Alex Fields, Junior, who murdered anti-racist protestor Heather Heyer.

To some, this all makes Smith an internet hero. To others, he’s just the vile, destructive left wing doxer du jour. (Smith did not respond to request for comment, though he has discussed the campaign on NPR.)

So who's got truth on their side? The internet has always been a swamp of ambiguity, especially where doxing is concerned. But as doxing continues to evolve as the preferred tactic of both far right and left wing internet factions, it’s important to take a hard look at what each side is trying to accomplish. While the two sides use different logic to justify their actions, the true result is the same and even cumulative—leading to an arms race of financially incentivized, shame-slinging vigilantes.

The internet has been fussing over what doxing is and isn't for decades. Most recently, the debate has centered on whether journalism is doxing. (For the record, it's not.) But at a base level, most people agree that the term refers to the digital release of private information without consent, typically as a display of power or blackmail. That immediately clouds the water around how to classify what @YesYoureRacist did, since the information the account published isn't actually private. "The Unite the Right rally was a public protest in a public park," says Andrew Zolides, a digital media scholar at Xavier University. "They're not wearing masks. What did they expect?"

Still, @YesYoureRacist is emblematic of left wing doxing's dominant motivation: social and economic punishment. In left wing doxers' minds, they're just creating consequences for being openly hateful—and releasing information only acquaintances and family members would recognize or care about. On one hand, that would seem to give them some moral high ground: They're just exposing names and faces, not personal information such as addresses and phone numbers and family members' names. Those sorts of details would not only make the doxee easy to harass but possibly physically unsafe.

Publicizing those sorts of details isn't exclusive to right wing extremist doxing (Anonymous has exposed plenty of emails and phone numbers), but it's far more common. Most employers won't fire a person for showing up to demonstrate against hate groups or in support of women, people of color, or the LGBTQ community—which essentially leaves out-and-out harassment as the far right's only option. But from their perspective, they're still just creating consequences for being openly hateful too. After all, many white supremacists believe the left is perpetrating a vast "white genocide." So if you're a pure relativist, each side has a moral defense for its doxing.

But even if you're not—and in this case, when the opposing forces are lethally violent white supremacists and, y'know, not white supremacists, it's kinda tough to be—the impact ends up being about the same. For all the high-minded distinctions Anonymous or antifascists or @YesYoureRacist might draw, internet sleuthing in 2017 can expose people to widespread harassment and even physical danger. "Doxing is a sloppy form of justice that often hurts many beyond the intended target," says Jared Colton, who teaches about ethics and technology at Utah State University. "It punishes their families and even people who look like them or have similar names." Once you strip away the intentions, in other words, both sides are sharing the same swampy low ground.

That's not uncommon for battlegrounds, which is kind of what the internet has become. But experts aren't sure the doxing war is going anywhere productive. "We need to stop thinking of the ethics of doxing in terms of how well it performs justice by punishing others," Colton says. "Until we can show evidence that the people being doxed will actually change their lives for the better, we may be only fanning the flames. It might work on those who have just joined the group, but those heavily indoctrinated will only dig deeper." After the Charlottesville naming and shamings, few have expressed remorse—only outrage at what they perceive as character defamation.

So if doxing helps neither left- nor right wing extremists, who does it benefit? Well, increasingly, it's a financial boon for self-styled internet investigators. On the right there's WeSearchr, a kind of far right GoFundMe where users post bounties on things they'd like exposed—which often include the identities and personal information of anti-Trump protesters. Then other users pile on, contributing money to the pot to raise the stakes. The bounty on the antifascist who attacked so-called alt-right activist "Baked Alaska" in Charlottesville has topped $6,000. On the left, Patreon has become a way for name-and-shamers to earn a bit of cash.

Even if "professional doxer" never becomes part of the internet's gig economy, having this kind of financial incentive to participate in doxing efforts could be severely destabilizing, and not just for internet culture. "The scary part is there's an uncomfortable sense of vigilante justice," Zolides says. It's an understandable response to the failure of traditional institutions (like real police forces) to adapt their work to the rapidly shifting needs and realities of the digital world. But rather than helping the situation, the enforcement they're supplying is not only amateurish but is eroding trust in professionals.

These groups are also changing the scope of doxing, which used to be a digital punishment for digital "crime." "This is the internet policing the internet, but also outside lives," Zolides says. "It's not as bad as mob rule, but it is a kind of surveillance state." And if stating your beliefs in public becomes a risk not just for you but for your family, and even strangers who look like you, effecting change is going to be a whole lot harder—for everyone.