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Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

China is doing this explicitly, but the West has been doing this implicitly for a while. Doxxing people with the "wrong" opinion and emailing their employers, friends, etc. I pretty regularly see if on Facebook where someone says something and their post or a screenshot of their post is shared hundreds of thousands of times with test that says "make this person famous". To be clear people should be called out for bigoted speech. An internet lynch mob though solves nothing and just creates a forever alienated group of people outside of society with little to no stake in the future. We all, as in humanity, could use understanding the nuance of stopping bad behavior while also forgiving people for their pasts. I don't have all the answers, but I guess I wrote this as it's just a generally worrying trend I see with the internet overall.

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There is a massive divide between private citizens harassing and bulling one another and governments wielding a monopoly on force outlawing and punishing dessent against the ruling class.

You can sue someone for attacking you online if they cause provable financial or social distress. Go try suing the CCP in China for not providing freedom of speech and see how that unexplained disappearance treats you.

Nobody who is doxxed has a travel ban.

Yes, but in this case we’re talking about the government punishing the same practices that the polity will harass and bully a person over, rather than just practices that are against the state’s own interests, in addition to the state suppressing things it actually derives benefit to itself by suppressing.

Or, to put that another way: if there’s a lynch-mob after you, does it matter how many of its members are in uniform?

Obviously yes it matters. You got rights, and self-defense is infinitely easier if it's not the government coming after you.

Yes it does. Because it answers whether there are people in uniform that can protect you.

Sorry to sound condescending but your post is one of things people dislike about the internet too - what about-ism. This is just sweeping everything under the rug by using the logic - "this is bad but what about x?" It seems as if every issue in the world needs to be discussed and solved at once or not at all.

So, can we please stop equating doxxing with a government effort and trying to pass it of as being nearly the same or part of an arc because it is not.

Woah, there's a difference between an "internet lynch mob" doing it and the state doing it!

Agreed. I was bringing up that in my mind they both fall under the same overarching trend I've been seeing in the west for a while.

If you don't want things you post screen-shot-ed and re-pasted, don't post them on the internet under your real name?

If you don't want your career destroyed and your life threatened, don't come to work on "no whites" day at your college.

That's been my approach, for sure. But then, Mirimir also has a reputation that's worth protecting.

Yeah, the USA would never have anything like an extrajudicial no-fly list for people the government doesn’t like...

The state does do it. It's called a criminal record which is strikingly easy to obtain in the U.S. which has a law for everything imaginable. If you've ever had any kind of criminal activity, ever, even from something dumb in your youth, the United States has a log of it, which employers use to discriminate against that person. Forever. It doesn't go away. The "miscreant" is then forced either into a life of crime, which puts them into prison or worse.

A criminal record, while cumbersome and overly-easy to attain, doesn't impose nearly the same scope of restrictions as this article suggests...

Do you even need a criminal record to end up on the No Fly List (or the less consequential terrorist watch list)?

I think it is only really different in scale.

That is absolutely true - even if you are lucky enough to have a charge removed from your criminal record, everything on your arrest record will outlive you. Thats a problem since today every little thing gets you arrested - your average school yard brawl will get kids arrested for assault. However, on the bright side so many people have been arrested or jailed in this country that employers have had to start taking people with minor offenses just because there are so few people who make it to adulthood without at least one encounter with the law.

If random idiots can internet lynch mob you, so does the state. And so will the state, if the need arises.

there is a difference, but it's not black and white.

sure, state is much more powerful. however, state plays by the rules, and if the rules (aka laws) are changed, state will leave you alone. And laws could be changed.

good luck trying to stop the mob, though.

The problem in both cases is a capricious and whimsical ultrapowerful organization with the ability to destroy a person's life for any reason with no repercussions. In China, it's the state, in the US it's in the private sector, in the form of your employer.

On the one hand, I would certainly like to know, for example, if the person I trust to teach my children in a public school is explicitly posting on the Internet about how she uses her position to indoctrinate children into extremist white nationalist ideology, Nazism and hate groups, and the "Internet lynch mob" did a great service by exposing this woman [1] -- there is no universe in which she should be allowed to be a teacher.

On the other hand, I think such firings should always be "for cause" with some kind of due process. We need to take away the ultimate power employers have to fire their employees, and make them go through some negotiation, process, discussion before they do so -- like through a union, who is obligated to stand up for wronged employees for example. If someone is failing to perform, provide evidence. If someone's publicly stated values are incompatible with the values of the business, prove it and let them respond. Either that, or we need a strong enough social safety net so that employment is optional for all people.

[1] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2018/03/05/flor...

It’s not just on the internet by random people, the state and the media are involved too. Once you did a mistake and it will never be forgotten.

You raise a great point. I would add, however, that doing this explicitly and systematically is much worse. In the US we are far from systematically banning people from riding the subway if they don't share the correct political views. There are definitely worrying trends but we still have enough of the idea of not discriminating in our country.

While what you say is certainly true in specific cases (ie. the Facebook mob example), there is nothing in the West at an institutional level that compares to the ambitions of the Chinese Social Credit system.

Also, how come every time an article is posted about something Orwellian the PRC is doing, the comments are packed with whataboutism fallacies? "Yea, but look at what's happening here in the West!" It happens so frequently and consistently that it must be a quirk of the HN audience...or something more suspiciously intentional.

I didn't say whatabout the west despite your accusation that I did. I said it seems like they are part of an overarching trend I've noticed which is a puritanical and unforgiving approach to policing behavior in modern society. That is all.

>or something more suspiciously intentional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

>people should be called out

Anyone can be doxxed in the way you describe--harassed, slandered--for any reason, and a lot of people have been for terrible reasons. This thing has nothing to do with justice against idiots or hateful people. There are already courts, professional organizations, etc for that. It's nothing more than a disgusting, immature, backwards trend that has become an opportunity for hateful people themselves.

The people downvoting might want to look into incidents such as Gamergate to see what I mean

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