Most doxxing campaigns only last a few days. But effects can be felt for months | Hacker News Reader

Most doxxing campaigns only last a few days. But effects can be felt for months

text.npr.org

26 pointsrntn18 comments

> Instagram pages like @JewsHateDatabase posted the video with the caption: "Help us find out who she is — Jew hater spotted in Williamsburg Brooklyn."

Surprised Instagram condones this type of behavior.

X has an account called Canary Mission that doxxes students, professionals and random people in the street for speaking out against Israel.

They’re also thought to be behind the real life intimidation campaign featuring people dressed in bird costumes:

https://forward.com/news/407127/a-new-wave-of-hardline-anti-...

I am of the opinion that America should put sanctions on Israel, but unfortunately it is ILLEGAL to voice that opinion in my state[1].

[1] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-bds-legislation

shouldn't this be easily challengeable given your constitution ?

One might imagine they would rather not end up in the database.

Nowadays the word antisemitism no longer means anything because a minority of people has weaponized it for the purposes of defamation. You don't have to think a single bad thought about Jewish people or Israel or even talk about them to be considered antisemitic by some cranks who are out to get you. They just want any excuse they can get, to harass you and divert attention from actual discrimination towards their pet cause or ideology.

"Antisemitism" could be replaced with "racism", "transphobia", "homophobia", etc. and your point would hold true. At some point popular discourse became such that escalating disagreements to accusations of tangible transgressions was fashionable.

Doxxing in individual, with proof of intent to harass, should be a federal crime.

>with proof of intent to harass

It would/should be very difficult to prove. A scenario; there is already a conversation online about how someone is an asshole and I link a publicly available page that has their address and phone numbers, no other message content. Is that prosecutable? Laws that try to read peoples minds (intent) are always abused and rarely just.

The intent element of a crime is rarely proved through direct evidence. Of course nobody can read minds. So circumstantial evidence is typically used instead - i.e., what else was going on when the criminal act was performed.

Doxxing that results in harassment should be a federal crime--intent not required. Harassment, by itself, also needs to start being taken far more seriously. These should be similar to wiretap laws or photo credits. And they should have a massive fines behind them. This is especially true if it costs someone their job when what they were doing is legal--both employer and harasser should get big fines.

The Internet makes things too asymmetric--the weak need protection and the guilty get away with it because it isn't worth prosecuting.

The issue is most doxxing is just 'revealing' already public information. I will stick with freedom of speech and not acting in a way that doxxing would matter. I also denounce, publicly, the current actions of israel. See how easy that is?

And when a thousand people who disagree with your position start harassing your employer to fire you, what then?

It is in the Netherlands, but only after they doxxed someone in the government.

If "doxxing" means stating, correctly, that a certain student was a member of an organization at the time that organization signed a particular public statement, then no, doxxing an individual should not be any sort of crime, doxxing an individual under that definition is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Should ProPublica be able to doxx wealthy individuals by publishing their tax returns? Of course they should, that's called freedom of the press. And I hate ProPublica. The person that gave them the returns is going to prison, as they should, but publishing that information is called freedom of the press.

Even if ProPublica's intent is to harass wealthy individuals, which I believe it certainly is.

What do you hate about ProPublica? I thought they did a great job with the available data for their series on chemical releases causing cancer in certain industrial areas[0]. The data available to them is not enough: it's mostly voluntary written release reports combined with weather models to predict gas diffusion patterns, rather than real physical measurements in neighborhoods -- we don't have any gas monitoring so they did as much as anyone could instead.

0: https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com