Columbia University has a doxxing problem | Hacker News Reader

Columbia University has a doxxing problem

theverge.com

If you participate in a public event you can’t really expect to keep that activity secret. (One could also argue that the fact you want to indicates you feel there is something wrong about your actions)

I wouldn’t really say this is doxing, since that usually refers to revealing a private online identity.

This is an inane argument. If one were to, for example, attend a public protest of Scientology, one might rightly fear for one's safety and be entirely convinced that one is in the right, regardless.

Might, or fear thereof, does not make right.

Not a compelling argument.

These people are putting their bodies on the line. It is a public protest. I cannot infer anything other than that they’re willing to risk everything, including their privacy to defend their ideas.

I, for one, would like to know who shows up to rallies where they chant “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground!”

Per the article: people who were not involved in any of the protesting and who hadn't made any statements were falsely named as anti-semites. I'd say thats doxxing - what do you call it?

This is the key reason: doxxing here has the glaringly obvious purpose of harassing the protesters. Nevertheless, while vile and immoral, and double so when it's likely a propaganda operation, it's a risk protesters should be willing to take, along with unlawful use of force. It has been this way historically.

If someone calls you an antisemite with no evidence, that's slander, not doxxing.

Tell me you didn't read the article without telling me you didn't read the article.

The effect of this is going to be employers quietly blackballing all graduates of universities that get into the news for these protests.

I haven't seen a shred of evidence that these protestors are violent, or that they harass members of campuses, as they are said to do. The unbelievably harsh response from the universities and the state, which included forced dispersion by the police, roof snipers at Indiana University, and threats to call in the national guard by the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson at Columbia, has led me to feel incredibly depressed. I feel that we are reaching a schism in the history of the United States, where liberalism is dying and being replaced by... something else.

Are you familiar with the 1960s? Somehow we survived that without “liberalism dying”.

that's a pretty terrible example considering the COINTELPRO program with the FBI sending letters to MLK trying to get him to kill himself and assassinating people.

This is a false equivalence. Student protesters were far more radical in their actions before force was invoked at that time.

I haven't seen a shred of evidence that these protestors are violent, or that they harass members of campuses, as they are said to do.

Then you need start reading from more diverse sources.

Just in the past week, for example - there's Khymani James, still currently front and center within the protest movement at Columbia, who was recorded earlier in the year saying "Zionists don't deserve to live" and "You shouldn't be surprised to see me murdering Zionists":

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/nyregion/columbia-student...

And the assault on Israeli activist Yoseph Haddad by an identified member of the local activist community:

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-797910

In general the right wing vastly overexaggerates the violent aspects of the protest movement. But beyond question it has its share of assholes.

and some (all?) of these assholes are agent provocateurs, just like in the 60s, which a previous poster alluded to.

That's speculation, and in essence an attempt at misdirection.

Full focus on unsavoury comments, or even actions, by one out of a thousand protesters (I'm taking a guess at the rate here; might be even lower than that) in order to label the whole protest movement as hateful, violent, and whatnot, is an attempt at misdirection from the message of the protest — that they want their universities to divest away from groups that are actively participating in the complete destruction of Gaza and mass killings of its people. This is a fairly standard way to bust protests [0, 1], and the fact that the mainstream media is playing along with that shows their alignment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Norman

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

in order to label the whole protest movement as X, Y, Z

I'm not labeling the "whole protest movement" as anything.

Go find someone or something else to direct your excess energy at, please.

> I'm not labeling the "whole protest movement" as anything.

Ok maybe not. What you did do, however, was accuse a person of misdirection, when your initial comment is itself a misdirection from the greater issue -- ~34 thousand people dead and the survivors in largely unlivable conditions with the full support of the government of this country; and the universities investing into the industry supporting it all. Interesting that 'ethical purity' of genocidal statements of high-ranking members of the Israeli government as the bombing began do not get people concerned much and it is casually rationalized away -- even though they actually did and do have the power to act on those threats, and have evidently acted on them as we have been seing over the past 6 months. Yet here we are spending time debating ethical purity of 1-2 college students, with no actual power, that have made questionable comments, out of thousands protesting, while the mass killing is still ongoing. That is the bigger misdirection, with more dire consequences.

> Go find someone or something else to direct your excess energy at, please.

One might be able to ridicule and patronize comments such as mine in a different time, if not for the ongoing slaughter in Gaza that we are witnessing in real time. Trivialization of it through misdirection is something worthy of pushing back against.

Khymani James probably isn't a provocateur; he was (before he was banned from campus) one of the leaders and organizers of the protest, and its media spokesperson. Just a day before the recordings were revealed, he gave a widely covered press conference.

If he's an agent, he's a spectacularly successful one!

Alex, can I take "comments that didn't age well" for 200?

> The student, who did not wish to be identified for fairly obvious reasons, said her name was listed on the truck because a club she was no longer a part of had signed onto an open letter urging Columbia to cut ties with Israel.

So she signed an open letter, but didn't want her name to be attached to it?

Isn't that the whole point of an open letter?

And then she has the opportunity to speak with the press, and asks not to be identified while saying she no longer wants to be associated with the letter?

I don't know what's going on with these kids.

> I don't know what's going on with these kids.

I recommend reading Ted Kaczynski's writing on oversocialization [1].

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...

The way I read that was, the club had signed the letter, not her directly.

Oh, I read it as the club all signed the letter, and now she's not part of it anymore.

Maybe I misread, but if you actually look at the letter, it's a Google form where individuals are encouraged to sign: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RcXX5DEO3yfJ9R4ksURnzpIP...

It's really not that hard to understand:

She once was a member of an organization.

She left that organization.

After she left that organization, the members (no longer including her) signed a letter.

She didn't sign it, since she was no longer a member.

So how is it OK that she was named as a signatory?

I don't know what's going on with people who use the term "these kids".

> I don't know what's going on with these kids.

If you do not know, maybe you should learn first before making assumptions.

You have probably missed in the article:

> ...said her name was listed on the truck because a club she was no longer a part of had signed onto an open letter...

If you are in public you have no right to privacy, especially if you break laws and misbehave. This has been exhaustively debated, The Verge should know better.

It's not doxxing to call out people for their public actions. It's attribution.

it's retribution.

The first example in the article concerns a student that was attributed as a signatory after a group they no longer attend signed on their behalf.

Call it attribution if you want but it's a pretty terrible job of it.

The doxxing campaign is deplorable and unacceptable on its own terms, of course.

However the article mischaracterizes the nature at least of the petitions that some of the students signed, making it out to be more harmless and innocuous than it actually was:

   Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine published an open letter on Monday demanding the University to “start verbally acknowledging Palestinian existence and humanity.”

Whereas actually that open letter was basically a standard piece of atrocity denial -- and in essence, it seems to celebrate the events that had just occurred 48 hours previously. Here's the language it used to describe the Oct 7 pogrom:

Despite the odds against them, Palestinians launched a counter-offensive against their settler-colonial oppressor – which receives billions of US dollars annually in military aid and possesses one of the world’s most robust surveillance and security apparatuses. Any omission of this context – any rhetoric of “an unprovoked Palestinian attack” – is shamefully misleading.

Which is a nauseatingly stupid and insensitive thing to say right after 700+ civilians had just been butchered, and another 200+ dragged off into tunnels by a certain militant group (whom the type of people who sign such petitions like to affectionately refer to as "the Resistance") can make some kind of a political point. In my view.

None of which justifies the doxxing campaign. But there's no need to mince words about the nature of the petition campaigns that preceded it.

100%

I also couldn't tell if the "doxxed" students were trying to say they were falsely associated with the moment, they just say they didn't personally sign the letter, but the article places them as "involved with the encampment", which to some spectators (myself included) counts as pretty suspect in the "pro resistance" column

It's frustrated me too that when I hear about the protests on the news they don't mention the depraved perspective of the organizers of the protest

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