Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Ugh. At the very least, this kind of victim blaming attitude and lack of empathy is presumably exactly the setup for people jumping on the harassment bandwagon without thinking things through.

1. You're pretty much advocating mob rule. Also, are you seriously comparing the threat that internet hate-mongers vs. the NSA poses to the average Joe or Jane with an internet persona? I dislike corporate and government spying as much as the next person, but what immediate threat does the NSA pose to Kathy?

2. It's not hard to dream up a scenario (any immediate severe danger to one or more members of the public?) which, once the police starts believing the "witnesses", would make it irresponsible for them not to act on it. You just need enough "witnesses". From what I gather, the attitudes of some police forces, particularly in the US, could certainly do with adjusting, but that's an entirely separate problem.

3. Yes, as I'm sure you'll remember from the OP, once someone gets beaten up or worse, the authorities will take an interest. Not before that. You can't run around in real life constantly threatening people with violence, what makes it OK to do so via electronic media?

I didn't see any victim-blaming in that post - the victim is obviously due our full sympathy in each and every case. The question is what to do about it. The OP suggests that we might be able to form better communities, suggesting that the existence of communities in which this kind of thing does not happen proves that it must be possible. The GP appears to disagree, believing that we need technical and legal solutions to the problem instead. That's something about which reasonable people can disagree.

Victim blaming/"they deserve it":

"For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway."

I read that differently from you.

I think the author was simply pointing out that well-known people are well known, so their privacy is, almost by definition, limited anyway.

This handily ignores that doxxing is not some virtuous research and release of pure facts in the public interest. Its purpose is to turn lies about the victim into the publicly perceived truth (defamation) by mixing them with the weight of real facts.

That people who have some level of public exposure (as you and I do, posting on a public forum) will have some personal information out in the open is obvious. The thread-starter appears to be playing down the damage that doxxing can do "I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces". To me, their admittedly unspoken, conclusion from point 1 is therefore "they had it coming".

I agree with that and I'm not sure what that jMyles' point was there, but I still don't think he/she was victim blaming, but rather making some sort of observation about the nature of privacy and popularity.

That's a cruel outlook and not at all what I meant. I think it's reasonable (and in fact an essential part of calling into question the norms of patriarchy) to point out that attack surfaces are real and they require scrutiny.

In this case, the one with which you seem to take issue OP's point #1, which I merely want to point out is a surface that is only available against people who haven't already dox'd themselves. And for those people - people who want to occupy a place on the anonymity spectrum that is far away from a "public figure," the threats to this attack surface are more damning than trolls - they include huge advertising corporations and the NSA.

I think they meant more that it was the trolls' targeting critera ("Has lots of Attention, and 'doesn't deserve it" implies someone you can google, or who has a relatively large following), NOT that it was any implication that the target deserves such abuse.

I read it as "If you don't want to be harassed, you shouldn't have a public presence."

FWIW, immediately before that sentence, the thread-starter called into question the real danger of doxxing and calls to "action" based on the released information/misinformation.

> "If you don't want to be harassed, you shouldn't have a public presence."

I did not at all mean that. What I meant was that doxxing is a complex attack surface. If someone is already high-profile and public, they can't really be dox'd. If someone isn't, then staying anonymous is a more harder task than avoiding being dox'd. That's all I was saying.

If anything, I think that people who choose not to be anonymous need more social / political support, not less.

It's not victim blaming to say, "this attack surface is larger than that attack surface." Shame on you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com