Journalism is not doxxing

“Doxxing” is the practice of piecing together personal information culled from someone’s publicly available online profiles and comments in order to figure out their real life identity. Many people are careless about maintaining their anonymity and will use the same screennames and email addresses everywhere. That makes it easy to cross-reference details they leave on one website with their Facebook or Twitter accounts and find names, phone numbers and even addresses. Many times, the determined doxxer doesn’t even have to trace your IP address or hack into your accounts. You might inadvertently be leaving traces of your real life identity all over the place.

The intention behind doxxing is generally malicious. It’s to connect people’s online activities to their offline lives and expose them to harassment. Doxxing is also problematic because it’s easy to make a mistake and identify the wrong person.

Doxxing is a particularly big problem for already vulnerable groups, like women and girls, closeted gender/sexual minorities, and people with persecuted religious or political beliefs. Doxxing can get those people stalked, harassed, injured, imprisoned, or even killed. Being able to use your real name online without worrying about negative repercussions is a privilege many people don’t have.

Don’t want to get doxxed?

• Use a unique screenname for every website you regularly use.
• Don’t link your main email address to any of them.
• Don’t link your Facebook profile to any of them.
• Make sure your passwords are all strong and that your FB privacy settings are set up the way you want them.
• There are some creeps out there who steal pictures from Facebook and Photobucket. Think hard about any pictures you put online.
• If you’re really paranoid, you can salt your blog entries, Twitter feed, or comment history with false personal information. “Man, I sure do love being a 6’2 Canadian tutu manufacturer”….(um, less obviously fake than that.)

That said, what Adrian Chen did was journalism. He did not “doxx” Violentacrez—he wrote an article about him and a pretty even-handed one at that. He interviewed the subject and the subjects’ acquaintances. He gathered information from publicly available sources.

The intention was not to intimidate or harass Michael Brutsch, but to inform the public about the shady side of a very popular website. The article also raised important questions about free speech, privacy, anonymity, and personal responsibility online. Chen also attached his name and reputation to the article—another reason why it is journalism, not doxxing.

So describing the Chen piece on Michael Brutsch as “doxxing” (as many seem to be doing) is inaccurate. The term subtly suggests that Chen was setting Brutsch up to be attacked by a mob with pitchforks. Will Brutsch face negative social consequences for his online activities? Probably. Will he be jailed or lynched? Given that he’s a white man living in a country where the rule of law is strong, I strongly doubt it.

Brutsch is not the victim here. He willingly posted disgusting and inflammatory things online for kicks. He’s not entitled to any pity or sympathy. He was a shitty person for years and it’s finally coming back to bite him in the ass. I find it more pathetic than sad that Brutsch is figuring out at the age of 49 that there are limits even to white/straight/male/cis privilege.

You want to know who the real victims are? All those girls whose Facebook pictures he stole and posted on Reddit for pedophiles to download (including this 14-year-old). All those girls and women who were forced to become porn stars without their knowledge or consent. The families of the dead children (r/deadjailbait) whose pictures he posted online to shock and titillate. The minorities (r/n*ggerjailbait, r/Jewmerica), rape victims (r/rapebait), and violence victims (r/chokeabitch) whose pain he exploited for lulz. Michael Brutsch didn’t give a shit about them, so why should we give a shit about him?

Do you know what upvotes are called on Reddit?

Karma.

Violentacrez apparently had tens of thousands of karma points by the time he deleted his profile. But Michael Brutsch didn’t understand what karma truly is until now.

The fight between Reddit and Gawker is taking place within the sphere of free speech, not "about" it.

There are a million angles to this very fascinating event: about gender, social power, anonymity, the gaze, the culture and political economy of the internet, trolling, play-acting (or claims of, in self-defense), and on and on. At internet speed these have already been well hashed out.

What I don’t think it is “about”, however is “freedom of speech.” There’s always a lot of talk in these cases about chilling effects and vigilantism and “first they came for the pedos” and the like, but I think in this case it’s a shallow reading.

“violentacrez” was free to post what and however he liked. I mean, he still is! He could just say fuck it and keep on creepin’ on (somewhere other than Reddit) now that he’s jobless and hated, right? He’s suffered some consequences of Adrian Chen putting two and two together and the world reacting, but his freedom remains exactly what it was. Gawker is free. I’m free. Consequence is not the same thing as lack of freedom. Consequence is a necessary part of freedom. You speak, you get judged, others speak their judgment, and around it goes.

I say this in light of this reaction from Freddie DeBoer, which I disagree with strenuously. If I can summarize his points fairly, they are: 1. a moral standing argument: the Reddit creep scene is disgusting but Gawker is only marginally better and in some respects worse. 2. A slippery-slope/PATRIOT Act kind of argument: that applauding any “chilling effect” on speech acts such as these will probably harm leftists and dissidents more than it will hobbyist misogynist trolls. And 3. an “honesty” argument, that Brutsch’s/violenacrez’ “open depravity” is better than Nick Denton’s tabloid sensibility. I think all of these are flat wrong but I encourage you to give it a read. (Again we’re on internet time here so these have all been argued by others elsewhere). Deboer’s general take is that “this is what it looks like when internet liberals get self-righteous.” I think it’s more “this is what it looks like when people talk.”

Two things in DeBoer’s post stick out that I wanted to call out specifically.

Change won’t come from a few high profile outings but from a general change in the tenor of a culture that continues to view women as repositories of sexual pleasure.

This makes no sense, or rather, it contradicts itself. In a culture of free discourse, how else would a “change in tenor” be effected but by, not a few, but by hundreds of “outings” like this, and other constant social pressure besides? DeBoer has just said, you laid one brick here, but fuck that, we need a house.

And this, where DeBoer goes after one of his constant targets: the incestuous and clubby nature of our internet/media culture:

If you’d like to depress yourself, you can find photos on Facebook of, say, arch media critic Alex Pareene at industry parties where people like Jacob Weisberg are mere feet away.

Mere feet! What’s Pareene supposed to do, deck him?

If you write about Reddit, memes, Internet Culture, etc on a regular basis and you have not yet weighed in on the outing of Violentacrez, then I have to wonder just what the fuck you’re doing.