As far as holiday weeks go, this one started out weird, with President Trump tweeting a video of himself beating up a CNN logo. Then it got weirder. CNN's KFile investigative team traced the video—a creative edit of footage from a 2007 professional wrestling match—back to a Reddit user. The Redditor in question, who goes by the username HanAssholeSolo, was apparently spooked enough by a reporter's inquiry that he issued an apology for his past bigoted and violent posts on the pro-Trump subreddit /r/The_Donald. And that should have been it: a milkshake duck tale of an average citizen riding that now-familiar arc from obscurity to virality to notoriety.
Except that wasn't it at all. Because, while CNN didn't disclose the apologetic Redditor's legal name or any other identifying characteristics, language in the piece stated that the company "reserves the right to publish his identity" if he relapses into trolling. (Reporting from Gizmodo suggests that such language came courtesy of a network executive, not the reporter himself.) The blowback was swift and strong; #CNNBlackmail began trending nationally on Twitter within hours, CNN-vilifying memes bloomed across social media, and everyone from Donald Trump Jr. to Julian Assange to (obviously) the rest of r/The_Donald expressed support for HanAssholeSolo.
Among the outraged tweeters and meme-makers, though, was a more worrisome character with a more worrisome tactic: neo-Nazi black-hat hacker Andrew Auernheimer, known online as weev, threatened to dox CNN reporters' families on hate site The Daily Stormer. And just like that, the original issue at play—the President of the United States tweeting content from an anonymous Redditor with a demonstrated history of racism and Islamophobia—vaporized, eclipsed by a war over privacy and journalism. CNN doxed a private citizen, goes the thinking among those advocating for harassing the reporter's family. We're just fighting fire with fire! While that argument is specious (and we'll get into why), the controversy demonstrates that confusion still clouds the issue. This allows bad actors like Auernheimer to conflate reporting with doxing, and thus destabilize the foundation of journalism. With that in mind, a little explanation might be in order.
Doxing is the public, digital release of a person's private information without their consent, usually to exert some kind of power over the dox-ee. But the practice hasn't always been digital. "Lord Herman Ouseley, a race relations campaigner in the UK, used to get endless midnight phone calls in the 1990s," says Amy Binns, a media scholar at the University of Central Lancashire who studies online abuse. "Far-right activists had posted his phone number on cards in public toilets all over London." In fact, the term seems to have derived from a plain old analog word: documents, which begat "docs," and then "dox." Around the same time Lord Ouseley was getting those late-night calls, hackers were "dropping dox" to get revenge on previously anonymous rivals.
But politically motivated doxing has only become mainstream in the past ten years or so. That's partially because social media has made doxing easier, but also because it's gotten sexier. "Doxing tends to be used by those who see themselves as lacking power in order to exclude those who threaten their current norms" says David Douglas, a researcher who has published work on doxing. Of course, norms and power are all a matter of perspective, so regardless of ideology every notable doxer has seen themselves a righteous vigilante—including Auernheimer.
In fact, according to Know Your Meme, the progenitor of the modern political dox was a 2006 YouTube channel called Vigilantes, who doxed racist or otherwise hateful vloggers. (They were then, of course, doxed themselves.) But by 2007 and 2008, Anonymous had given social media–enabled (and –publicized) doxing a higher profile—first by doxing white supremacist radio personality Hal Turner, and then the Church of Scientology. The Scientology incident received international attention, and ushered in the wave of left-wing doxings the internet has seen since: the Ohio high-school football players accused of rape; the dentist who shot Cecil the Lion; Cincinnati police officers suspected of being involved in fatal shootings.
At the same time, on the other end of the political spectrum, was the case of Kathy Sierra, a prominent software design and coding blogger who supported the now standard practice of comment moderation. Auernheimer doxed her, and the resulting wave of trolls was so severe it drove Sierra from the public sphere and her own home. In retrospect, Sierra's story looks a lot like a prequel to Gamergate, the vicious 2014–15 online harassment campaign against female gamers and videogame critics. (And, as many have posited, Gamergate's tactics begat those of today's so-called alt-right movement.)
Gamergate was to right-wing political doxing what doxing Scientologists was to Anonymous: turning the crosshairs away from public figures and toward regular people you happen to disagree with. Auernheimer was a prominent, vocal supporter of the campaign, calling it "by far the single biggest siren bringing people into the folds of white nationalism." Gamergate's timing couldn't have been better for him: he'd just been released from more than three years in prison for exposing 114,000 iPad users' email addresses (a controversial sentence many thought of as too harsh, given that a security flaw had rendered the information freely available). Since then, he's become an avatar of doxing's moral gray areas for both sides. To the trollish right, he's a martyr, and a champion of digital free speech. To the progressive left, he's an example of how online harassment law can be both lax and draconian.
The perceived ambiguity of Auernheimer's doxing stance has helped him join the the self-described journalists of the alt-right, who have made a practice of harassing progressives under the guise of speaking truth to power. He's been nowhere near as successful as Mike Cernovitch or Alex Jones (that swastika tattooed on his chest might be holding him back), but in that threat to CNN employees, he calls his troll army "reporters"—just as, two years ago, he defended his hacking of an adult dating site by calling it "journalism."
Admittedly, the line between doxing and journalism line isn't always clear. What if the paparazzi photographs a celebrity coming out of their home, and superfans use details in that image to find the celebrity? Is that doxxing? What about when Gawker exposed the identity of "violentacrez," a Reddit user responsible for sharing the images of underage girls? Or when Newsweek (possibly incorrectly) identified the inventor of Bitcoin? And didn't CNN muddy the waters a bit by injecting language that sounded like a quasi-legal threat against HanAssholeSolo? The question of what is in the public interest—versus what the public is interested in—is a subjective, moral one. And even professional journalists can get it wrong.
But real and important differences exist between doxing and reporting. For one, most doxing is done by anonymous agents. Reporters have bylines, and can therefore be held accountable—ethically, legally, financially—for the words they write and the repercussions those words have. Reporters announce their intentions and their profession openly, while dox-ers could be anybody. Reporters include only personal information that is relevant to a story—facts the public has an compelling interest in knowing.
That's why a Politico editor releasing Richard Spencer's address was still doxing: the public should know Richard Spencer is a white supremacist, but they don't need to know where he lives. "Conflating doxing and journalism risks blurring or eliminating the public interest goal of good journalism," says Andrew Zolides, a digital media scholar who has taught courses about doxing at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Arguing for journalism over doxing is the same argument for leaking to a trusted publication (via SecureDrop, say) instead of Wikileaks: the training, expertise, and caution of professionals matters.
Yet, flattening the distinctions between doxing and journalism threatens to normalize doxing even beyond where it is now. "Worst case is it snuffs out certain discourse, and people are afraid to speak to people outside their class or party," says Zolides. According to Binns, that's already happening: her research shows 15 percent of journalists have stopped pursuing certain stories, fearing online blowback. And then there's that whole filter bubble problem. "Then again," Zolides adds. "We don’t want to think about conversation without repercussion."
Which is exactly the problem: doxing is internet culture's Big Stick, wielded by and against the average citizen when traditional institutions like journalism don't have an easy answer. Clearly, some people think it's inappropriate for the media to take on a troll like HanAssholeSolo. So they make handwavy excuses for politically motivated doxers—on both sides of the ideological continuum—based on those groups' perceived intents, and whether they roughly match their own. "I don’t think our ethical frameworks have caught up with doxing yet," says Jared Colton, who teaches about ethics and technology at Utah State University. "Evaluating someone's intent is impossible, and anyone can always make the case they're doing something for the greater good." Even Auernheimer.
