Doxxing is one tool in a suite of tactics for crushing dissent. Exposing an anonymous, pseudonymous, or unidentified persona’s true identity and personal information is always an attempt to take them off the chessboard. When executed successfully, a doxx accomplishes the following objectives:
Tags an individual for reputational destruction for their past, present, and future.
Delegitimizes their public work by sullying it with their private activities.
Creates psychological, if not also physical, insecurity for the target.
Puts their livelihood, education, property, business, or life under threat.
Generates social pressure through guilt by association from friends, family, and colleagues.
Warns others to stay down by making an example of them.
Removes them from play.
These seven criteria are obviously not always, nor uniformly, achieved. But they qualify the intent of every doxx. Choosing to doxx someone is therefore a deeply personal, intentionally destructive act; whether you know the target or not. In the U.S. it represents any number of the above, up to and including, death by murder or suicide. In some cases it represents threat of imprisonment or execution as well. For the purposes of this article, we are using a broad definition of doxxing that includes exposing not just anonymous and pseudonymous internet actors, but also unidentified and underexposed persons to public scorn. Partly, this is because the dividing lines between these 4 categories of targets are not always clear-cut (some are varying degrees of all 4, as we’ll see later), but also because the line between internet and real-life is decreasingly meaningful.
Recent events in the Israel-Palestine conflict have drawn renewed public debate, particularly on the Right, over the propriety of compiling lists of radicalized supporters, and reporting protestors to their schools, employers, and even Homeland Security. Credible and imminent threats of violence are covered under U.S. free speech restrictions, and law enforcement have numerous tools and tactics at their disposal that even the most pernicious journalist couldn’t dream of, for unmasking and identifying threats. It is unreasonable to claim, then, that a primary, or even significant, justification for these activities is public safety or policing unlawful violations of speech. Clearly, these maneuvers are the actions of private or institutional actors aiming their doxx canons at partisans for the purpose of crushing dissent.
The Right’s Fight
A refrain echoed by those with still-liberal temperaments is that the Right ought not to revel too greedily in the schadenfreude of seeing, or partaking in, the professional, academic, and interpersonal down-going of their ideological enemies. Many in this camp are weary of the venomous spread of cancel culture through our formerly liberal institutions, and wish to broker an uneasy truce, hoping for a return to “normal”, tolerant relations. Some have themselves even been doxxed or brigaded to cancellation, and chosen to turn the other cheek. This Faction of Forgiveness wants unilateral disarmament.
A louder crowd is actively or vicariously participating in campaigns to tarnish and dispossess overstepping agitators, and loving every minute of it. “A chance,” they’ll say, “to finally give them a taste of their own medicine! Where there was no quarter given before, there shall be no quarter offered in turn.” They seek to capitalize on the outrage and the fervor, to break their bullies and disembowel their (dis)establishment. All this in hopes that their righteous fury may now be finally met with divine justice, and providence has smiled upon the downcast. Alas, the Star of Nemesis is returned. This Faction of Fair Play recognizes the rules of engagement on matters of public discourse have been rigged against them for some time, and wants heads to roll.
What the Faction of Forgiveness and the Faction of Fair Play share are reeling experiences of ideological persecution by institutions, themselves or by-proxy. What is unshared is their prescription for ameliorating these transgressions.