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How is it facilitating harm to post publicly available information? If someone wanted to use the information for harm, they wouldn't be stopped just because Kiwi Farms deleted it. It's public information, so they can find it anyway.
In fact, it's security theater to think that information, once published, can somehow be unpublished. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, and it's better to accept that it's out there and deal with it accordingly. To do otherwise would be to delude yourself and operate under false beliefs.
Do you have any evidence for this or is this just baseless speculation? I can find countless examples where people who used the information to cause harm (a/k/a cowtipping) were summarily banned from the site. How is it possible to lie about that?
Making things easier to do facilitates it and, in practice, can drastically increase its prevalence, even if it is not impossible to do without your help. This is a common rationalist fallacy: "They could have done it ANYWAY". Things don't work that way.
Also see Scott's article https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/29/against-signal-boosting-as-doxxing/
Observation of how human beings behave in similar contexts.
But surely then you would direct your ire at the ones who actually make doxing possible, i.e. the data brokers who hoover up everyone's data without even the slightest resistance. A lot of American doxes happen because it's possible to type someone's name into a people finder site (like TruePeopleSearch) and get their address in seconds. I myself have done this many times when writing threads, it's shockingly easy. Furthermore, they make deleting this data impossible. You can send in removal requests, but this only happens temporarily and they will republish your data a few months later when they update their database with new dox. There are several paid services dedicated to regularly sending takedown requests so you don't have to do it yourself.
I can understand why people take issue with doxing, but whenever I confront people about this, they seem to not understand where doxes actually come from and it comes across as an isolated demand for rigor to complain about Kiwi Farms and spare not even a crumb of attention on data brokers. It promotes a false sense of security to paint this picture where the only problem is having a thread on the site, and if it was just gone, everything would be fine. Not so. The reality is that if you're an American (and you own a house, or have a job, or drive a car), you're one leak of your legal name away from having your address known to malicious actors. If you post under your legal name, then you should consider yourself already doxed.
I really cannot understate how uniquely an American problem this is, and how most of the problem is from data brokers. Most other countries have laws against data collection which at least attempt to mitigate people buying and selling people's data. Most of the people I've doxed are Americans and most of them were doxed using people finder sites. Sure, other countries have people finder sites, but they are limited in completeness or searchability. If data brokers disappeared overnight, 90% of the doxes posted on KF would not be possible anymore, and we would have to rely on good old-fashioned detective work (e.g. geolocation of images posted by the subject). The sooner people dispense with this fiction that doxing is some magic wand waved by dark wizards, the sooner people can direct their attention to the actual doxers, the data brokers who make doxing possible.
And who knows, if I'm being optimistic, maybe we can also have a conversation about how we ought to not collect people's data in the first place. I've said it before and I'll say it again, data leaks are inevitable. The only solution to data leaks is to not collect data. It's bad enough that KYC laws force companies to force customers to dox themselves to access money, that's just a vector to leak their identities. It's even worse when sites like Discord freely give in to age verification regimes and force people to take ID selfies. The gold standard should be services like Mullvad, which collect as little identifying information as possible. They don't even require an email address.
The central example in this post was obviously done with the intention of ruining his chances at employment. I don't like that, and I don't think that's in the spirit of the farms (that leans closer to a-logging territory), but surely I'm still allowed to discuss someone's posts without going full a-log like this. Obviously, nobody on the farms would care if someone made a racist joke, but I otherwise can't think of a principle that wouldn't preclude discussion of anyone on the Internet at all.
That's not evidence, that's just speculation. Granted, I suppose it's not as baseless, but I'm not impressed by this answer.
By the reasoning in the first part of your post, that shouldn't matter at all. The Twitter thread had no effect on him because since he posted under his real name, people could have gone to a data broker, found his employer, and harassed him regardless of whether the Twitter thread existed or not.
The reason that it did matter is that human beings don't behave the way you describe. A thread on social media is a coordination point to harass a person, even if the information is already available from a data broker or anywhere else.
Scott's whole point was that even though the information was public, spreading it still enables harassment that wouldn't have existed without it being spread. You seem to recognize that this is true for Scott's example, but you don't seem willing to generalize it. Kiwi Farms and that Twitter thread are in basically the same situation. Just like that guy could have his chances at employment ruined (even though Twitter only spread information that existed anyway), people whose information is signal-boosted by Kiwi Farms have a much greater chance to be harassed (even though Kiwi Farms only spreads information that existed anyway).
That's the autistic answer. People routinely act in ways which can be predicted, but do not follow from logical deductions. You need to be able to recognize them.
I only agree with Scott's example because the signal booster basically said "let's ruin his chances at employment indefinitely." Again, that's a-logging behaviour. If she had just said "this man is racist," I wouldn't find that objectionable (besides that I disagree on the object level of racism being an issue). Obviously, if someone with a huge following tells her audience to contact his employer, they will probably go and contact his employer and harass them.
I don't agree that criticising someone, regardless of the way you frame it, especially when you have explicit disclaimers against harassment as we do on the Kiwi Farms, is somehow enabling or promoting harassment. That principle seems to imply that no one is allowed to criticise anyone for any reason, lest the criticism become a coordination point for harassment.
Scott's point was that just because the information was available anyway doesn't mean that spreading it doesn't cause harm. This point does not depend on anyone explicitly saying they are going to cause harm. It's about refuting the argument "oh, the information is available already". It's true that in this specific example someone said they were going to cause harm, but Scott's point is more general than that.
Explicit disclaimers are things you put in when you need to cover your ass. The reason the Twitter doxing didn't include explicit disclaimers is that anti-racism social justice has such status that nobody is going to go after them no matter what they do, so they didn't need to cover their ass. Kiwi farms doesn't have this status, and people there need to cover their ass.
If Kiwi Farms posters actually didn't want to cause harm, they wouldn't signal-boost information that can be used to harm. Their actions would be consistent with not wanting to cause harm, not their disclaimers.
Someone can be criticised without mentioning their real name, address, or employer, aside from edge cases that apply to almost nobody attacked by Kiwi Farms.
I'm still confused. As I understand it, the Reason columnist didn't publish the alleged racist's address or employer, and only posted his name insofar as he was publicly posting under his name. If that's the case, does that mean that there's no way to criticise him that doesn't involve doxing, just because he posted under his real name? So it's fine to criticise pseudonymous people, but not people posting under their real names? Or is the problem that you have a large audience? What's the threshold at which you can't reply to people without (being considered to be) inducing harassment towards them because it's signal boosting and signal boosting is doxing? Is it 100,000 followers? 50,000 followers? 10,000? Should the media be prohibited from including people's names in their articles because doing that means they're going to be doxed, and subsequently, harassed?
I can't think of any way to consistently follow this principle that doesn't result in a huge prohibition on innocuous speech.
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Doxxing is facilitating harm: it may provide information to someone who may physically harm the target. In the most direct case, revealing a spy in a repressive country. Even in a free country, providing someone’s location may aid a schizo into becoming a hitman, or associating their name with controversial online activity may enrage their family or a local into confronting them.
It also creates a Chilling Effect: sure, an employer and spouse are legally allowed to fire and divorce someone (respectively, hopefully), but I think the world is better when people feel safe speaking freely online, and I’m sure most in Kiwifarms and here agree at least for themselves.
And just because information is accessible from any internet-connected device doesn’t mean it’s “public”. In the most obvious case, a password-protected website is “public” if you know the password. Then there’s no clear line between this and, for example, a URL that somebody forgot about. The FBI discovered Dread Pirate Roberts via a years-old public forum post under is pseudonym (or used alternate construction, but still, it was possible).
I don’t support the (censorship) infrastructure that would prevent doxxing, some people deserve to be doxxed (e.g. Epstein pedophiles), revealing information that could help reveal someone’s identity or other details isn’t doxxing (there’s no clear line), and sometimes someone hides their identity or other details so poorly it’s not obvious they were supposed to be hidden (again, no clear line). Also, there exist unethical people, so if someone controversial has public information that is incriminating and not well hidden, they’ll be doxxed eventually anyways…unless you tell them privately.
Generally, I think it’s wrong to dox someone unless they did something unethical enough that justifies the probable reactions: commit a serious crime, cheated on their partner, etc.. And even then, limit the range so justice is reasonable (e.g. if someone mildly betrayed their friend, probably tell their friend but don’t ruin their life). Otherwise, even though it’s just revealing true information, you’re making the world worse in a rather obvious way.
And in particular, I don’t think doxxing people for nonspecific speech (opinions, media, etc.) is ever moral, even if they’re obnoxious content creators, at least because it ultimately amplifies their views and makes them look better to bystanders.
If you're going to run a multibillion dollar drug empire, then you should take the appropriate opsec measures. In this regard, the feds have the ability to subpoena/EDR, effectively making all "private" data on the site accessible to them, but I don't think we should suspect alternate construction when his opsec was that bad.
On the Kiwi Farms, we take appropriate opsec measures to not get doxed, including using an alternate email address and not revealing personal details. We do want the ability to speak freely, but we also recognize that it's not really possible to do that under your real name in a world where saying "that" in your native language can earn the ire of the cancel mob. As Scott Alexander said, society is fixed,
biologyopsec is mutable.This isn't a useful or achievable maxim in practice. Once you tell someone, you can't really control what they do with that information. If the friend wants to ruin their life, you can say you don't want that, but you can't stop them from doing it. People are terrible at keeping secrets.
It's probably better for you to only tell the friend, because if the friend ruins their life in response, that's their responsibility and not yours. But the consequences are likely to be the same. Whether that means you're less morally culpable for what happens afterward depends on your moral philosophy.
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