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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.
"After one of the cofounders, Gabe Einhorn, posted Franco’s reply with his last name blocked out, Franco was quickly identified" and "was doxed by Jewish business leaders" implies that the harm was caused by people finding out and spreading his full name, not by the first name on its own.
It's not reasonable to read that as "business leaders harmed him by just using his first name".
You don't actually need a name at all to criticize someone's ideas.
Doxing is something that can be done to a greater or lesser degree, so there is no absolute cutoff. (And most cases are nowhere near any sort of edge case.)
But without his first name, wouldn't it be less likely that people find his full name and spread it? You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you're going to post his first name, you should expect that people could find his full name. If your theory of liability states that you would be responsible for harassment if you posted his full name due to the actions of third parties, then why does the same not apply for his first name?
In fact, I thought this was the point of the "signal boosting=doxing" argument. Were Franco not signal boosted, he wouldn't have been doxed, right? That implies that in an ideal world, to prevent his doxing, we ought not criticise him.
Then the next thing you say (that you don't need a name at all to criticise someone's ideas) seems to take the position that posting any name does mean you are responsible. So I am still confused.
Ok. Let's see what this would look like.
"I believe racism is bad." I don't think most reasonable people would disagree, so this is a vacuous statement.
"I believe racist jokes are bad." Also vacuous.
"I believe this one particular joke is racist." Well there are many racist jokes, which one are you talking about?
"I believe the following joke: '(FILL IN THE BLANK)' is racist." So we did it, right? We managed to criticise the racism without using the person's name?
Not so fast. The problem is that it's easy to find whoever said something based on the content of their speech alone. You seem to be advocating for a practice known as subtweeting (or with the advent of Bluesky, one might call it "subskeeting" (eugh)), and it doesn't work. Here's a good recent example.
Hbomberguy posted the following:
Almost everyone recognized, correctly, that he was talking about Patricia Taxxon, despite the fact that Hbomb did not name him at all.
So the bigger your following, the more liability you bear, and the more speech of yours you have to suppress in order to not be liable for harassment? Isn't that a perverse incentive against having an audience, and wouldn't that also result in many suppressing their speech in order to not grow too big? I still think that consistently following this principle would end up prohibiting a lot of innocuous speech. Not everyone who gets criticised on the Internet is going to face doxing or harassment, but under your argument, it seems that the mere potential of harms committed by third parties (who we have no control over) is enough that we should not criticise people at all.
No, I shouldn't expect that. The lesson of Scott's post is that making something easier matters. He's even posted about this in other contexts, for instance beware trivial inconveniences. In fact, I've even complained in another context about this "rationalist" idea very recently.
Even if it is in fact true that someone could do X, and your own actions were not necessary for them to do X, making things easier still makes you responsible. It doesn't matter that someone else could use the first name to find the full name; posting the full name (including posting it behind the scenes to "business leaders") and posting the first name are not equivalent actions. This concept seems to be foreign to a lot of "rationalists".
There are degrees of harm. Posting the full name harms more than posting the first name, which in turns harms more than saying "a guy I know".
Then maybe he shouldn't have said anything (unless Taxxon is a public figure). Sometimes acting in an ethical manner means not doing things you want to do or not doing things that benefit yourself.
If you mean moral liability, absolutely.
Whether you call it an incentive is a matter of semantics, but it's not something you can choose to do or not do in the same way you can choose to do or not do most incentives. Ethical conclusions just are; if people avoid some actions that benefit themselves so that they don't behave unethically, that doesn't make the unethical things ethical.
This sounds fine in theory. In practice, I'm not sure it makes a difference. If you post the content of a tweet but blur out the name, it's not that much harder to find the original author (depending on which tweet you post). And if the entire point of these ethics is to prevent bad actors from harassing people, do you really think those bad actors would just give up when they see a blurred name? If they want to harass people, they are motivated enough to do it anyway. The only way to escape responsibility is to not post anything at all, akin to the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics.
I'll give another example. Let's say there's a forum out there where people are allowed to discuss suicide and how to achieve it in detail. Let's say you're a mildly successful musical British-Irish Youtuber who stumbles upon the existence of the forum and want to campaign against it, but you also subscribe to this theory of ethics and you could never in good conscience make the forum more notable than it already is, as you believe that you would be responsible for more suicides if you did that. How do you report on the forum without inadvertently promoting it to more suicidal people?
Your theory goes that he would be in the clear (or at least cause less harm) by doing the following:
So does this work? The answer is a resounding no.
Tantacrul's video on Sanctioned Suicide did all these things. He called it "Sorrow Solution", he never used actual screenshots (save for one censored screenshot) and he made up fake names for everyone. In the wake of his video, the number of visits to the site actually significantly increased in a way that the website operators noticed. It's not even clear at all that the number of visits in the aftermath was less than if Tantacrul had been upfront and used the site's real name instead of "Sorrow Solution". It's very likely that a majority of the visits came from suicidal people (or even curious people) who watched Tantacrul's video and decided to look for themselves. If someone is motivated enough to commit suicide, they're not going to let a silly thing like the "Sorrow Solution" name replacement stop them. The forum even got its own Wikipedia article after this. It turns out that you can't report on the forum without promoting it. (Also, his recreated screenshots only served as an avenue for further misrepresentation of the site, but that's another discussion.)
So again, it seems like the most ethical thing to do in the face of a forum where people teach others how to commit suicide is... nothing. Or at least not to make a Youtube video on it, I suppose.
He is. So is it fine (or less harmful) to criticise public figures?
It's not clear to me that Hbomberguy's skeet benefited him. Being anti-lolicon may win you the support of fellow anti-lolicons, but most people are already against lolicon anyway, and the ones who are in favour are fierce advocates who will target you with nasty tactics (e.g. calling you a pedophile) for being against it.
It's not clear to me that being a critic in general benefits the critic. (Unless it's movie criticism and you're Roger Ebert, I suppose.) The primary benefactor of criticism is the one who is criticised, so they can take the feedback and improve. If I didn't care at all about someone and at least have some sense of respect for them, I wouldn't criticise them. I would just not say anything.
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