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Yes, because Franco responded to the post on X.
Franco was outed by then. He created a twitter account for the purpose of replying after he had already been identified.
Is it “doxxing” if you message a Jew on a social media platform under your real name saying you don’t want to work for him because he’s Jewish and he decides to share that with the Jewish community? Thats a very wide definition of doxxing.
Doxxing, classically, would be tracking down the owner of an anonymous account the way that the SPLC and other do and outing the real owner. If John Smith sends an email to a company from johnsmith@gmail.com signed John Smith and the company makes it public that’s not a dox. It might be a violation of privacy, if the email is understood to be in confidence, but that’s a legal question.
The conceptual expansion of Doxxing as complained about online, at the same time that internet privacy has collapsed in most cases, is fascinating.
Fifteen years ago Doxxing was a narrow concept: you hunted down and exposed the real identity of someone who was posting pseudonymously on the internet, who at least tacitly hid their identity and did not want their "real" identity to be connected with their pseudonym.
Today, I see people accused of doxxing for things like finding out public information about someone who was real-name and real-face posting to begin with. Or finding the identities of public officials who performed public acts. Or normal acts of paparazzi following celebrities. It has been reduced to publishing any information about anyone in any situation.
In my mind, Doxxing properly has three factors: to be guilty of Doxxing you must a) expose real life details about b) someone posting under a pseudonym on the internet who c) had a reasonable expectation those details wouldn't become known. A LOT of people believe in exceptions for "this guy is really bad tho actually" or "well this was a journalist doing it;" I don't necessarily buy those.
This is clearly not a case of doxxing, it fails all three points. Franco wasn't posting on the internet under a pseudonym, he was communicating using his government name with a company. No real life details about him were exposed beyond his name, the rest came out after it was already a story. Franco can't possibly have reasonably expected that his message was private, particularly when it consisted of an insult.
The definition of "doxing" also has been muddled by the decision of several state governments (example) to criminalize publication of personal information with intent to harm (i. e., harassment) under the name "doxing" (which, under the traditional definition, does not necessarily involve intent to harm).
Last year, the administrator of Kiwi Farms urged that website's users to switch to a different word, such as "phonebooking", "unmasking", or "sunshining".
I see no reason to follow Kiwi Farms' definition. Claiming that they have rules against using the information to harm ignores, probably deliberately, that they're facilitating harm by other people.
Yes, it's "different" because they don't intend harm themselves, but 1) it's easy to lie about that without being detected, and they probably are lying about it and 2) there's no useful moral principle that says that it's okay to participate in harm because the harm wasn't your terminal goal.
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.
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