On December 8, 2017, Katie Bates’s phone buzzed as she sat in her car about to walk into Trader Joe’s. “There’s a video about you going around,” the text read. “You need to watch it right now.”
As someone who plays Magic: The Gathering (a card game from the ’90s that still has a significant cult following), Bates has become a frequent subject of online bullying. She’s often vocal about the need to get more women in the game, and just one hour before the video posted, she had published an article about harassment in the community.
The video posted about her involved a male Magic player who was angry that she’d called him a bully. He mocked her article, calling her a “bitch” and “trash.” Not nice words, sure, but she wasn’t too worried—that is, until she saw the comments. There someone had published her real name (she wrote under a pseudonym online). Another posted a photo of a gun. One guy even wrote that he lived close to her and thought he had seen her around.
“I had to change how I drove to work every day because I was so scared he was going to follow me home,” Bates said.
This form of online harassment, where personal information is made public and used to intimidate and threaten, is called doxing. You’ve probably heard of it —and if not, you have more than likely seen it take place.
The problem: even though doxing can be scary and upsetting, it’s not always illegal, and perpetrators are rarely arrested.
Take the recent arrest of 27-year-old Democratic staffer Jackson Cosko, who allegedly doxed Republican senators by posting their personal information (including home addresses) on Wikipedia. Or the uproar this past summer after the Berkeley police unusually tweeted photos and identifying information about anti-fascist activists. Or just take a quick peek into any corner of Twitter right now, and you’ll surely see it happening.
The practice isn’t new—it’s been around in some form since the start of the internet—but it certainly seems to be getting more brazen. The problem: even though doxing can be scary and upsetting, it’s not always illegal, and perpetrators are rarely arrested.
In fact, there aren’t really explicit laws against doxing—that is, the general practice of posting information about someone. But if it can be proven that the doxer had an ill-willed motivation, such as to defame, harass, extort or injure, it can be prosecutable under stalking, cyberstalking, harassment, extortion or other laws, depending on the circumstances.
Given the often limited legal recourse, people are putting more pressure on tech companies to change their policies and platform designs to better mitigate this type of online bullying.
However, someone has little chance of pressing charges if the information posted can been found on publicly available databases or on social media accounts not marked private, said James Wheaton, founder of the First Amendment Project. As an examples, the Huffington Post outed a virulent anti-Muslim Twitter troll—deemed perfectly legal—and the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that a conservative professor who doxed a graduate student was protected by “academic freedom” and free speech.
Given the often limited legal recourse, people are putting more pressure on tech companies to change their policies and platform designs to better mitigate this form of online bullying. If someone is legally doxed — say, their publicly available full name, address or email address is published — a Terms of Service violation might be the only way to get the content taken down, and the user who posted it banned. “Private companies are free to include or exclude any information they wish,” said Wheaton.
For example, the community guidelines for YouTube—where the video about Bates was published—explicitly forbids doxing and bullying. Similarly, Twitter’s rules say users are not allowed to “distribute content obtained through hacking that contains personally identifiable information.”
“I didn’t have the context to say, ‘Hey, this is not normal. This is not OK.’”
This language lets people like Bates flag comments that contain personal information. Some organizations have popped up to help people through this process, like the nonprofit OnlineSOS, which mainly works with women journalists who’ve been doxed or digitally harassed. Elizabeth Lee founded the group after she was harassed in 2009, when she received disturbing messages from an anonymous online source.
“I didn’t know anyone else this had happened to,” she said. “I didn’t have the context to say, ‘Hey, this is not normal. This is not OK.’ Our goal is to give people information and resources so they can decide how they’d like to respond.”
OnlineSOS urges people to keep an incident log of the harassment they’ve experienced. Recording a date, time and descriptions of the incidents — including screenshots — can help with a civil or criminal case against the perpetrators. If a dox contains truly private information, hate speech or threats, it’s probably not protected by the First Amendment.
Caroline Sinders, a design researcher who studies online harassment, said all tech companies should consider how they respond to reports of harassment on their sites. She noted that certain designs — like open text fields — can enable online harassment. When people have the space to write whatever they want, they often will.
“Take into account how reports are being fielded in, what’s considered high or low priority, and how victims know when they’re providing enough information about an incident,” she said.
Experts also suggest taking steps to make it harder to dox you. Because culprits often try to hack into accounts to get information or photos, experts recommend setting up two-step verification, making social media accounts private, creating complex passwords and removing potential doxing information.
For Bates, the experience of being doxed is still unsettling, but she’s determined not to let the doxers rule the day.
“I’m definitely very careful about what I post,” she said. “But I try really hard to just be who I am. I’m not gonna let them win.”
Hey! The Bold Italic recently launched a podcast, This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley. Check out the full season or listen to the episode below featuring Aarti Shahani, technology reporter at NPR. More coming soon, so stay tuned!
