Doxxing, vigilantes, and transmisogyny
By Abigail Curlew
This article is part of a new series hosted by Digital Justice Lab, the series will be navigating technology and its impact on our daily lives.
[Content warning: transphobia]
When I published my first article as a publicly out as trans feminine, I was doxxed and harassed by an online hate group. It was my first run in with targeted gendered violence, and the experience was visceral. Before this, when I presented as a man, no one ever bothered to dig into the dirty details of my personal life — the worse I got was a handful of angry comments littering the comment section.
Doxxing is the practice of collecting personal information on a person’s legal identity or Internet activities and publishing them to hostile publics. These practices are usually accompanied by “name and shame” tactics that encourage folks to mob a person by sending harassment and threats en masse. The word is shorthand for “dropping docs”, historically a practice used by hackers and software pirates to reveal the personal information of an anonymous user. It’s been used as a method of retaliation or vigilantism that seeks to silence an opponent.
Doxxing can entail the use of DIY surveillance and investigatory techniques to scour the Internet for personal information, possible pseudonyms, and most importantly, embarrassing user-generated content. When these techniques are used on trans women, the emphasis of the doxx is on trying to prove that the victim is faking their transition, mentally ill, hiding from a dark past, and/or doing it for attention.
Once the they have enough information to put together a dossier, it’s dropped onto troll-y forum boards, where users use the information to harass, belittle, and threaten the victim.
For me, all of this went down throughout the Lindsay Shepherd controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University, when a first-year masters student released a voice recording of her professor chastising her for showing a Jordan Peterson video in tutorial. She asserted that this was an issue of free speech, that she’d been censored, and the media went wild.
Throughout these very public, and often vitriolic, debates, I was concerned that the voices of trans students and scholars were being ignored. What Shepherd was arguing was that she had a right to instruct on transgender issues, however, she had facilitated discussions that questioned the very existence of non-binary trans folks. I was concerned how some people’s free speech can function to silence the free speech of marginalized folks.
I remember getting a Google notification not long after I published my Vice article informing me that my name (and my deadname) had been mentioned on the Internet. I had been doxxed, and I felt violated and vulnerable in the visibility and exposure afforded to me by these trolls.
Along with bemoaning that social justice warriors (SJWs) who wanted nuanced discussions about free speech were somehow ushering in a dark era of Orwellian or Huxley style totalitarianism, Kiwi Farm trolls also attacked me based on my appearance and my gender.
One post read, “If accommodating the 0.1% or so of people who are trannies involves destroying free speech for everyone else, fuck trannies”.
Kiwi Farms trolls are notorious for their constant attacks on women, specifically trans women, plus sized women, and women with disabilities. Their sign-up page had once declared, “Autistics will be laughed at. Trannies will be misgendered. People will try to find where you live”. According to the Rationalwiki, a treasure-trove of folksy Internet history, the forum board was originally created to harass an autistic webcomic artist named Christine Weston Chandler. The community eventually blossomed into the toxic dumpster fire it is today — and began to facilitate the monitoring and harassment of marginalized women.
Another user speculated, “They do it to escape their insecurity or their mistakes from their male self. Unfortunately, the Internet never forgets, nor does their body, which is male”.
They’re right, the Internet never forgets.
DIY Surveillance and Digital Vigilantes
To those who’ve never been doxxed, the consequences of digital harassment may seem minimal. Afterall, we only need to click away and not read it. However, the sensation of exposure to folks who hate you has a deeper impact. It raises the stakes of social participation, as these intimidation tactics are used to silence trans feminine voices and belittle our issues.
Users over Kiwi Farms are composed of an unsavory combination of trolls and digital vigilantes who have political stakes in silencing dissent. A troll is a person who engages in online trickery to rile up other users for the fun of it. As Angela Nagle explained in her book Kill All Normies, trolls are engaged in a culture of transgression that facilitates awful behavior for its own sake.
I don’t want to give them too much credit: This political mission is very likely a tacit by-product of men who feel that their access to male privilege is being outright challenged by women who they view as inferior.
These troll-y vigilantes expend a fair amount of energy targeting a very specific population of women who they believe pose a (laughable) threat to Western values and freedom of speech. They engage in a form of digital vigilante work that is unique to our social media saturated contemporary society where many of us liberally post user-generated content to a wide array of social media platforms.
As sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd observe, we fracture our digital identity across multiple sites that are often visible to the wider public and designed for an imagined audience. For instance, you might have a Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Google account where you post different types of content. You might post family-friendly content to your Facebook feed to appease your grandmother but discuss the weekend at length on Twitter. However, a near lifetime of surfing the web means we have substantial data exhaust about our identity lingering across cyberspace.
We live in the era of visibility, where we knowingly make ourselves visible to an unknowable audience. And the exhaust from this visibility can be decontextualized and used by trolls and vigilantes to discredit or embarrass their victims.
While discussing digital vigilantism, Sociologist Daniel Trottier refers to the “weaponization of visibility” where trolls across the political spectrum are able to collect and map all of this stagnant data to drop a doxx. Kiwi Farm trolls exploit this visibility to conduct DIY investigations into the lives of their victims, build revelatory dossiers, and post them to their forum boards with links to social media accounts.
A doxx can have lingering consequences, for instance, a victim’s Google record will be tarnished. Any potential employer can easily access the dossier and subsequent threads of harassment, which can steal away important life opportunities.
Furthermore, doxxing and “name and shame” tactics severally chills online discussion and hampers the state of free speech. The fact that trans women can’t contribute to the public discourse without getting doxxed and harassed means that there are many who won’t speak out for fear of reprisal.
Queer feminist op-sec
There is often very little recourse to digital gendered violence, and because of this, many of us are left vulnerable to constant attacks on our personhood. For those of us who aren’t exactly computer savvy, it is important that we learn techniques that can improve our ability to navigate digital exposure safely.
This is important, because if we stop contributing to the public discourse, the trolls win. We must not be silenced.
Doxxing is dangerous business, so much so that even folks on Kiwi Farms are careful with nurturing a robust cybersecurity. Null, otherwise known as Joshua Conner Moon, the founder of Kiwi Farms, warns that their victims might seek retaliation and thus users should be weary of their browsing habits. It’s a practice commonly known on the far-right as “hiding your powerlevel” or being very cautious and aware of the information you are revealing to others. Especially information that would link bigoted and violent content to a legal identity.
For us rebellious femmes who refuse to be silenced by anonymous trolls, there are a multitude of practices you can learn to make a troll’s work more difficult. As the HACK*BLOSSOM collective assert in their DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity, “you have a right to exist safely in digital spaces”. You should consider reading through this guide and making an effort to learning skills nurturing a better op-sec, but in the meantime, here are some pointers.
Use a virtual private network (VPN) when you are surfing the Internet. A VPN functions to create a private network for your Internet connection that both encrypts your browsing data and disguises your IP address. VPNs are available for free, but often the most secure platforms entail a membership fee — be sure to do your research beforehand so you don’t find yourself using a leaky VPN that puts your identity at risk.
Max out your privacy settings on all your social media accounts. I spent most of my tenure surfing cyberspace with minimal privacy settings on all of my accounts, and I hadn’t realized how vulnerable that made me until a handful of trolls began commenting liberally on my Facebook posts. Social media accounts are treasure troves of doxxable data — be sure to tighten your security so that only friends can dig into the details of your private life.
Be cautious about the information you share over the internet by fostering unlinkability. Many of us navigate an unmanageable number of applications and social media platforms where we reveal our legal identities. We might share information across these platforms that may seem like a good idea at the time but might be used against us in the future. Instead of recycling common pseudonyms, use a variety of pseudonyms over the platforms you’re posting in. The more obscure you make yourself, the less likely a troll will be able to link your content to your legal identity. Unlinkability obfuscates their ability to use common DIY surveillance practices.
We live in a surveillance society that is characterized by constant monitoring by governments, private corporations, and peers and strangers. The logics of social media are founded on the ability to carefully watch each other post user-generated content. Furthermore, these logics have become normalized and taken-for-granted. Trolling practices are probably going nowhere fast, so we are left with fostering a robust op-sec to protect our ability to engage in the public discourse.
Abigail Curlew can be found: here
This story is part of a series on technology and its impact on our lives funded by Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant received by Nasma Ahmed at Digital Justice Lab. The Digital Justice Lab’s mission is to build towards a more just and equitable future. The Digital Justice Lab is a member of the Tides Canada Shared Platform
