Photo by Yoal Desurmont on Unsplash.

Trolls Gonna Troll: When Online Doxxers (try to) Come Get You

The following is a narrative of my proposed talk at the 2018 American Library Association (ALA) meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. Unfortunately, I had a scheduling conflict that precluded my attendance and participation. The talk would have been part of the “Bullying, Trolling, and Doxxing, Oh My! Protecting our Advocacy and Public Discourse around Diversity and Social Justice” session that was moderated by Nicole Cooke and included presentations from April Hathcock, Cynthia M. Orozco, Miriam Sweeney, and Stacey Collins. Special thanks to Jenny Ferretti for the encouragement.

What follows is an account of an incident that occurred nearly two years ago in relation to my work with the LIS Microaggressions (LISM) project. This is the first time I will publicly talk about it, with hopes that sharing this experience provides comfort and solidarity to those that have gone through similar experiences in the Library and Information Science (LIS) profession.

A week before the 2016 presidential election, I received an email in my personal Gmail account from someone who identified themselves as a reporter and who wanted to do some fact checking about me. She supplied my full name, my employment title, and institution in the body of her email and asked if she had contacted the right Elvia. I replied, confirming that she had, and asked what this was regarding.

Her next email sent a chill down my spine:

I remembered that email conversation vividly, since it occurred about three months earlier. Cynthia had received some pushback from audience members regarding a keynote talk she gave at the California Academic & Research Library (CARL) Association that year on our shared work with LIS Microaggressions. LIS Microaggressions is an online space and analog zine project for folks from marginalized communities who work in the LIS field to share their experiences with microaggressions. Through conference presentations and zine making workshops, the LIS Microaggressions collective worked to engage the profession in critical reflection and analysis about microaggressive behaviors while fostering support and participatory community for library workers dealing with microaggressions. The project was founded in 2014 and began in candid, private conversations between early career women of color looking for advice and support from their peers on how to deal with microaggressions in their workplaces. I now think of it as more limited in scope and a precursor to We Here.

Prior to our work in LIS Microaggressions, Cynthia and I had long formed a friendship when we met in 2007 during a UCLA summer Travel Study program in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, while I was an undergraduate and she a master’s student. So, just in case you are wondering why I used the language that I did — I can tell it like it is with Cynthia. We are just on that level on our 11 year friendship. Also, I never in a million years would have guessed that someone would go through the trouble of submitting a public records request to read my email conversations between my friend and I.

While reception of LIS Microaggressions was mostly positive, the folks we received the most pushback from at conference presentations and workshops were from folks who:

• questioned or flat out did not see the value of bringing these types of conversations to professional conference spheres;
• were not likely to belong to a marginalized community; and/or
• felt the need to express their opinions about how uncomfortable conversations about racism and other discriminatory behaviors made them feel, totally missing the point about needing to have those hard conversations in order to overcome said discomfort.

And to clarify, what I meant with the “strength of our voices” is just that — attributing it to our work and purpose in LISM, and getting folks in the profession to understand that microaggressive behavior is real and it affects retention rates, morale, and productivity.

If detractors are not willing to walk over that bridge with us, they have the option to not to listen to us. But, please, do not get in our way, and do not block that bridge for the rest of us who are willing.

After receiving that email, I froze; I had no idea what to do next. I felt confused, shocked, and violated. How was this even possible? I did a search in my email history to re-read the message thread. Cynthia had sent the initial message from her California State University Long Beach email address, but I had written back through my personal Gmail address. In the true spirit of LISM I forwarded the reporter’s message to my LISM collaborators who all were just as shocked and angry as I was. I also Googled the reporter to find out more about the publication she works for. She turned out to be a reporter for a conservative online publication that prided itself in such news articles as: “Social Justice Warriors Are Incensed Over the Existence of Cleavage in ‘Final Fantasy XV,’” “Millennial Men Rush to Restore Their Foreskins, ‘Feel Whole Again’”, and “Boob and Butt Fighting Anime ‘Keijo!!!!!!!!!!’ Passes the Bechdel Test.”

Classy.

While I was consulting friends and colleagues on what to do next, I received a phone call from my employer’s public and media relations spokesperson. The reporter had also contacted them and was asking them to respond. During the conversation I had with the spokesperson, my mind was racing about all the possible outcomes that may manifest from this. The biggest: Am I going to lose my job? Followed by: How will my employer react? Will they stand with me or against me?

Thankfully, and much to my honest surprise, my employer had my back. Even though I have since moved on from my position there (not related to this incident!), I will always be extremely thankful for their response and responsible ownership of the situation. They are no strangers to these types of inquiries. The incident involving Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor was to occur some six months after my own. My employer’s public and media relations team instructed me to not to engage with any further inquiries. They, in turn, handled all inquiries, and asked that I forward all new inquiries to their team. They put out a statement, even though they did not have to.

As my body caught up to my racing brain, I came to this enlightened question — what does this have to do with my day job? LISM is a volunteer/side-project, and I never used my position or my employer’s name to help promote the project. I also, and I believe this was critical, did not use my institutional email in this conversation. It was not until the “article” came out (I use quotes because I cannot convince myself to qualify it as such since it was so poorly written and illogically researched), that I understood what this person was trying to do.

The publication folded in June 2017, just after passing one year in publication. If you want to read an in-depth take down of its demise, someone else did it here. Being the archivist that I am, I located a crawled version of the “article” in the Wayback Machine (thanks, Internet Archive) and you can read it here.

It is clear to me that this reporter attempted to paint a character sketch of me as a “SJW” (social justice warrior) based on the issues I am outspoken about, while attempting to feebly connect my institution’s name recognition with the ultimate goal of sparking outrage from conservative right-wing readers. What Cynthia, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, and I have in common is that we are outspoken, successful women of color working in academic spheres who dare to bring issues of race and racism to the forefront of discussion. Professor Taylor and I share being queer; and I believe our racial and sexual identities were called out to inflict harm to our well-being by doxxing and attempting to endanger our livelihoods and safety.

One question that is valid to ask is: Is it really doxxing when the information that is used is publicly available? By definition, doxxing someone means that their private or personally identifiable information is published to inflict harm, harassment, online shaming, etc. While none of the information that was culled and shared about me was private, it was culled with the intention to incite harm to my name, image, career, livelihood, etc. The situation worsened when Fox News picked up the article and linked out to the original story. To paraphrase Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor, whose “story” was picked up by Fox News as well: Fox News did not run this story because it was “news”; they use their platform to incite and unleash the mob-like mentality of its fringe audience.

I did not get death threats; and my experience was in no way compared to what Professor Taylor received. My name appeared on several conservative forums, some now defunct. I remember reading some that encouraged readers to send me Tweets, emails, and phone calls and supplied all the necessary information to do so. There was one that was especially violent, something about “I’d like to introduce her to my right fist.” I did not screenshot that one because I never want to revisit that comment again. Here are ones that I did capture (er, Cynthia probably did):

Personal Decisions on How I Dealt with This: To clap or not clap back?

I took my employer’s advice to heart and choose to not publicly disclose or address this incident through social media. I stayed completely offline and only reached out to folks for emotional support when I needed it or when I saw others experience similar issues in the profession. I really wanted to clap back and bring the full might of GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) Twitter against this publication and all of its associated individuals who waste their energy trying to bring down other people. The folks closest to me were 100% ready and on standby. Ultimately, I realized that neither I or we (librarians/archivists) are in the business of trying to bring anyone down, they are. In the famous words of our featured speaker Michelle Obama at this year’s American Library Association Annual meeting, “When they go low, we go high” (c’mon, let me have it).

Here are other considerations I took to mind in making my decision:

1. I did not want this to overshadow my nascent accomplishments in the field and at my place of employment. At the time, I still considered myself an early career professional and I had just passed my first year of employment at my institution. I did not want to jeopardize my relationship with them any more than it already felt like.
2. Control, control, control. I felt like I had lost it when that article was published with my name on it, and kept losing more of it as it got picked up by Fox News and other website forums. It felt like the trolls kept replicating and I could not keep my name away from some of the most disgusting corners of the internet I have ever seen. These dark corners were an odd breed of patriotism, insolence, boredom, racism, and, well, doxxing.
3. The less you engage, the faster it will go away. I do not feel like this is a cop out, see #2 Control, above.

I decided to focus on what I could control: my future commitments and new professional projects. I got BUSY. It was a weird psychological move, but essentially, my logic was this: if I kept focused on positive things I got involved in, professionally, then these can positively influence Google search results (i.e. bury the story with my new accomplishments).

I was totally humbled to have been nominated and successfully elected for the Society of American Archivists (SAA) 2017–2018 Nominating Committee; I took it as an opportunity to focus on something meaningful and large scale in the profession. This and the subsequent year ended up being the most professionally productive time of my career thus far.

Offerings on How to Protect Yourself If They Come for You

1. Rule of thumb: Do not use your public institution email address if you do not want the content of the email to be read by a conservative right-wing reporter who is out to get you. I am serious. Take it to your private email, channel, chat, etc. take it back to middle school and write your friend a paper note and pass it along. I am too paranoid now and am constantly policing myself and what I say on my employer’s email. And by the way, I am now at a public institution myself. If you work for a private institution, you are probably okay but, I don’t trust this government, this climate, anything — just don’t.
2. Even though I replied to Cynthia’s email on my private Gmail address, my third party privacy was not observed when the institution released her emails; do not assume yours will be.
3. Check your state laws regarding public records, records access, information practices laws. Since Cynthia was working at Cal State Long Beach, an institution that is part of the California State University (CSU) system, it is a public institution and therefore mandated to observe the California Public Records Act (CPRA). Anyone can submit a public records request to any institution that receives state funding. As it is defined in the Act, “Public records” includes any writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business prepared, owned, used, or retained by any state or local agency regardless of physical form or characteristics. “Public records” in the custody of, or maintained by, the Governor’s office means any writing prepared on or after January 6, 1975.” § 6252(e).
4. Protect your name, your work, your voice, your ideas. Prior to this incident, my Twitter bio read: “practicing archivist at the intersections of the analog and digital, queerness, latinxness, anti-oppressiveness.” The founder of the publication decided to pull my Twitter bio as a quote to Tweet out in an effort to point it out to reactors. My Twitter bio is a lot less flavorful now. I am still super queer, super Latinx, and still working to support liberation and anti-oppression and finding ways to intersect this work with archives. But I am doing it less on Twitter because Twitter = cesspool.

This incident made me think twice about publishing on open-access platforms like Medium. I know this is pretty contradictory of me to write this on a Medium article, but I’ve cooled off Medium since the first article I published on here. The protections that traditional scholarly publications afford through paid subscriptions allow for protections against general audiences that are looking to find you for malicious reasons.

5. Protect yourself in the way that makes sense for you. Dealing with my emotions privately and with those closest to me was the way that I chose to process it. It was not easy, and writing this narrative two years later has brought out a lot of heaviness related to the way I handled this. I feel like I am casting a light to something that I chose to stay in the dark for so long. If something like this happens or has happened to you, know that you have my and the support of many folks in the profession. There is always growth where light is found, even if it feels like you are totally in the dark. You are not alone. You are not the only person in the field this has happened to. We here.