Miller: In the Pit thread “Fucking idiot coronavirus-loving rednecks in Michigan,” you edited a post of mine, claiming I was a little too close to doxxing people. I wholeheartedly disagree with your assessment.
Several violent right-winters were posting to private Facebook groups, advocating for the murder and lynching of Michigan’s governor over her stay-at-home order. They were calling for violence, they were horribly misogynistic.
A Detroit MetroTimes reporter got access to the groups. He quoted several of the individuals in his story, using their names. And since they were posting under their actual public Facebook accounts, it wasn’t hard for the reporter to verify several of their hometowns. For others, he didn’t include the city where they live, for whatever reason. The reporter also posted some screenshots of these violent posts, with the person’s profile pic included.
I decided to
[quote some of the more horrific posts]
(https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=22297272&postcount=239) these guys made in the aforementioned “Fucking idiot” thread, which were also included in the MetroTimes story. You took out all of the locations I included, including the ones directly mentioned in the MetroTimes story.
How did I find these fellas’ locations? I looked up some of their names on Facebook, most of them included their towns (viewable publicly), as well as a bunch of publicly-viewable anti-Whitmer and pro-Trump crap on their Facebook pages, and profile pics that matched the profile pics from the screenshots in the MetroTimes story.
I included no home addresses, no phone numbers, and no names that weren’t already named in the MetroTimes story. I did no Internet searches, paid for no background information on these fellas, just spent about 60 seconds doing a public Facebook search. I got the location information the exact same way the MetroTimes reporter did-- through these guys’ PUBLIC Facebook pages.
Since the original story ran, other news outlets (one cite, for example have picked it up, and included the same hometown information I included in my post. I assume these reporters and bloggers did the same simple Facebook search I did.
To reiterate: These guys posted this violent, misogynistic shit on Facebook (albeit in private groups), with their public profiles, and got caught by an investigative reporter. I simply posted the same location information that the reporter published, or I utilized the same resource he did (Facebook search) to find the publicly-listed city these guys live in, and included it in my post.
Why is it considered “reporting,” and thus allowable, when a news outlet publishes this information, but it’s “doxxing” when I do it here? I say it’s not doxxing, and I simply ask you to unedit my post and restore the information I originally included.
If all of that information was freely available to all and highly visible in the sources, then just why did you need to repeat it all? What was the purpose of doing that?
Why do you suppose out was important to include that information in the MetroTimes, or Deadline Detroit, or any of the other media outlets who have since published our?
Why do you suppose it was important to include that information in the MetroTimes, or Deadline Detroit, or any of the other media outlets who have since published it? What was the purpose of those outlets posting that specific information?
For the same reason this place isn’t just a collection of people posting links. We quote, we research, we post commentary, we post information we find.
What’s the difference Colibri? I found information about people in published news stories and on Facebook, and I shared it. I quoted them, I identified them, just as the reporters covering this story are doing. Nothing more than is currently being covered in news stories across the Internet.
And if we’re getting picky about not answering questions, you still haven’t answered any of my questions.
Is there a rule that we have to explain our intent when sharing information that has already been published by the media?
God knows we reported our resident right wing trolls (for example HurricaneDitka, RIP) for name-checking the alleged Ukraine whistleblower wherever they possibly could. That information had not been officially released yet, the media were refraining from reporting it. I reported it as doxing and there was no mod attention whatsoever (he is now banned but IIRC it was on some unrelated jerk-adjacent technicality).
Either anything reported in public media is fair game, or it is not. There should be a single clear standard.
Are you a reporter? Is it your duty to report all details of a story?
Or are you a poster on a message board who doesn’t really have a reason to go into that level of detail but decided to anyway?
For instance, the now edited post, it seems to effectively get its point across without any of the location information, clearly that information was extraneous to whatever point you wanted to get across, so why did you feel the need to include it?
Ok, I’ll run by you, as well as Colibri and maybe some other mods, whether information is deemed “important” enough for me to post in the future. I wasn’t aware this was a rule around here. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
If it is on Facebook, is it “private” or “public”? Just how “private” (hidden, hard to find) must information of this type be for it to deserve the label in question?
The issue isn’t what was reported in the public media - in the post in question, I didn’t edit out the names, which were in the original article, just the locations, which had not been in the article, and which the OP had added after doing his own research. Facebook profiles are public, but that’s not quite the same thing as being “in the public media.”
I don’t think there’s a bright line that we can point at and say, “Stuff on this side is definitely not doxxing, and stuff on that side definitely is.” Because this sort of situation involves real world consequences, not just for the person being doxxed, but also for this message board in terms of legal liability, I think it’s wisest to give the entire area a wide berth, instead of parsing the precise boundaries of “how much personal information can I disclose before it becomes doxxing.”
A person’s home town isn’t very specific identifying information, but it is identifying information. And maybe you didn’t have to do very much additional research, beyond what was in the article, to find it, but you did have to do some. You did research to find identifying information about people in the media. That’s doxing. It wasn’t very extreme doxing, which is why you only got a note and an edit instead of a warning.
Your intent in posting it is relevant to our rule against calls to action. Now, you didn’t suggest that anyone retaliate against these people, but the information you posted could aid in doing so for those so inclined.
As I said, you didn’t actually do this but I think the post was edging in that direction.