CNN is guilty of gross double standards in covering internet researchers on a mission to expose their political enemies. On Saturday, CNN updated a previous post, “People are getting fired for allegedly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder. It looks like a coordinated effort,” by CNN Business “breaking news writer” Ramishah Maruf.
The headline conveyed the hostility of Maruf’s story, adding much emphasis on conservatives “doxxing” (revealing personal information on private citizens for the purpose of targeted harassment) the angry left.
Dozens of social media posts and messages about the murder of Charlie Kirk, including some that celebrated his death, are being spotlighted by conservative activists, Republican elected officials and a doxxing website as part of an online campaign to punish the posters behind the messages.
Prominent far-right influencer Laura Loomer, a US senator, and a site called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” have all drawn attention to people who have posted messages about Kirk’s Wednesday assassination.
The campaigns show how social media posts or personal messages — even by accounts with few followers or from people who are not public figures — could easily be surfaced and publicized, and people’s personal information can be spread across the internet at a time when doxxing is easier than ever.
The Charlie’s Murderers site, whose domain was registered anonymously and which says it is not a doxxing site, claims it has “received nearly 30,000 submissions,” according to a message on the site’s front page on midday Saturday. Currently, there are a few dozen submissions published on the site. “This website will soon be converted into a searchable database of all 30,000 submissions, filterable by general location and job industry. This is a permanent and continuously-updating archive of Radical activists calling for violence.”
Maruf had a weird quibble.
Most people whose messages have been posted on the site do not seem to refer to themselves as activists, nor did it seem many were calling for violence. Administrators for the site did not respond to a request for comment….
Maruf cited a bad example of supposed victims "now receiving a barrage of harassment and are worried about becoming the victims of violence."
Rebekah Jones, a former Florida coronavirus data scientist who in 2022 claimed the state of Florida pressured her to manipulate pandemic data, said she contacted the police twice about death threats and about the “hit list,” her name for the anonymous site. Jones’ claims about Florida’s pandemic data were found to be “unsubstantiated,” according to a state inspector general report, a finding she disagrees with.
Jones is just a little bit more controversial than that whitewashed paragraph implies. But trust the Biden administration official-turned-professor:
“It is absolutely fair to call it a coordinated harassment campaign,” said Laura Edelson, assistant professor at Northeastern University and director of the Cybersecurity for Democracy Project. “That’s absolutely why it exists, to coordinate and target the harassment toward the selected individuals.”
Compare that to CNN’s Sara Murray’s June 2021 celebration of “Sedition Hunters,” under the cozy headline, “Meet the internet sleuths tracking down the January 6 insurrectionists.” No concerns about doxxing here. Murray defended this brave band of online leftist sleuths (don’t dare call them doxxers!).
The Deep State Dogs are just one group in a sprawling social media community dedicated to rooting out insurrectionists after January 6. Experts and members of the community describe it as diverse and diffuse but united by a common goal: Accountability. But their efforts are also a rebuttal to Republicans looking to whitewash the horrifying events of that January day.
Murray reveled in the tactics of the “online sedition hunters….poring over video, images and social media footprints – crowdsourcing information to try to determine the identities of the rioters.”
Surely this next part would have gotten higher play if it had been done by “Exposing Charlie’s Murderers." Murray avoided the D-word, instead using the euphemism “misfires.”
The community has evolved since its early days, members said, when the zeal from amateur sleuths led to some misfires.
“There was a tremendous amount of desire and eagerness, on the part of people who’d never done this kind of digging before to get involved and to help out,” Scott-Railton said. “And that resulted in some overenthusiastic people making some misidentifications.”
