The Atlantic magazine has come up with a creative but laughable way to defend the extreme doxxing by Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz, who once was a staff writer at their periodical. Their tactic is to broaden the definition of "doxxing" to make it fluid enough to serve the purposes of liberals. Therefore, according to the Atlantic's semantics game, what the Libs of Tik Tok did by presenting unedited videos uploaded by liberals to the very public TikTok platform was somehow "doxxing;" but when Lorenz exposed the name and other personal information of the creator of Libs of TikTok that wasn't really doxxing at all.
If you are scratching your heads at the absurdity of that stance, at least Atlantic admits it in the title of their article by Kaitlyn Tiffany on Friday, "Doxxing Means Whatever You Want It To." The subtitle submerges even deeper into the realm of the surreal with "The word once defined a category of behaviors. Now it expresses an emotion."
The Twitter account @libsoftiktok has gained a significant and influential following by reposting TikTok videos of LGBTQ teachers and suggesting that they may be guilty of “grooming” or other forms of sexual predation. In The Washington Post on Tuesday, the reporter Taylor Lorenz identified the previously pseudonymous woman behind Libs of TikTok as the Brooklyn real-estate salesperson Chaya Raichik. (Lorenz is a former Atlantic staff writer.)
Raichik’s identity is in the public interest, given the account’s political goals; it was also easily discovered via a domain-registration website. Yet, as soon as the story was published, Libs of TikTok and its right-wing fans, including the Trump-endorsed Senate candidate from Ohio, J. D. Vance, began tweeting and accusing Lorenz and The Washington Post of “doxxing”—a term that comes out of early-internet hacker circles and generally refers to the uncovering and deliberate weaponization of private, personal information. The conversation has continued since, thanks in part to Raichik’s Tuesday-night (voice-only) appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, during which she referred to Lorenz as “a known hypocrite” who is “known to dox people.”
The definition of doxxing is releasing a person's identifiable information on the internet. Such information can include but is not limited to their real name, address, phone number, bank numbers, and government identification numbers like social security.
And now Tiffany plays the incredibly silly semantics game in order to defend Lorenz:
The internet is a powerful machine for twisting the meaning of language. A new word gets pushed through various subcultures that use it for their own purposes, then out to broader audiences that will use it in whichever way they first hear it. Doxxing is a special example, in that it originally referred to somewhat specific, dangerous, and unethical behavior—“dropping documents,” or making private information public and calling unfriendly attention to it. By naming that behavior, the word allowed for the development of shared norms against it on the nascent internet. But doxxing has since then been used to describe so many different situations—with varying degrees of sincerity and fairness—that its original utility has faded. Where the term once defined a category, it now expresses an emotion. Whoever feels doxxed will claim to have been doxxed.
...In the case of Tuesday’s Washington Post story, fans of Libs of TikTok fixated on Raichik and her right to privacy, rather than on the people whose videos Libs of TikTok had plucked out of obscurity and served up for scrutiny. If you really wanted to call the Washington Post story an example of doxxing, you could make that argument. But if you wanted to call Libs of TikTok a longtime doxxing operation, that would make sense too. Any time a person’s information is “purposefully moved, lifted, and repurposed in other spaces” without their consent, that could be called “doxxing,” according to Stine Eckert, an associate professor of communication at Wayne State University who has written about the history of doxxing. There is “usually an element of bad intentions,” she told me. In his book, Kosseff goes further in advocating a “broad interpretation” of doxxing, saying that it can happen with or without “malicious intent.”
Finally, we find out that by a very selective definition of "doxxing," @LibsOfTikTok is the real doxxer while poor Lorenz is merely performing journalism.
In the case of Tuesday’s Washington Post story, fans of Libs of TikTok fixated on Raichik and her right to privacy, rather than on the people whose videos Libs of TikTok had plucked out of obscurity and served up for scrutiny. If you really wanted to call the Washington Post story an example of doxxing, you could make that argument. But if you wanted to call Libs of TikTok a longtime doxxing operation, that would make sense too. Any time a person’s information is “purposefully moved, lifted, and repurposed in other spaces” without their consent, that could be called “doxxing,” according to Stine Eckert, an associate professor of communication at Wayne State University who has written about the history of doxxing.
There you have it. Creative definitions of "doxxing" make Libs of TikTok guilty of that practice while Lorenz gets a free pass if you so desire thanks to very convenient semantic tricks.
