Doxxing, Privacy and Gendered Harassment. The Shock and Normalization of Veillance Cultures

Abstract

We conducted 15 in-depth interviews with women and men in Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, and the United States who were victims of doxxing. The goal was to understand their experiences, their responses, and the consequences they faced. We understand doxxing as a complex, gendered communicative process of harassment. Doxxers use digital media technologies to expose personal information without consent given by those to whom the personal information belongs. We apply a feminist approach to surveillance studies to doxxing, focusing on the constructions of daily, habitual, and ubiquitous assemblages of veillances that disproportionately impact vulnerable individuals. We found that gendered aspects shaped the flow and suspected intent of doxxing and subsequent harassment. Victims experienced uncertainty, loss of control, and fear, while law enforcement and social media providers only helped in a few cases to pursue doxxers or remove unwanted personal information. We ultimately extend the definition of doxxing by considering the ubiquitous nature of information shared online in gendered veillance cultures. Our findings lead us to advocate for protecting the contextual integrity of entering personal information into expected, intentional, or desired spaces.

Harm Imbrication and Virtualised Violence: Reconceptualising the Harms of Doxxing

“…Key among these new behaviours, Eckert and Metzger-Riftkin (2020b) argued, are the information sharing behaviours promoted by technologies of surveillance capitalism (see Zuboff 2019). Such information sharing behaviours not only increase the reach of doxxed information but, as Eckert and Metzger-Riftkin (2020b) noted, also increase the likelihood of doxxing occurring through encouraging individuals to share PII on digital platforms. For this reason, they conceptualised doxxing as: a gendered process enmeshing online and offline spaces in which others' personal information is shared intentionally or unintentionally but non-consensually, triggering negative fall out for affected users and their networks.…”

“…To date, the majority of research on doxxing has come not from criminology but from media studies (see Anderson and Wood 2021), where researchers have generated important insights on the veillance cultures informing contemporary doxxing (Eckert and Metzger-Riftkin 2020b) and the emergence of dox-for-hire services (Snyder et al 2017: 433). The small number of criminological studies that have examined doxxing have tended to frame it as a form of technology-facilitated violence (see Anderson and Wood 2021;Dragiewicz et al 2018).…”

Hate speech’s double damage: A semi-automated approach toward direct and indirect targets

“…As such, degradation with references to (4) gender, including either hostile or benevolent references to gender identification or sexuality (cf. Chen et al, 2020;Eckert & Metzger-Riftkin, 2020), (5) racism, including hostile references to physical appearance and/or the belonging to minorities (cf. George, 2015;Nielsen, 2002), and (6) religion (cf.…”

Contributions to reducing online gender harassment: Social re-norming and appealing to empathy as tried-and-failed techniques

“…Women can experience psychological harm such as increased anxiety and depression, and decreased wellbeing (Cortina & Magley, 2003). They can be further victimised by "doxxing", whereby their personal information is distributed online to cybermobs (e.g., Gamergate) (Eckert & Metzger-Riftkin, 2020). Harassers may even solicit actual physical violence from their communities and followers (e.g., INCELS) (Regehr, 2022).…”