When Twitter abruptly suspended the accounts of several journalists without explanation, the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, hinted at the possible reason: he was allegedly misled.
“Dox, you’re getting suspended. End of story. That’s it,” he said in a Twitter Space audio discussion Thursday night, referring to the act of revealing someone’s personal details online.
Musk targeted journalists from The New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post and other outlets after suspending a Twitter account that tracked his private plane using publicly available data, an account Musk had previously said he would leave alone as a demonstration of his commitment. with freedom of expression. .
Read also | Elon Musk Responds After Norway’s Government Twitter Accounts Were Labeled ‘Nigeria’
Twitter updated its policy this week and said it would remove any tweet or account that shares someone’s live location if it’s not done to help with humanitarian efforts or during public events.
Several of the journalists whose accounts were suspended had written about the plane’s tracking Twitter account, as well as Musk’s reasoning for the new policy, which followed Musk’s claims that a family member in Los Angeles had been harassed earlier in the week.
WHAT IS DOXXING?
Doxxing, sometimes written as doxing, is a shortened version of “dropping dox” or documents.
Read also | Red lines… sanctions soon: EU official warns Musk about Twitter ban on journalists
It is generally a malicious practice of collecting private or identifying information and posting it online without the person’s permission, usually in an attempt to harass, threaten, embarrass, or retaliate.
Jeff Kosseff, a professor of cybersecurity law at the US Naval Academy who wrote a book on the subject, said doxing is not a legally defined term and can mean different things to different people. Some people think that it only applies to the exchange of private information. The Department of Homeland Security says that doxxers can use publicly available information, such as property records.
“If you were to take the DHS definition, just because plain data is already open source and publicly available doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not misleading,” Kosseff said. “But DHS has what I think most people include, which is malicious intent. And it’s very difficult to make that judgment about why someone is posting this information.”
Doxxing grew out of the online hacker culture of the 1990s, which valued anonymity. It was a way for hackers to unmask rivals they were fighting with, according to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky. But that aspect became less relevant as the definition of doxxing expanded and many more people moved online using their real names on their social media accounts, the firm says.
NOTABLE DOXXINGS
Celebrities, politicians, journalists, everyone has been doxed. This is how people with lower profiles have it.
In an early example, anti-abortion hackers in the 1990s infamously exposed the addresses, photos, and other information of abortion providers on a now-defunct website called the “Nuremberg Files.”
Another prominent victim was Brianna Wu, a software engineer who criticized the “Gamergate” movement, a 2014 harassment campaign against game developers. She told The Associated Press in 2016: “I got death threats, so I had to go to the police, they doxed me, so my personal information (was) available.”
Even the authorities are not immune. High-ranking police officers in several US cities, including Washington, Atlanta, Boston and New York, shared their addresses, emails and phone numbers on social media amid tensions over death in police custody of George Floyd.
IS DOXXING ILLEGAL?
Disclosure of publicly available information is more an ethical than a legal issue, said Kosseff, the cybersecurity expert.
It would be difficult to show responsibility for a crime, for example, if an account simply republished public flight data, he said. Any criminal charges that may be brought against anyone involved in the sharing of personal information are likely to be related to something like stalking, not doxing.
“As long as it’s based on publicly available data, I think there would be pretty strong First Amendment protections,” Kosseff said. Still, he said that could change depending on the jurisdiction of a potential case and the specific damages that occur.
WAS ELON MUSK DOXX BECAUSE OF THE SUSPENDED JOURNALISTS?
It depends on how you define doxxing.
The suspended journalists deny directly sharing information about Musk’s location. Musk’s definition of doxxing seems to be much broader than its original meaning, to include anyone who even links to personal information posted by someone else.
When some of the reporters, including the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, held an audio discussion on Twitter Spaces to discuss the suspensions Thursday night, Musk made a surprise appearance.
“You are suggesting that we are sharing your address, which is not true,” Harwell said. “I never published your address.”
“You posted the link to the address,” Musk replied.
Harwell argued that the journalists posted links to the @elonjet account that tracked his private jet as a normal course of information.
WHAT ABOUT MUSK’S OWN RECORD?
While it’s unclear whether Musk himself has misled anyone, as one of the suspended journalists has alleged, he has a history of calling people out and targeting them for harassment by his army of fanatics.
Business Insider columnist Linette Lopez, who spent years covering Musk, alleged in a tweet before his suspension Friday that Musk engaged in doxing “Montana Skeptic,” a prominent Tesla critic who contributed to the Seeking Alpha website. . His true identity was posted on Twitter several years ago.
The writer, whose real name is Lawrence Fossi, told Mediate earlier this year that Musk also called his workplace one day and threatened to sue over the writings.
Among other examples, Musk also faced a libel suit in 2019 after calling a British cave explorer a “pedophile boy” in an angry tweet. The man, Vernon Unsworth, had been involved in rescuing 12 boys and their soccer coach after they became trapped in a cave in Thailand in 2018. Musk defeated the lawsuit.
