How ‘Doxxing’ Became a Mainstream Tool in the Culture Wars

Riding a motorized pony and strumming a cigar box ukulele, Dana Cory led a singalong to the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.” “You’re a Nazi and you’re fired, it’s your fault,” she sang. “You were spotted in a mob, now you lost your freaking job. You’re a Nazi and you’re fired, it’s your fault.” “All together now!” Ms. Cory, 48, shouted to a cheering crowd in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood on Saturday. They were protesting a rally planned by far-right organizers about a mile away.

“Dox a Nazi all day, every day,” she said. Online vigilantism has been around since the early days of the internet. So has “doxxing” — originally a slang term among hackers for obtaining and posting private documents about an individual, usually a rival or enemy. To hackers, who prized their anonymity, it was considered a cruel attack. But doxxing has emerged from subculture websites like 4Chan and Reddit to become something of a mainstream phenomenon since a white supremacist march on Charlottesville, Va., earlier this month.

“Originally it was little black-hat hacker crews who were at war with each other — they would take docs, like documents, from a competing group and then claim they had ‘dox’ on them,” said Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who wrote a book about the hacker vigilante group Anonymous. “There was this idea that you were veiled and then uncovered.”

Now the online hunt to reveal extremists has raised concerns about unintended consequences, or even collateral damage. A few individuals have been misidentified in recent weeks, including a professor from Arkansas who was wrongly accused of participating in the neo-Nazi march. And some worry that the stigma of being outed as a political extremist can only reinforce that behavior in people who could still be talked out of it.

Doxxing was on the minds of a number of protesters on the streets of San Francisco on Saturday. In the Castro and Mission neighborhoods and Alamo Square, the home of the famous row of houses known as the Painted Ladies, thousands participated in counter-demonstrations to the right-wing rally. There was the energy of a street party — children and dogs joined in, protesters shared baked goods, and the bars nearby were full.

Marla Wilson, 35, of San Francisco, said she was appalled when she saw white supremacists marching so brazenly in Charlottesville. Doxxing, she believed, was an effective way to make people think twice about being so bold with their racism. “Some of what is happening now will make these white supremacists realize why their grandparents wore hoods,” Ms. Wilson said. “At least then there was shame.”

The ethics — and even the definition — of doxxing is murky. It is the dissemination of often publicly available information. And, some at the protest asked, are you really doxxing a person if he or she is marching on a public street, face revealed and apparently proud? It is not as though they are hiding their identities. But Tony McAleer, a former white supremacist leader who now runs Life After Hate, a rehabilitation program for neo-Nazis, called doxxing a “ passive aggressive violence.” He said publicizing the names and workplaces of neo-Nazis may offer some level of solace to people outraged by them, but it makes his job more difficult.

“For us, it slows things down. We try to integrate people back to humanity,” Mr. McAleer said. “If isolation and shame is the driver for people joining these types of groups, doxxing certainly isn’t the answer.” In short, once someone is labeled a Nazi on the internet, that person stays a Nazi on the internet.

Internet vigilantism has a checkered history. In April 2013, amateur detectives on Reddit used screen shots of security camera footage to identify two men as being connected to the Boston Marathon bombing. The New York Post put the image on the cover under the headline “Bag Men.” But the two young men pictured were not the bombers. At one point, Reddit sleuths even set their sights on a student from Brown University, about 60 miles away in Providence, R.I., who was missing. He had nothing to do with the bombing; he had committed suicide.

The next year, doxxing became a tool by in the “Gamergate” controversy, an online dispute purportedly about ethics in video game journalism that became a foundational moment for some of today’s fringe far right. Mostly male video-game players began to publish personal information — including home address and phone numbers — for women in their community, typically journalists and game designers who they said were unfairly politicizing gaming culture.