Abstract
To doxx someone is to release identifying information that compromises their anonymity on an online platform. The existing scholarly engagement with doxxing is scant, couched within the legal frameworks of harm, harassment, and privacy. In my paper, I reimagine doxxing as an act invested with justice potential, by operationalising digital space as something that allows users to redraw the boundaries between themselves and others in agentic, and empowering, ways. By subverting doxxing from an issue of justice into a tool of justice, I complicate the framing of doxxing as a harm experience, providing insight into the ways that technology pivots between the synchronised facilitation of harm and justice potentials. I present and reflect upon a selection of Twitter threads that doxx landlords in the COVID-19 rental apocalypse. I am chiefly interested in exploring the following questions: under what guise is doxxing used as a technique of citizen and vigilante justice? When, and for what purposes, is doxxing undertaken by users to procure and bring about community justice needs? Drawing on the 2021 conference theme of ‘Pandemic Driven Opportunities and Challenges’, I hope to complicate our existing models of procedural justice, which we have seen collapse and atrophy under the pressures of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movements in 2020. I put forward that doxxing, as an alternative to justice, is a creative effort to ‘crowd-source’ justice outcomes when the law is unable to meet the needs of its citizens.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Doxxing, Justice Potential, Technology Facilitated Harms
