> Every person who, with intent to place another person in reasonable fear for his or her safety, or the safety of the other person’s immediate family, by means of an electronic communication device, and without consent of the other person, and for the purpose of imminently causing that other person unwanted physical contact, injury, or harassment, by a third party, electronically distributes, publishes, e-mails, hyperlinks, or makes available for downloading, personal identifying information, including, but not limited to, a digital image of another person, or an electronic message of a harassing nature about another person, which would be likely to incite or produce that unlawful action, is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in a county jail, by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.
If we're to believe that information that is technically public can be "doxxing" if not widespread, then if I post about a party at my house, and then you share that post with lots of people who want to hurt me, that's doxxing and a violation of that law.
> LoTT re-uploads video content
This is not at all what LoTT does. That's what the LoTT TikTok did, but it was banned on TikTok. Current things that LoTT twitter account is posting about are:
- Yoel Roth
- A drag queen event at the white house
- A number of videos and images of drag queens that were not posted by the performer
- Taylor Lorenz
- etc.
And was repeatedly suspended from twitter for (incorrectly) claiming a hospital were doing hysterectomies on kids, resulting in bomb threats at said hospital, and then doing it again.
"re-uploading content users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing" is a misrepresentation of the account.
You are the one misrepresenting here. Someone involved in censoring a sitting US President is newsworthy by any definition as is someone who accepted a very public invitation to the White House.
Taylor Lorenz doxxed LoTT (not even debatable here with the article even being edited to remove some of the doxxed links). Speaking about this and the public journalist who did it to you certainly seems appropriate.
As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
> Over the 3-year study period, a total of 204 gender affirmation surgical cases were identified: 177 chest/top and 27 genital/bottom surgeries (Table 1). Most cases were masculinizing chest reconstructions 177/204 (86.8%) with 65/177 (36.7%) of those patients being less than 18 years of age.
> The Center for Gender Surgery (CfGS) at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH) was the first pediatric center in the United States to offer gender-affirming chest surgeries for individuals over 15 years old and genital surgeries for those over 17 years of age. In the four years since its inception, CfGS has completed over 300 gender-affirming surgeries.
> You are the one misrepresenting here. Someone involved in censoring a sitting US President is newsworthy
Whether or not they are newsworthy or appropriate, information about Roth and Lorenz clearly isn't "video content the users had already explicitly uploaded for the purpose of public viewing". If you want to change your argument, feel free, but don't accuse me of misrepresentation and then lie.
Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
> As to Boston Children's Hospital, you were lied to. A study from March this year clearly states that 36.7% of their patients were under 18 and as young as 15.
No I was not. A hysterectomy is not a chest surgery, and the hospital doesn't provide them to children (https://archive.vn/7R44e). The hospital may provide some services to children, but hysterectomies aren't one of them. Again, do not misrepresent my comments.
> Of course, if you want to make the argument that Roth is notable enough, you can. But I want to see you thread the needle about how doxxing Roth is acceptable, but Musk isn't.
I'm a bit confused by this.
I have just checked Libs of Tiktok's Twitter feed and only found two tweets referencing Yoel Roth, one bemoaning the fact that LoTT is receiving threats and that if it were Roth it'd be national news[1], and another[2] from November the 4th flagging a tweet to him and wondering why it is still up.
Where is LoTT doxxing Roth?
As to the stuff circulating about Roth, it was all public to begin with, right? I certainly don't wish any threats to come his way but that's threats and harassment, not doxxing. Maybe I missed something.
And more, all recent. You're correct, I guess that I should have said "harass" not doxx, but yeah there's tons of stuff LoTT is doing to stoke harassment at Roth (like imply he's a groomer: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1601778632552484865)
I'll be frank and say that I don't find any of that to be harassment nor inciteful of anything but opprobrium, and I do find some of his tweets shown to make it easy to question his position. I think the tweet about whether students can consent is being unfairly taken out of context (the article it's from[1] is fair and not anything like the way it's being portrayed) but some of the other tweets and his PhD thesis… the criticism are valid (to be made, not necessarily correct).
Still, no one should be in fear because of their legal speech - that makes it unfree - whether that's Roth or LoTT or Musk or anyone else, but I don't see that those tweets would be liable for that.
I don't know if the tweet qualifies as harassment, but it's certainly making entirely baseless allegations that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types.
By using heterosexual, non-paedophilic women as one end of the spectrum, and paedophiles at the other, we can see that indeed, such statements by the former would raise no eyebrows. Such statements by the latter would raise eyebrows. That's because of context/prior behaviour.
Roth has a lot of tweets that would provide context that invites raised eyebrows, especially given his PhD dissertation, and his behaviour as head of Trust and Safety, where he suppressed the #groomer hashtag, and given an overall context where people of Roth's political persuasion are hyping up drag queens dancing for children and he's actively suppressing criticism of it. That's so easy to explain.
I also might add that women have a biological urge to give birth and take into account the male's skills as a father. To say that (some or all) gay guys have this may be true but it seems a stretch, and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM? At the very least, his tweets are utterly stupid and reckless. If a headteacher tweets "wow, women are hot but women holding babies, extra hot!" wouldn't you pause? How about if he tweets out from his main account "I have a secret dirty twitter account", you wouldn't raise an eyebrow? Please.
As to "that could easily lead to this person being targeted by crazy vigilante types", firstly, that could be said of anything, though we do have another spectrum, running from (to a reasonable person) non-threatening through marking out undesirables to directly threatening. The marking can lead to actual threatening situations, like before a genocide, but they also overlap with valid criticism, and since we're not in a genocide situation I struggle to see how the tweets in question reach that bar. Find something that says "we should kill paedos" from LoTT and you'll have a much stronger case, otherwise you've taken up a position where you're arguing against someone who's against paedophilia, simply because they're a political opponent. That's how this endless cycle continues.
You are basically just saying, in a long winded way, that it’s ok for straight women to be attracted to straight men holding babies, but it’s not ok for gay men to be attracted to gay men holding babies. It’s a strikingly clear case of homophobia. One could more easily believe that it was unintentional on your part if you hadn’t written your third paragraph trying to justify it with back-of-an-envelope evo psych.
> and why express it out loud when you're supposed to look like you give a damn about CSAM?
At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
> You are basically just saying, in a long winded way, that it’s ok for straight women to be attracted to straight men holding babies, but it’s not ok for gay men to be attracted to gay men holding babies.
What a strange way to misinterpret something long winded. Should I have written more for you, or do you think that your preconceived notions would render that effort as moot as it is now?
> At least get your timelines straight. He was an academic at the time and not working for twitter.
a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
b) He was writing about letting underage children onto Grindr for some nebulous reasons around that time:
> accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.
I can think of better ways for teenagers to connect than a hookup app. Can't you?
c) American date format is idiotic, I'm not interested enough to decode them all, perhaps you could do it for me as you're so precise with what others have written.
What he wrote about was how to deal with teenagers using Grindr and other networks already.
"While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults."[1]
No, what he wrote - and you’ve so helpfully provided the quote - about was allowing teenagers to use those apps formally, with some illogical argument about general purpose platforms.
There’s a reason gays use Grindr, because they have a sexual preference and want to meet others with that sexual preference for sex. If they wanted to just chat they could go on Twitter and, you know, chat with anyone - gay or not - because it’s general purpose. Is it difficult to find gay people on Twitter?
If some bloke starts writing that we should let young girls on Tinder because they already use it and, god forbid they could just use Twitter for a chat, it’s too general purpose, they need a hookup app for interaction, feel free to label him a paedo too because that’s what it sounds like.
I would love to hear your 'better ways' for queer teens to connect with each other. In general it is much more difficult for queer teenagers to meet each other (especially in more rural or conservative areas) than it is for straight teenagers. From the age of 16 I certainly made use of the internet to meet other gay people (in the early 2000s). While there are certainly risks associated (as indeed there are for adults!), one has to be realistic about the availability of other options – some of which may be considerably less safe. To me, it seems quite a sensible suggestion to have properly vetted apps that teenagers could access without lying about their age. This would probably make people safer on average than the status quo, where teenagers still use dating apps designed for adults.
>a) Were all his pronouncements during this period?
I don't know what counts as one of his 'pronouncements', so you will have to check this for yourself.
>What’s wrong with Twitter? Tiktok, Instagram, Snapchat... Mastodon?
Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you. This seems like a fairly basic point. If you're living in a small town, you're not going to be able to easily find other queer people near you on any of those apps.
But why do you think that teens will be magically be safer on Snapchat or other such apps? This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
>Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
> But why do you think that teens will be magically be safer on Snapchat or other such apps?
Because they're not full of men explicitly looking for hookups.
> This really seems to just be based on an excessive fear of 'gay' apps.
Yes, it's not that Roth was making an argument indistinguishable from what a paedophile might write, nor that if he'd said it about heterosexual children and Tinder the same logic would apply, it must be that everyone against him is bigoted!
You already tried that earlier on in the thread and it sounded just as desperately idiotic then given that it required completely missing the example given of the headteacher, or just noticing what is obvious.
Rather than seeing bigotry where it's convenient - or claiming you see it - try reading the arguments put to you and coming up with something that is cogent.
> > Why are you being so strange about a normal word?
> In general he's obviously tweeted both before and after joining twitter. So if a 'pronouncement' is just anything he said on twitter, the answer to your question is obvious.
It's not, but again, if it's inconvenient to answer then don't.
> Err, the fact that none of them offer a way to find other queer users in the same area as you.
Users on all those apps have bios and can share their preferences and location, all the apps have search. You managed to meet people with less apps, less people on the internet, worse search etc. If there's a real need for this, someone can build it. As Roth himself points out, there probably isn't, but then he skips on to letting children into Grindr formally. Is noticing non sequiturs also bigotry? Do let me know.
If you’re correct that Snapchat etc. can be used to search for nearby queer people in the same way as Grindr, then that only goes to undermine your argument that teens will somehow be safer on one than the other. However, AFAIK, none of the apps you mention make it possible to search by sexual orientation. This makes them fairly clunky as a means of meeting queer people in your local area – especially if you are not in a large urban area.
The irony here is that you seem to basically agree with Roth. That is, you are fine with gay teens meeting each other via apps, but think that these apps should be age appropriate. For some reason you seem to think that Grindr is super scary, even though people do the exact same stuff on it (chat and share photos) that they do on Snapchat, Insta, or any number of other apps used by teens. An age-appropriate version of Grindr, which is what Roth was suggesting, would probably be *safer* than many existing apps. Snapchat, for example, will happily let you send nudes or other explicit imagery that can could quite easily be automatically blocked in the majority of cases.
By the way, if you think that Snapchat isn't full of 'men explicitly looking for hookups', I have news for you...
Neither Lorenz nor LibsOfTikTok would admit they intended to cause fear. But posting someone's contact details is not normal nor does it serve a serious public interest.
Sweeney isn't on the same level at all. He's tracking jets. Airports are full of security. The last time Internet posts led to an attack on an airplane was never, unless we're counting al-Qaeda's private message infrastructure.
You don’t have to attack a jet in the airport. You can attack a car on the only road from the airport for example if you know exactly when and where to attack. (Also, not all the airports have good security, smaller airports don’t.)
> You can attack a car on the only road from the airport for example if you know exactly when and where to attack.
Was this the case with the stalker? From what I can tell the airplane landed the day before, and I haven't seen any evidence that the incident occurred near the airport.
Despite Musks claims, there's zero evidence that Sweeney has ever done anything with intent to place someone in fear for their safety. And, given that it operated for years without issue, there is in fact compelling evidence to the contrary.
I mean, I never said what Sweeney was doing is considered doxxing, or whether his behavior could lead to reasonable fear for safety. I'd rather let the lawyers untangle this annoying mess
really didn't expect my initial comment to lead to a shitstorm...
Just because information is publicly available doesn’t mean it’s not doxxing. It’s the act itself. Otherwise every accusation of doxxing could be denied with a single level of indirection.
No, the bar for “doxxing” is whether you’re disseminating private or sensitive identifying information about a person, and particularly if you’re doing so with malicious intent.
Given my real name — which is available on Twitter — my home address is not difficult to obtain from online, public, governmental real estate records.
Despite the fact that the information is public, it would still be doxxing — not to mention inappropriate, violating, and frightening — if someone decided to dig up that address and post it to a broad audience on Twitter that would have otherwise been unaware of it. This is even more true if that audience is hostile, and my information is being posted in an attempt to harass and/or intimidate.
It helps if you use a word if you use the common definition of that word.
If you want to expand the definition of the word doxxing then that's fine but you'll have to have that conversation all by yourself.
I'll just use this one:
"Doxing" is a neologism. It originates from a spelling alteration of the abbreviation "docs" (for "documents") and refers to "compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone".Essentially, doxing is revealing and publicizing the records of an individual, which were previously private or difficult to obtain. "
I’ll just use this one, from the first paragraph of the very same page you cited:
> Doxing or doxxing (originally spelled in 1337 as d0xing) is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the internet. Historically, the term has been used interchangeably to refer to both the aggregration of this information from public source or record databases and social media websites (like Facebook), as well as the publication of previously private information obtained through criminal or otherwise fraudulent means such as hacking and social engineering.
So this is doxxing, and you dishonestly cherry-picked an incomplete definition. In case any confusion remains, here’s the Oxford Languages’ definition:
> search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
There is nothing 'personally identifiable' about an airplane, it's a plane, not a person.
Posting your home address which you've kept out of the public eye is doxing, posting the whereabouts of any aircraft that broadcasts that information to all receivers is not. That's why you can find this information all over the internet, the only place where you currently can't find Musk's jet is on Twitter. And that's before we get into his free-speech arguments which apparently were a bit inconsistent.
Or would you like to accuse the FAA of doxing as well?
How far out of the public eye does your address have to be? I have filed a few patents and I run a company, and both of those put my address in prominently searchable public records. If you dig a little deeper, the deed to my house is a public record accessible through a 15-year-old website, and going even further, you can do a credit report on me and find all of my past addresses.
I know people wish this weren't the case, but your address isn't exactly private information. Anyone can find it easily for anyone else.
That's true. But if you were to for instance publish that address with a call to action or if you were to compile a list of addresses of politicians with a call to action you'd quickly end up on the wrong side of the law. That is doxing. Merely looking up someone's address used to be a matter of looking in the phone book. And people that did not want to be in the phone book had unlisted numbers.
So the bar for doxing is definitely a low one, but in this particular case it isn't met. I can see why Musk is irritated that that account exists, even more so because it didn't go away at the first request by someone as powerful as him, and that makes it personal. See the whole saga with that diver for a typical response. But that doesn't mean that the person manning that account is doing something illegal and that is the bar which Elon Musk himself set not all that long ago, and which is what makes this news.
If he had been a bit smarter about this he would have just said: "I'm irritated by you, this is my site and you're gone". That would be that. But now there are all these logical pretzels why this is illegal and all that other stuff that people - and Musk - do on twitter is not because 'free speech'. The two are incompatible, and he knows it.
Yeah I don't understand this at all. If I told you right now that I'm arriving at LAX in 1 hour you still have no chance of finding me, and it's transient, I'll be somewhere else private very soon.
I don't see how it's any different from a public figure saying they'll be attending any public event.
Sure, it always helps if everyone can agree what the subject matter is, but at its core the issue isn't whether behavior X fits someone's definition of doxxing, it's whether behavior X is illegal. Something can be illegal but not doxxing, or doxxing but not illegal.
And in the case of Musk, secondary issues arise, such as the fact that in the US lawsuits can be commenced for almost any reason, and how Musk's tremendous wealth, power, and social influence allows him to hold others hostage to his whims and malleable ethical positions.
It isn't illegal as far as I can see and it isn't doxxing as far as I understand the term. It isn't classy either, and I wouldn't do it but whoever operates those accounts should be free to do so under the rules that Elon Musk set himself a few weeks ago.
The main criterium for Twitter rules changes appears to be whether or not Elon is personally inconvenienced. Which is fine by me but then he should drop the 'free speech' act and stop pretending that he understands the degree to which the former team managed to eke out the closest workable compromise on uniting free speech whilst still having a legal and functional website. That coin does not seem to have dropped yet.
Principles such as absolute free speech only mean something if you uphold them even if you are personally inconvenienced.
I agree, except to add that I unfortunately don't think Musk's principles are very different from most people's, in that it seems that most people only care about their own free speech and are completely fine with the speech of their ideological opponents being repressed.
Very true, but most people don’t brand themselves as “free speech absolutists” and make a big public spectacle about how their position is morally superior to all others.
Exactly. Just because information is publicly available, doesn't mean it's easy to find or access. Doxxing makes it easy to access and reference, and bridges the gap between a pseudonyms and real identity
Fair, I should clarify: it is not illegal in any of the locations that Musk or Jack Sweeney operate in. Musk going after Sweeney would hopefully get thrown out at the anti-SLAPP stage. Unfortunately, my go-to person for such questions (@popehat) just left Twitter because of how awfully Musk is running it.
I don't want to ban you, but if this keeps up, we'll end up having to. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
