I'm concerned that the continued existence of a certain post is normalizing Doxxing "people we don't like", and that's not okay.
Totally expect to see a sea of "Nazi Sympathizer" comments, but look. I don't think we should be Doxxing anyone so that we don't invite folks to Doxx us.
I don't think this is radical, but apparently this opinion is somehow tantamount to being an actual Nazi in that thread.
I don't wish to remain in a community that says that Doxxing is bad unless we disagree with the victim - and I think that the post's continued existence communicates this. Sure, it's a federated post and not from our community, but honestly, I think it should be removed from Beehaw. I've already removed it from my tucson.social instance since I'm in no mood to deal with retaliatory doxxing.
Post link - https://beehaw.org/post/10286519
To be clear, the Moderators have been removing the worst offending comments since the article itself doesn't actually Dox anyone, but navigating to the source thread on lemmy.ml provides easy access to ALL the doxxed information. As such, I think the whole post should be removed and/or locked.
Update: Post has been removed - I have no further issues. As an aside - good lord Beehaw - I get it I'm a Nazi apparently. I'll get out of your hair and delete my account later this evening. Sheesh.
Okay, so the discussions on Discord have revealed to me that I shouldn't stay here.
Apparently it is okay to Dox those we don't like here.
So, apparently if things are getting normalized we should just "go along with it"?
OOOkay, I'll get the popcorn.
"Apparently it is okay to Dox those we don’t like here."
just so we're clear here: not only is this obviously me speaking personally (which the screenshot illustrates)--and not only is this a position i'll stand by absolutely--but i think this is also a circumstance where "objecting to doxing" is really silly. many of these people aren't 4chan edgelords, they're just aspiring terrorists. Midgard is widely believed to be associated with the Nordic Resistance Movement, which has a long history of criminality, violence, ethnic hatred, killing, and attempted terrorism. NRM in its own right has a wide array of connections with other violent, neo-Nazi organizations like Atomwaffen and the Azov Battalion. the supposedly objectionable article says as much.
i think it's pretty understandable to want to publicize the names and addresses of people in the vicinity of or party to an organization like this for a wide variety of reasons, especially if you're a group they might target! but, and this is another thing that makes this a rather bizarre hill to die on: the article being objected to also didn't do that. it did not provide a link to any of the information in question, it just reported on it being posted and its significance. this is not "doxing", this is just journalism about a doxing event. add to this not being posted on Beehaw (i.e., something we're not even directly responsible for from a moderation perspective), and this seems like a wildly overblown reaction to a pretty banal article reporting on an action that i think is extremely morally and socially defensible.
I never claimed the article to do that. I claimed that despite the article not doxing anybody that the comments in the thread were.
And It was just one of many issues with the thread. It was very much. Also a hostile and toxic place to be. It stood head and shoulders over other similarly distasteful posts which is why I had issue with it.
As on Reddit, no one really cares about the not so popular posts. But this post was top of the all feed drawing in more distasteful discourse.
My position is that doxing is a form of violence. Violence in this definition is anything that restricts your choices. (Source: Philosophy Tube). Thus doxxing is violence since it forces one to move, react, or retaliate in response to the leaked information.
It is never acceptable to me - full stop.
The only entity with "Doxxing" permissions are government agencies with robust oversight such that this violence is only used when it's the lesser evil over not.
okay but this just invites the obvious question:[^1] why is it bad to do violence against a group of people who are disproportionately either Neo-Nazi terrorists or people who sympathize with/fund Neo-Nazi terrorists? let's be clear, this is an unambiguously Neo-Nazi storefront that has been compromised, and its founders are again widely believed to be connected to a group whose membership engages in constant acts of violence and aspires to do terrorism against minority groups. there are really no "innocent people" being theoretically caught in the crossfire here.[^2] i will once again restate that i think "being doxed" is quite a tame social prescription to adhering to an openly genocidal ideology.
[^1]: even if we don't debate the merits of this definition, which i think you could because i think this is a very dubiously workable definition of violence [^2]: and even so, the group which compromised the data is offering to make amends with people who have been compromised and expunge them from the lists
In 99% of cases, you would be correct. However, these are Neo-Nazis we're talking about here. Like, if they got their way, I'd be dead, so so would a lot of other innocent people. Their ideology has caused unspeakable horrors, and it'll happen again if we let our guard down. There has to be a social cost to being a Nazi. Like, this shit is getting way too close to the right wing mainstream. This isn't a matter of just "people we don't like". They're dangerous. Name them. Shame them. Ruin their lives. Force their evil ideology back into the deep, dark fringes where it belongs.
Does the violence of Doxxing accomplish that? I see no evidence that Doxing has done anything but embolden them. For me, if I look at the actual impact of these sorts of things, it doesn't seem that Doxxing is effective at actually fighting back, and is, in fact, making things more dangerous for folks like you and me, not less. Sure we get that rush of dopamine when "Karen the Racist" is fired for her own stunts when revealed to the company, but we don't check back in within 6 months to see that these people have largely recovered.
Retribution only begets more retribution. Personally, I'm more for restorative justice - even for those we find reprehensible.
Heck if the purpose is to "defend ourselves", going the route of retribution seems counter to that goal.
As for social costs - they already exist. I wouldn't be a friend with a proud neo-nazi, nor would most people. But this level of Doxxing is amplifying that social cost to unproductive levels - and I fear it serves as nothing more than a leftist/liberal virtue signalling performance.
If a drug dealer should receive compassion because of the systemic inequities that led him to "offend" - thus deserving restorative justice, why are closet Nazi's that much different? We already know that retributive justice doesn't work, and many of us would rather see it dismantled. Is every Nazi unfixable? I think the only people that can really answer this question are Germans. (And if anyone from Germany is here now, I'd love to hear your view on this - if it worked, what didn't work, etc)
Sometimes you just need to throw some hands to prevent worse violence down the line. It isn't a perfect world and we're a bunch of upjumped apes. I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be better than that, but we should at least be realistic about the hand we've been dealt. That being said, perhaps you're right about going the restorative justice route. I just worry because, this is getting normalized way past what anyone should feel comfortable about. Like, I feel we should do everything we can to prevent people from becoming Nazis. If naming and shaming deters people from going down that rabbit hole, I think we at least have to consider it.
Agreed, but in our world, with the powers that be sympathizing with fascism more and more, it's increasingly important to never be seen as throwing the first punch. Throwing hands needs to be in response to something meaningful. Otherwise we cede the moral ground in the eyes of many and reduce our ability to build more political power.
To be clear, I understand what I'm asking for seems AGONIZING, to "turn the other cheek" feels incredibly dangerous in the moment. But we have to understand that "turning the other cheek" is a social performance that helps build our power, and makes us safer. Doxing, by contrast, earns very little sympathy from a person that sees things in the common "both sides" narrative.
None of the admins of Beehaw are advocating doxxing. It isn't nice and it is not allowed here.
Your users do kinda appear to disagree with you, both on the niceness and the allowance.
I think it’s perfectly valid to feel a personal conviction against doxing as tactic to fight neo nazism, without also conflating someone’s ideas on the subject with “what is okay here” and “getting the popcorn”. It feels kinda weird to me and less like an attempt to raise a concern, and more like something else that may not be entirely in good faith. I think reasonable people can disagree on this one without it being a blanket statement about beehaw, or what you are expected to think or feel comfortable/uncomfortable with as a user. It’s perfectly okay to not like what you read or agree with it. But I’m uncomfortable with your implication that this one screenshot means things it doesn’t actually say, in a broad way about beehaw. Unless I’m missing some information, no one has doxxed anyone here. Please don’t try to start popcorn-getting-level conflicts here. I don’t think anybody wants that.
i will note, rather conspicuously, only about one-third of the actual exchange was posted. here's the rest--this is all basically public since it's in the community discord
I wasn't trying to omit anything on purpose. In fact, I'd argue that the history shows that this was in the context of discussing not wanting to perform any moderation on the content. While you might have felt you were clear that this is a personal view, such context muddies that fact.
Now I know that it is indeed a personal position and not one of beehaws rules.
Fair point - commented more in response to the full image, but suffice it to say that it didn't really seem that inherently personal. The context was that the response was initially "We don't usually do that" and the disourse in response was explaining their personal philosophy. When that's done it's hard to establish if this is truly a personal opinion or not.
It sounds like the post in question was not on beehaw, and it was later removed. I can understand feeling strongly about that, but no one was actually doxxed on beehaw and regardless of anyone’s opinions on whether or not it’s ok to dox neo nazis, it was made clear that doxxing would still be against beehaw’s rules. It sounds like the moderators were following their policy of not messing with non-beehaw posts, but then did actually go ahead and remove it. So their own philosophy about it didn’t impede moderation decisions. No one said that it was ok to “dox people we don’t like here”, they said that while they personally believed that doxxing people who specifically engage in the violent ideology of neonazism was ok, the post in question was outside beehaw’s usual moderation scope. Later it was clarified that doxxing is against beehaw’s rules, and the federated post was removed anyway. I do think all that nuance is really important, and I do think that, intentionally or not, your post initially made the situation sound like something pretty different than what was actually said or what happened.