The Online Avengers; New York Times, 1/15/14

Emily Bazelon, New York Times; The Online Avengers:

None of the OpAntiBully members ever met in person, but they began spending hours working together online, using encrypted email accounts or chat rooms for anything they deemed sensitive. Katherine set up a Twitter account, @OpAntiBully, and encouraged young people who felt victimized to seek them out. OpAntiBully members posted links to resources for depressed teenagers and responded to pleas for help. Sometimes they would offer informal online counseling or send a flurry of encouraging messages to a desperate-sounding soul out in the ether. Other times they would take more aggressive measures, tracking down and exposing the identities of supposed wrongdoers who the group felt had not been brought to justice. Public shaming is a standard tool for this kind of activism, and it was part of OpAntiBully’s approach from the start — “it can be great fun to bully the bullies,” Ash says. This kind of outing, known as doxxing, involves scouring the Internet for personal data (or documents, the source of the word “doxx”) — like a person’s name, address, occupation, Twitter or Facebook profile — and then publicly linking that information to the perpetrator’s transgression. The process can be as simple as following a trail the target has left behind or it can involve tricking someone into revealing the password to a personal account or hacking into a website to obtain private information. The exposure, Ash says, is its own punishment. “People need to learn from their mistakes,” he said. “If it takes shocking or scaring them to do that, so be it. And sometimes we have apologies coming in, because people realize that what they’ve done is wrong.”

Pointing a Finger on Facebook; New York Times, 1/15/14

Jacob Bernstein, New York Times; Pointing a Finger on Facebook: "Itay Hod has been a journalist for more than 15 years. He has reported on health issues for NY1, done segments for CBS News on gay rights, covered the Oscars for Logo, and written articles for The Daily Beast about lesbian pornographers and “American Idol” winners. But nothing he has done the past few years has garnered him as much attention as a post on his Facebook page this month, in which he suggested that an unnamed Republican congressman, whom he described as being hostile to gay rights, was himself gay."