Doxing: A New Form Of Internet Harassment That Targets Women
Doxing is one of the latest examples of harassment adapted to recent times It is an example of how our way of harming others evolves as new technologies develop.
Specifically, This is a type of harassment based on Internet udo and the power that this virtual space has when it comes to harming us, to the point of making us afraid of it. Unfortunately, doxing is also becoming more common, and it especially affects women. In this article we will see what it consists of.
One of the characteristics for which the Internet is usually valued most positively is that it allows us to do almost everything while maintaining relative anonymity. However, This anonymity can actually become a mirage The network of networks may be a place where it is common to navigate with a mask on, but it is also true that it gives the possibility for thousands of people to see private data about us or for some to even manage to find out things about our lives. that they would hardly be able to know if it weren’t for the Internet. With some computer or programming knowledge, a few clicks are enough to remove the mask that stands between a real person and a forum or a social network.
Doxing is, technically, a set of strategies aimed at collecting information from a target, whether a natural person or organization. However, in practice it does not have to stop at simply storing this data, and this type of private information is used as a form of Internet harassment, threatening and extorting to make public what has been discovered about the victim
Typically, doxing takes advantage of the fingerprint that we leave when browsing the Internet, when leaving comments and when registering and interacting with web pages to, from those few data, pull the thread and find things such as the place of residence, the names of the closest friends, the hobbies , political opinions… or even confessions and compromising videos.
A far-reaching form of Internet harassment
At a time when an unfortunate photo posted on Facebook can cost you a job, doxing is a form of extortion that has virtually no limits. If a photograph, a video or a story published on Twitter reaches levels of diffusion that are close to viral, A person can receive dozens of taunts and threats overnight from people she does not know and will not know but who, at the same time, have the power to psychologically abuse her.
Doxing is especially used to eliminate the influence of competitors in the political or work sphere. Information about certain people’s pasts can be posted for everyone to see from anonymous Twitter accounts, for example, and get more and more people to participate in its dissemination, through a kind of snowball effect
Furthermore, in these cases the truth can be combined with lies. Accompanying falsehoods with data, videos or images that are real allows you to give truth to a group in which most things are invented, and all this to harm someone remotely. In any case, regardless of the veracity of what was disseminated, the mark left by this type of information on the Internet is permanent, and can be reached years after everything has happened.
Doxing often goes hand in hand with cyberbullying, and its effects on young people are especially harmful. On the one hand, the end of childhood and adolescence are moments in life in which belonging to the group is usually of capital importance, and being exposed in this way may see the possibility of receiving social acceptance in jeopardy or, even, to make it more possible for bullying to appear or intensify. Furthermore, as it is a type of threat for which one is not prepared, indecision about what to do and dependence on adults lead to the appearance of very high levels of stress and anxiety.
However, adolescents and children are not the only demographic group especially vulnerable to these types of practices. Doxing is a type of symbolic violence that also greatly affects women
A problem that especially affects women
According to a recent study, doxing as a form of threat due to the disclosure of personal data mainly affects the female sex. Specifically, one in every 4 Spanish women who have been harassed online have at some point suffered from its effects, through threats for disseminating data that can leave them in a vulnerable situation
How is this explained? Part of it has to do with the ease with which women are stigmatized. The effect of spreading certain private information does not have the same effect if the victim is a woman, since It is still relatively normal for people associated with that gender to be judged This disparity makes the effectiveness of this type of threats greater when it comes to dominating the victims, who, if they do what they are asked, can become increasingly exposed, as more and more information is generated. confidential.
