Finding neo-nazis via Twitter
I remember scrolling through my twitter feed last month to find a set of pictures of Neo-Nazi protestors, dubbed with the caption “If you know these people, please reply with their information.” The post had been retweeted hundreds of times, which is why I could see it from my laptop in an Ithaca apartment. “Doxxing,” as defined in the linked article, often can take the form of these massive community search parties on social media. One simply takes a picture of a person doing something questionable, and uses the intertwined connections of the internet to locate the person so their information can be revealed and they can be publicly shamed. The topics discussed in Networks so far seem to provide a framework for considering a phenomenon like Doxxing, and can help us understand how it works.
In order for a neo-nazi to be outed, people in an interconnected group, as a set of nodes in a given component, must each decide to utilize their connections to meet the same goal. If one person takes a picture of a protester and shares it with his connections, they must then decide to share the picture with their connections and so forth. The best case scenario for the initial photographer is that he encourages the people on the other sides of all his local bridges to share the picture, because these individuals can then reach people the initial photographer doesn’t have access to. This feat of collective action across an entire network is impressive because it requires the initial message to be convincing enough to influence the behavior of people who are multiple connections away.
When we analyze doxxing in the context of network connections, we can see why some attempts to do it work and others don’t. Each node must individually have the motivation to offer their connections to the cause. When a person takes a picture of someone doing something and asks others to identify and shame them, they must do so to address something universally frowned-upon and must make people feel that their support of the attempt to locate the person is worth the share. If these two conditions aren’t met, the retweets won’t come and the culprit may stay anonymous.