Doxing: a new form of online harassment targeting women

This phenomenon is based on extortion via the Internet. Women are more exposed to it.

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 along with the development of new technologies.

Specifically, it is a type of bullying based on the use of the Internet and the power this virtual space has and the power that this virtual space has when it comes to harming us, to the point of making us fear it. Unfortunately, doxing is also becoming more and more common, and it is especially targeted at women. In this article we will see what it consists of.

What is doxing?

One of the characteristics for which the Internet is usually valued most positively is that it allows us to do almost anything while maintaining relative anonymity. However, this anonymity can this anonymity can, in reality, be 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 that thousands of people can see private data about us or that, even, some manage to find out things about our life that they could hardly get to know if it were not for the Internet. With some computer or programming skills, a few clicks are enough to remove the mask between a real person and a forum or a social network.

Doxing is, technically speaking, a set of strategies aimed at gathering information from a target, be it an individual or an organization. In practice, however, 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 digital footprint that we leave when surfing the Internet, leaving comments and registering and interacting with web pages to, from these few data, go pulling the thread and find things like the place of residence, the name of the closest friends, hobbies, political opinions ... or even confessions and compromising videos.

A far-reaching form of Internet stalking

At a time when an unfortunate photograph posted on Facebook can cost you your job, doxing is a form of extortion that knows almost no bounds. If a photograph, a video or a story posted on Twitter reaches a level of diffusion that approaches the viral, a person can go on to receive dozens of taunts and threats overnight, from people he or she does not know and will not knowfrom people they don't and won't know but who, at the same time, have the power to mistreat them psychologically.

Doxing is especially used to eliminate the influence of competitors in the political or work environment. Information about certain people's past can be published in full view of everyone from anonymous Twitter accounts, for example, and more and more people participating in its dissemination, through a kind of snowball effect..

Moreover, in these cases, truth can be combined with lies. Accompanying falsehoods with data, videos or images that are real allows to give veracity to a set in which most of the things are invented, and all this to harm someone remotely. In any case, regardless of the veracity of what is spread, the footprint left by this type of information on the Internet is permanent, and can be reached years after everything has happened.

Minors are the most exposed

Doxing often goes hand in hand with cyberbullying, and its effects on young people are particularly damaging. On the one hand, late childhood and adolescence are times in life when belonging to the group is often of paramount importance, and being exposed in this way may jeopardize the possibility of social acceptance, or even make it difficult to be or even make it more likely that bullying will appear or intensify. Moreover, as an unprepared threat, indecision about what to do and dependence on adults lead to very high levels of stress and anxiety.

However, adolescents and children are not the only demographic group particularly vulnerable to this type of practice. Doxing is a type of symbolic violence that also greatly affects women..

A problem that particularly affects women

According to a recent study, doxing as a form of threat by disclosure of personal data affects mainly women. Specifically, one in four Spanish women who have been harassed on the Internet have at some time suffered from its effects, by means of threats for disseminating data that can leave them in a situation of vulnerability..

How can this be explained? Part of this has to do with the ease with which women are stigmatized. The effect of disseminating certain private information does not have the same effect if the victim is a woman, given that it is still relatively normalized to judge people associated with that gender. it is still relatively normalized for people associated with that gender to be judged as women.. This disparity makes the effectiveness of this type of threat greater in dominating the victims, who, if they do what is asked of them, may become increasingly exposed as they generate more and more confidential information.