On the other side of the fediverse, @realcaseyrollins@social.teci.world brought up an interesting point, that the concept of doxxing being something with values around it is relatively new. Thought it could make an interesting conversation here.
On one hand, this isn't really a thing that was discussed much for most of history. Publishing the personal information of a person who did a thing didn't really have any moral connotations to it. Under the ideal of freedom of speech, it should be considered acceptable to publish any information about a person.
On the other hand, even from a libertarian mindset and from a constitutional perspective, there are limitations to freedom of speech. For example, you're not allowed to commit fraud. You're not allowed to perjure, you're not allowed to lie about someone else in a way that causes them damage, do you not allowed to claim that you are a police officer when you're not, you're not allowed to represent that you have professional licensure you don't have, there's a lot of things that you're not allowed to do.
Then from another perspective, it's important to understand the difference between what is law and what is something else, any taboos against doxing aren't enshrined in law anywhere, it's just a dick move. On the other hand there, when you have a rule on a site like Twitter that is so big and so ubiquitous, even though it isn't a law per se, it can effectively stifle speech to a similar extent because of the Monopoly Powers involved.
So getting past that, why exactly would someone who values Free speech consider doxing to be something worth considering to be a taboo or against the local instance rules? To me, I think that that really boils down to a change in the nature of communication. Prior to the internet, there was a non-trivial amount of effort involved with communication. In order to talk to someone on the phone, you needed to get their phone number, you needed to pick up a phone, you needed to dial the phone, and that phone call if it wasn't local could cost a lot of money. Likewise, if you wanted to send a specific message to a million people, you would have to print off a million copies of that thing, then you would need to buy a million stamps, and a million envelopes, or alternatively you'd have to walk up to a million houses and drop them in a million mailboxes. Today, if you are among the anointed few in big tech, you can get a message out to millions of people for free. The hackers who released the trucker convoy data (and keep in mind that hacking as a relatively low risk crime of breaking into computer systems didn't exist 40 years ago -- prior to that, if you wanted to steal data from a charity you would have to break into the offices of that charity) didn't need to print out a thousand copies of that data, they just had to post it online once. At that point their exploits were carried all around the world. From there, people who supported this cause had their names and email addresses and postal codes out there, and there's an entire planet full of people who might decide that they are offended, and then from there it is an incredibly low cost operation to start spamming people's employers with emails.
The human brain evolved in a world of a 50 person society. In that world, you and everyone you knew made up about 50 people. Occasionally you might run into another tribe, in which case there would likely be a war. Outsiders were dangerous. In a 50 person society, social proof is incredibly important. If 10 other people in your 50 person society back a person, that person probably has some serious power. If 49 other people back that person, then that person is basically the king. I contract, if you can find 50 people on the planet Earth who disagree with you about something, congratulations that's not very impressive. But our brains tell us that it is. The key to all of this tangent is realizing that there is a particular danger to the difference between the way that our brains are wired, and the way that the internet age actually is.
The famous example for first amendment case of yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't actually against the law. However, the reason that such dicta was mentioned is the self-evident danger of crowds in a physical space. If you say a thing that causes a riot in a physical space, it is clear that something bad has happened especially if it's based on things that are either not true or partially true or presented in a highly emotional way meant to manipulate. If one whips a digital crowd into a frenzy and a similar way, seems to me that innocent people could definitely be trampled in the same way. If such a thing isn't explicitly illegal, I can understand why theater owners would ban you for doing it.
I said before that the left doesn't come up with bad ideas, they just are stupid about them and shut off their brains and turn them into universals when they are not. The idea of stochastic terrorism isn't based on a stupid idea. If you behave in certain ways that you are reasonably convinced will result in harm against another person, particularly when you're aiming a large group at that person, that certainly seems to be a thing. Intent seems to play into it as well. Accidentally revealing details about a certain person is patently different than intentionally revealing details about a certain person alongside a bunch of reasons why people should go off and lynch that person. I guess arguably it's the call for lynching that is the problem not the release of personal information.
At the end of the day, I think the best solution to the problem of doxing would be to change in the neopuritanical culture. We really need to stop worrying about what every single person is doing and thinking and saying, and demanding that they all agree with us in every way. That cultural change may not be possible. In a large enough group you always have bad actors, and the internet provides the largest group available. So that being the case, allowing people their anonymity and at the very least making breaking that without consent a taboo, and maybe enforcing it at the service level may be the right thing to do.
Anyway, this is mostly just a brain dump, what are your thoughts?