Rutgers Law School student threatened with doxxing: Interview
Jannine Masoud, a Rutgers Law School student, said students threatened to dox her and colleagues over a statement they released supporting Palestinians
Jannine Masoud was looking at screenshots sent to her from a student group chat at Rutgers Law School when she spotted her own name and photo.
She froze.
The captions under students’ photos read:
“Your employers have a right to know you support terrorist organizations.”
“Maybe we sent [sic] this to some news outlet?”
“Let’s dox them one by one.”
The students were upset over a statement supporting Palestinians by the school’s National Lawyers Guild chapter, and they debated posting members’ personal information online. The incident deepened campus tensions and sparked a complaint to the administration.
In a volatile political era, Rutgers University is not alone in grappling with a surge in doxxing incidents. In schools, neighborhoods and workplaces, Americans are being singled out because they shared controversial opinions, joined protests or were part of certain social and political groups. Doxxing — the spreading of personal information with intent to punish, intimidate or harass — is not new, but it has been practiced with fervor amid tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.
Students and workers say doxxing has risked their reputations, jobs and safety.
“This is triggering, frightening and scary because doxxing is intended to invite harm,” Masoud said. “It is intended to invite harassment. This is not a metaphorical target on our backs. This is a group of students saying ‘these students support terrorism, go harass them.’”
As doxxing unfolds in snippets that lack context and are framed to inspire rage, advocates and ethicists warn the public to use skepticism before sharing and to ask themselves: Am I doing more harm than good?
Dueling doxxing sites
Doxxing has been used to harass female games journalists and LGBTQ advocates, to expose individuals allegedly making racist remarks and to identify people believed to be violent far-right extremists. It has also been widely used to blacklist Palestinian rights activists.
As political tensions bubble over the Middle East conflict, the tactic has become more systematic. Organizations and social media groups have pored through statements, online posts and protest activity to identify and condemn speech they view as offensive.
At universities including Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, names and photos of professors and students connected to Palestinian solidarity statements were displayed on “doxxing trucks” and websites accusing them of antisemitism.
Last month, Ramapo College faced complaints after an online doxxing group slammed a professor of cinema over a cartoon she shared on Facebook. It showed a baby under a cleaver held by a hand in a shirtsleeve with Israeli and American symbols. The group urged people to contact the college president, and the college subsequently opened an investigation into the professor’s posts.
Advocacy and legal groups have reported a spike in requests for help from people targeted by doxxing. Selaedin Maksut, executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, said his most recent call came from a mother of five in Passaic County whose employer had received complaints over pro-Palestinian content she had shared online.
“It makes us feel we live in an authoritarian government,” he said. “This is America. We have the ability to speak freely. The fact that we are being silenced in this way is really scary.”
Though doxxing has been around for years, one trend is new: reverse doxxing. At least one rival site has been launched to expose people who it alleges have made hateful comments about Palestinians.
Last month, the new social media account called for people to complain about a Bloomfield lawyer and a doctor affiliated with Hackensack Meridian Health. It later posted screenshots of a letter from the health care network saying the doctor had been suspended from his practice. Hackensack Meridian declined to comment or confirm.
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One-star reviews
Businesses are also reeling from online harassment. In Marlboro, pharmacist Heba Macksoud said she was targeted after she posted “I stand with Palestine” on a town Facebook page where many had written in support of Israel.
A local rabbi posted the name of her pharmacy and wrote on the page that he “cannot do business with a place owned by someone who posts supporting Palestinians as they rape and murder innocents.” In another post, he called her a “terrorist enabler.” Macksoud said she received about 300 angry messages and a slew of one-star reviews for her pharmacy.
She took down her post after family members also began receiving harassing comments and her niece’s carwash business was doxxed because of the relation to her, she said.
For Macksoud, who is active in the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom, an interfaith group of Muslim and Jewish women, and has attended rallies against antisemitism, it has been a hurtful time. She has cautioned her daughters, who are in college, to avoid social media.
“I called them and said, ‘Chill; don’t post anything.’ I keep hearing stories. People are not getting jobs. People are putting them on lists,” she said.
“It hasn’t stopped me, two months in,” she added. “I post like crazy and go to protests. What I am worried about is the censorship and doxxing of an entire younger generation.”
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‘More harm than good’
The groups behind doxxing say they are exposing people who are guilty of hateful or extremist speech and should face repercussions. But even in seemingly just cases — like viral video of the hit-and-run driver at the Unite the Right white nationalist rally in 2017 — ethical questions remain, said Irina Raicu, director of the internet ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
“The danger here,” Raicu said, “is that we have seen over and over misidentification and innocent people suffering in their efforts to try to bring people to justice.”
Doxxing is carried out by people who want to appeal to their side and confirm and solidify their own views, Raicu said. But they have no control over how people will respond, which historically has been through attacks and harassment.
“This trend we are seeing for people on one team to go after another adds to polarization,” she said. “Especially in this conflict, if the goal is to solve or limit conflict, then this seems to do the opposite.
“It just seems to do more harm than good in just about every situation I can think of,” Raicu said.
The snippets of information shared on social media are intended to provoke outrage but lack nuance and context. People may be seeing “selectively edited versions of what may be the more extreme or louder views” and not a realistic view, Raicu said. Social media algorithms fuel the content that confirms our views or antagonizes us.
“Instead of really going out and talking to people and understanding how they feel and why they feel and potentially changing each other’s minds,” Raicu said, “we are entrenching ourselves further in our own views and pushing people we view as opponents farther and farther away. And that just seems like such a recipe for more anger and more conflict rather than resolving anything.”
Protection from doxxing
When the National Lawyers Guild chapter released a public statement about the doxxing threats against members, it redacted names of the students in the group chat. The statement was focused on accountability, and not on shaming or harassing individuals, Masoud said. Still, the group chose to conceal their identities.
“We didn’t want to even touch upon the same things they do to us,” Masoud said. “We engage in substance, and we will never resort to harassment or intimidation to silence our opposition.”
Masoud called for Rutgers to take a stand against doxxing, to seek accountability for victims and to ensure that enforcement action is unbiased.
“The conspiracy to dox came out of a student group,” she said. “When we went to the administration, they said we could put in a complaint and there is nothing further we can do. We want to see swift action taken … It was extremely frightening to see our peers wanted to harm us in this way.”
How to lower the risk of doxxing
There are steps the public can take to lower the risk of doxxing and to respond should it happen to them. Internet privacy and advocacy groups recommend that people do online searches of their own name, phone number, address and online social media handles to see what is publicly available.
They can delist their personal information from websites and make social media accounts private, among other steps. If the problem escalates to physical threats, people should consider extra security measures to stay safe.
More advice is available at the following sites:
Tyler Fields is your internet guru, delving into the latest trends, developments, and issues shaping the online world. With a focus on internet culture, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies, Tyler keeps readers informed about the dynamic landscape of the internet and its impact on our digital lives.
