Doxxing has become one of the most controversial weapons of both left and right in exposing and shaming their enemies. But is it ethically justified — particularly when it comes to unmasking the identities of government employees like ICE or DHS agents?
In To Catch a Fascist, the journalist Christopher Mathias tells the story of Antifa’s fight to expose the radical right. For Mathias, there doesn’t seem to be much of a moral dilemma about revealing the identities of white supremacists at events like Charlottesville’s 2017 Unite The Right rally.
“You can join those groups if you want to, but you don’t get to wear a mask,” Mathias told me. “We’re going to figure out who you are.” Fair enough, perhaps, when the targets are self-declared neo-Nazis. But what happens when that same tactic gets applied to federal employees doing their jobs, or to rally attendees who aren’t ideologues? Not all ICE or DHS agents — or even all participants in the Unite the Right rally — are “fascists.” As Orwell noted in 1946, the F word had already lost meaning in the English language apart from being an insult. Eighty years later, it’s even more meaningless. So using it to justify revealing the private identities of people you consider evil seems like a feature rather than an antidote to our troubled times.
