From “Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate” by Zoë Quinn. Published in September 2017 by PublicAffairs, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.
The consequences of doxing are far-reaching and long-lasting. Prank calls have been around forever and are still in style—ordering pizzas to someone’s home or workplace has been streamlined to the point that you don’t even have to talk to another human being on the phone. Free samples of lube, escorts, magazines, and Jehovah’s Witness visits can all be ordered online and sent to anyone’s house. There were organized pushes to spam the IRS’s tip-line system with claims that I had committed tax fraud to try to get me flagged and audited.
Classified ads can be placed on sites like Craigslist, advertising free stuff or sex at your address. A man named Jebidiah Stipe did this to his ex-girlfriend in 2010, placing an ad in the site’s section for folks looking for sex, claiming to be his ex looking to fulfill a rape fantasy. He found an interested guy and gave him her real address. Following “her” instructions, Ty Oliver McDowell broke into her house, tied her up, and raped her at gunpoint.
Encyclopedia Dramatica, essentially a Wikipedia for 4chan users, has a “life ruination tactics” page that includes all of the usual crowdsourced harassment strategies as well as classifieds site-specific suggestions on how to “get creative” with your targets like this:
- Epic Idea #1: Post that “you” are having a garage sale. You are moving and everything needs to go. You’ll have an HDTV there for $50, a stereo set for $100, and many other cheap-ass high-end things. Steal pictures off the internet of “your items” for lulz. Enter your victim’s address, and choose a date over the weekend. On those days your victim will have strangers constantly coming to his house asking for cheap stuff. Sometimes even the police get involved. Why? Police track down thefts. If your victim is selling a bunch of high-end merchandise, it’s likely the police will check it out.
- Epic Idea #2: Post to Craigslist that you are selling “your” car. Make it cheap, something like a 1999 Ford F-250 for $2000 because it needs a new paintjob or something. Make sure to post “your” phone number! Be creative!
- Epic Idea #3: Post a personal ad that conflicts with “your” sexual identity. Normally this is best done by posting in the men seeking men section. You need to write an ad that is both believable and hawt so people will reply to it. Steal some pictures of “yourself” and “your” dick because ads with dick pics get more replies. Post “your” phone number and make sure you say in your ad how urgently you need to get laid. Soon enough “you” will have half the leather daddies in town calling “you” up.
It’s terrifying enough to live under a constant avalanche of threats, hatred, and bile when it’s from strangers who hate you. It’s another thing entirely when they start getting cops to threaten you for them. SWATing is one of the most serious ways online abuse can endanger your physical safety.
Most of these SWATing incidents start the same way—someone is at home, going about their normal routine, when they’re suddenly interrupted by dozens of militarized police with automatic weapons drawn and aimed at them and their families. The cops scream at them, make them get on the floor, and then begin their search. The SWAT team searches the premises only to find nothing in the house that resembles whatever their anonymous tipster had called in: the hostages, bombs, drugs, or corpses are nowhere to be found. Further investigation of the tip will reveal it to be a farce, and trying to trace it back to its origins leads investigators only to a long trail of proxies and phone-number resellers.
Militarized police forces grew out of the social unrest of the 1960s, and through the one-two fear-mongering punches of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, 80 percent of law enforcement agencies in towns with populations of 25,000 to 50,000 now have military-style units. It’s not uncommon for a twitchy, armed-for-literal-warfare police force on high alert to end up shooting totally innocent people. During a raid in 2010, when a SWAT team was searching for a murder suspect (in the wrong house), they somehow accidentally shot and killed seven-year-old Aiyana Jones in her sleep. In October 2014, a SWAT team was dispatched when a man called a suicide hotline for help—and the police ended up shooting and killing him when “negotiations” failed. When an unsuspecting victim is surprised by someone attempting to bust down his door, he might react like Iraq veteran Jose Guerena did: thinking he was being robbed, he picked up a gun to defend himself and his wife, Vanessa, who had previously lost two relatives to an unsolved home invasion. When the police entered his home, they saw the gun and shot him sixty times. Guerena had no criminal record, and the raid didn’t find a shred of evidence to support the suspicion that he had been helping his brother sell marijuana.
When you remember that marginalized people are disproportionately targeted for online abuse, this picture gets even more dangerous. Nonwhite Americans make up less than 38 percent
of America’s population but make up more than 50 percent of the people killed by police and, worse still, two-thirds of the unarmed people murdered by police. Make no mistake—regardless of whether the SWATer intends their target to die or is unaware of the possible consequences of their actions, sending a militarized police force to a target’s home is no less than attempted homicide.