Doxing: a new form of Internet harassment that feeds with women
Doxing is one of the latest examples of harassment adapted to recent times. It is a sample of how our way of harming others evolves as new technologies develop.
Specifically, it is a type of harassment based on the internet udo and the power that this virtual space has at the time of harming us, to the point of making us fear it. Unfortunately, in addition, doxing is becoming more common, and is especially focused on women. In this article we will see what it consists of.
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What is doxing?
One of the characteristics by which the Internet is usually valued more positively is that it allows us to do almost everything maintaining a relative anonymity. But nevertheless, this anonymity can become, in reality, a mirage . It may be that the network of networks is a place where it is common to navigate with a mask on, but it is also true that it gives the possibility for thousands of people to see private data about us or that even some of them manage to find out things about our lives that they could hardly get to know if it were not on the Internet. With some computer skills or programming, a few clicks are enough to remove the mask that is placed between a real person and a forum or social network.
Doxing is, technically, a set of strategies designed to gather information about an objective, be it a physical person or organization. However, the practice does not have to be simply to store this data, and this type of private information is used as a form of Internet harassment, threatening and extorting with making public what has been discovered about the victim .
Normally, the doxing takes advantage of the fingerprint that we leave when surfing the Internet, leaving comments and registering and interacting with web pages to, from those few data, go stretching the thread and find things like the place of residence, the name of the closest friends, the hobbies , political opinions ... or even confessions and compromising videos.
A form of long-range Internet harassment
In a time when an unfortunate photograph published on Facebook can cost the job, doxing is a form of extortion that has virtually no limits. If a photograph, a video or a story published on Twitter reach a level of dissemination that approaches the viral, a person can happen to receive dozens of taunts and threats overnight , on the part of people who do not know and will not know but who, at the same time, have the power to mistreat it psychologically.
Doxing is especially used to eliminate the influence of competitors in the political or labor field. Information about the past of certain people can be published to everyone's view from anonymous Twitter accounts, for example, and make more and more people participate in its diffusion, through a kind of snowball effect .
In addition, in these cases the truth can come together with the lie. Accompanying the falsehoods with data, videos or images that are truly allows you to give truth to a set in which most things are invented, and all this to harm someone remotely. In any case, regardless of the veracity of what has been disseminated, the footprint left by this type of information on the Internet is permanent, and it can be reached years after everything has happened.
The minors are the most exposed
Doxing often goes hand in hand with cyberbullying, and its effects on young people are especially damaging. On the one hand, the end of the stage of childhood and adolescence are moments of life in which belonging to the group usually has a major importance, and be exposed in this way can see the possibility of receiving social acceptance jeopardized or, even, to make it more possible for bullying to appear or intensify. In addition, being a type of threat for which it is not prepared, the indecision on what to do and the dependence of adults lead to the appearance of very high levels of stress and anxiety.
However, adolescents and children are not the only demographic group especially vulnerable to this type of practice. Doxing is a type of symbolic violence that also affects women a lot .
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A problem that especially affects women
According to a recent study, doxing as a threat due to disclosure of personal data affects mainly the female sex.Specifically, one in four Spanish women who have been harassed by the Internet have suffered from its effects, through threats for disseminating data that can leave them in a situation of vulnerability .
How is this explained? Part of that has to do with the ease with which women are stigmatized. The effect of spreading certain private information does not have the same effect if the victim is a woman, given that it is still relatively normalized to judge the people associated with that gender . This disparity makes the effectiveness of this type of threats greater when it comes to mastering the victims, than in the case of doing what is asked of them, they can become more and more exposed, as they generate more and more information confidential.
