Twitter is a one-way doxxing machine for the right
You probably should not post there if you value your privacy!
Twitter’s Terms of Service are perfectly clear that users
may not threaten to expose, incentivize others to expose, or publish or post other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission, or share private media of indivuals without their consent.
You may remember this from a few years ago when Elon Musk went on a suspension spree against journalists who allegedly doxxed him. In reality, of course, they did nothing of the sort: they simply posted information about his flights that were already public. But this didn’t stop Musk from claiming claiming his privacy had been violated and categorically declaring “You dox, you get suspended. End of story. That’s it.”
Or you may remember it from just a few years later when Twitter banned my account, which I had run for twelve years. The circumstances were nearly identical: I tweeted out the name of a pseudonymous Republican and his home country even though he had repeatedly posted both publicly in the past, and Twitter used this as an opportunity to permanently kill my account.
Where you won’t see this rule enforced, however, is on the right. Because for the last several weeks, the Twitter accounts @Anarseldain and @realMattForney have been openly and repeatedly doxxing left-wing posters. They are publishing real names, addresses, phone numbers, personal pictures, and even information about uninvolved family members. The former account, Anarseldain, is even fundraising off of it, sending followers to his buymeacoffee page. And they are completely candid about what they are paying for:
How they are getting all of this information is anyone’s guess. It is often possible to track down personal information about even the most careful pseudonymous users because few people know how to cover all of their tracks; but it is also possible, of course, that Twitter’s administration itself is just feeding them private information about their users. I see no reason to put this past Musk, who has already proved his willingness to selectively leak information to attack the left through his so-called “Twitter Files.”
And more to the point, there is no reason to put this past Musk as long as his site keeps selectively enforcing its own Terms of Service to the advantage of the right. Whether this has been mandated formally or is simply operating in effect, the outcome is the same: there is a plain double-standard on Twitter now meant to rig the site in favor of the hard right and against its left-wing users. I am not going to complain about the unfairness, but it is genuinely pathetic for people who so desperately want to see themselves as warrior-posters and the heirs of Western philosophers to rely so heavily, in the marketplace of ideas, on endless intervention and affirmative action by the mods.
In any case, if you value your privacy I would strongly urge caution when using Twitter. Use a VPN, delete your old tweets, and absolutely do not assume that your DMs are private. At this point I am just operating under the assumption that Musk is just handing over whatever information connected people on the right ask for, and until we see any kind of balance in moderation you should probably do the same.
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