There are two definitions of doxing (alt. doxxing):
a. Form of harassment in which personal information is used to intimidate, threaten, or distress others.
b. Searching / archiving public information and reposting it.
The Kiwi Farms has always had rules against contacting people. We've always had rules against threatening or extorting people. We've always had rules against encouraging other people to do those things ("someone should...").
In the last year especially, the word doxing has become popularly realigned from the second definition (which originated online in the 2000s) to the first (which was popularized by journos).
The law has extended harassment definitions in many jurisdictions to include online harassment which utilizes personal information. This is in the same way "cyberbullying" is a crime, but "cyberbullying" does not mean any form of online critique: it specifically refers to students in highschool or college harassing their peers online in such a way to intimidate them from going to school. Doxing has become criminalized, but as an extension of already criminal behavior under the first definition, usually applied to people who already know each other in real life.
The fact that this subculture invented the term and abides within the law is irrelevant to what the average person now thinks of when they hear "doxing". That we are 'in the right' does not matter. The use of a word, which now describes a crime, to describe things which are not criminal, is detrimental to our interests and long-term prospects.
In 2025 I need the community at large to stop using the word "doxing" to describe legal information gathering and switch to anything else. The following terms have been suggested, including both verbs which describe the act of looking something up, and the noun which describes a compilation of this information.
Phonebooking.
Unmasking. *
Deanonymize / Deanon
Infodump / Infodumping
Sunshining.
Exposing.
Receipts.
Deets. * per shawnphase
I'm not going to force any specific transfer, so you can pick whichever term you'd like and feels works best. Language is malleable and getting people to change at all is going to be hard enough.
- This is the word LFJ uses to literally dox people and harass their employers.
@Aevann please hard filter "doxing" and "doxxing" to "sunshining" and "sunshinning" even if people have filters disabled
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Not the audience, but the age of the one you're sending information to makes the difference. You legally aren't allowed to show minors all the things that you are allowed to show adults, nor should you be. Minors generally have limited rights and liberties, so something that would apply to every other group doesn't necessarily apply to them.
I'm fine with limitless distribution of information as long as people receiving that information are consenting adults. However, I personally wouldn't allow people to just post someone's home address, landline phone number, or voting district if I owned the Kiwi Farms, as that kind of information is only ever used to harass people in 90% of the cases. Posting their full/dead name, state of residence, s*x offender entry, or any sort of document that might contain their address, as long as revealing that address is not the main intent of the post, would be 100% fine with me. But hey, since I don't own Kiwi Farms, I don't get to make that decision, and since I, in principle, agree with Null that nobody can, should, or will guarantee you internet anonymity, I'll just accept that a website with rules I don't fully agree with exists on the internet and that that website isn't doing anything inherently wrong.
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