It’s all over twitter lately, people getting recorded ripping down posters with a graphic about the missing Israeli children and then their real names are found and are quickly fired from their jobs.
Honestly – and I before I say this, Free Palestine – if you want to be a person who tears down a poster looking for a missing person, I think you should be prepared to live your life as a someone who everyone knows tears down posters of missing persons.
I think people have a right to privacy in the ways that don’t affect other people, but when you do things that affect others – whether that’s not cleaning up after your dog or anonymously harassing whoever hung a poster of a loved one by tearing it down – I don’t feel you’re exercising a right that I have some obligation to defend. Live with the reputation of who you are.
Again, I say this as a critic of the genocide in Gaza. Bibi Netanyahu deserves to be dragged into the Hague to face the International Criminal Court. At the same time, I still hope as many of the Israeli hostages are returned safely as possible, and I have no sympathy for people who are inclined to tear down a missing person poster and want anonymity. That’s not liberating Palestine, that’s just anonymously terrorizing whatever grieving person hung the poster when they discover it’s been torn down.
The posters do nothing.
How can some random Australian in the middle of the suburbs ‘bring them home’?
They aren’t put up from a genuine desire to help the victims, they’re propaganda to stir emotions and brew support for the genocide in Palestine.
And, as we can see, bait to identify and attack anyone who has a problem with that.
Honestly – and I before I say this, Free Palestine – if you want to be a person who tears down a poster looking for a missing person, I think you should be prepared to live your life as a someone who everyone knows tears down posters of missing persons.
I find it interesting that you felt the need to explicitly say you support Palestine, even though your opinion isn’t really controversial IMO.
This is not the first time I noticed this about a comment, it almost feels like people are afraid of being ostracized by “their side” for having a slightly “wrong” opinion about this conflict.
The Guardian has a good article about the tribalism going on right now (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/29/us-support-divided-israel-palestine-gaza-war).
Any empathy is seen as a betrayal right now. It’s imo also one of the reasons things are so terrible to begin with.
Doxxing is bad. I don’t care if the person is a murderer or a protestor. Doxxing can have many, very nasty unintended consequences that can hurt more than just the person being doxxed.
Great question! Initially, I was 100% against doxxing because it turns into vigilante justice when people gang up on a suspect that hasn’t been properly tried in a court, so innocent people could become victims for something they didn’t do or pay excessive consequences. However, with your question, I think it points out some nuance.
In the case of the Jan 6 insurrectionists, the FBI was trying to find them to press charges, so I think it was appropriate to doxx them. Protesters that didn’t partake directly in the insurrection were also outed and I’m iffy on that one. Their presence still had an impact on the insurrection because it gave energy to the thing and possible increased intimidation. Imagine if there was 1 person outside your house with a guillotine vs 100 people with a guillotine. The latter would likely instill more fear.
Ultimately, I think the main issue is not with being doxxed, but with the vigilante justice that people like to enact when someone is doxxed. Rather than say firing this dentist, the people that had the power to do so could have just accepted that the dentist had his own opinion on the matter irrelevant to his employment and left it at that. Yet, they acted on the desire to punish him by firing him. I think that’s messed up because for all we know, he might have had a valid reason for that behavior or at the very least, it was not affecting his work. I think it’s normal to be frustrated with the situation and have emotional responses to it. Rather than punish and isolate him, they could have had a compassionate talk with him to hear him out and possibly come to a collaborative stance to help ameliorate the situation. After all, conflicts aren’t resolved by increasing antagonism. It’s resolved by engaging in understanding and healthy interdependence. If anything, all they did was further radicalize the dentist.
This concludes my TED Talk.
That’s a pretty fair response. Although I would say that I am against doxxing people who just happened to show up and didn’t actually enter the capital/participate in any illegal behavior. You can’t predict what the crowd will do and I think we would all agree it’s wrong if a BLM protest got out of hand and they decided to punish everyone who was there simply because they “increased intimidation”.
After reading the Jon Ronson book “So you’ve been publicly shamed” where he interviewed a load of people that were outed for both bigger and smaller ‘crimes’, no, I don’t agree with it. Doxxing and other public shaming can have consequences you could not expect.
Plus, what if you get the ID wrong and dox someone innocent? That happens all the time too.
Anyone else remember when the reddit hive mind mis-identified the Boston bomber?
All I can say is everything about this conflict is getting out of hand, and this is a big part of that. The “remember the human” rule isn’t acknowledged by anyone over there, and with the elephants fighting, the grass continues to get trampled. Saddest part is we’ll probably see a bigger version of what’s going on when Pakistan and India boil over some years from now.
when Pakistan and India boil over some years from now
What’s going on with that? Why are you expecting that to happen?
It’s difficult to explain if you’re not in their cultural atmosphere reading the room (in my case I have family from there). Outsiders can currently see propaganda show-offs going on, India is maneuvering thought in favor of Israel (one might say going against previous sympathies in the process) while Pakistan is covertly one of the strongest sympathizers of Palestine. Nothing out of the ordinary, but it’s the subtleties in the expressions that would raise the first alarms if an outsider begged for hints that something is about to erupt. I’d give it one to three years.
Missing civilians are not soldiers. People are experiencing the social consequences of their actions when they get blowback for destroying a missing persons poster.
