A SOCIAL MEDIA MOB IS STILL COMING FOR CORNELL'S JANE DOE

My first problem with the New York Times story about online efforts to doxx Jane Doe involves verb tenses. Here's the headline:

When a Social Media Mob Came for Cornell’s Jane Doe

After a former student named seven men in a lawsuit saying they had sexually assaulted her, a movement gained steam online to reveal her identity.

The verbs here are in the past tense. Reading this, you might imagine that the campaign to doxx Jane Doe was a toxic online moment, but it's over now. It wasn't, and it isn't.

The Times story makes clear that the first key figure in this doxxing campaign was a real dirtbag, but it suggests that his efforts belong to the recent past.

The online campaign to unmask Jane Doe began with pleas on X.

“Please help me discover the Cornell girl,” Aidan Thompson, a 23-year-old man who regularly praises Hitler and disparages women on the social media platform, wrote in one of the first posts. “I have a good lead, but I need your help.”

Within hours of Mr. Thompson’s post, another user had offered a bounty of $5,000 for the name and photos of the woman who had sued Cornell University under the pseudonym, claiming she had been gang raped at a fraternity party. Within a day, commenters were circulating a woman’s name and images of her from a social media account....

A little more than a week after Mr. Thompson’s post about the former Cornell student, more than 11,000 accounts had made almost 25,000 posts that purported to name her, according to an analysis by an online analytics company, Gudea, conducted at the request of The New York Times.

Aidan Thompson's tweet (which I won't link) was posted on September 29 -- two and a half weeks ago. I don't know why the Times reporters -- five of them share a byline -- didn't get a more up-to-date analysis of the doxxing traffic. Again, note the verb tense: "more than 11,000 accounts had made almost 25,000 posts that purported to name her." It's easy to read this as a rapid online flare-up that's already burned itself out. That's not the case. I know the name that's circulating. I count 46 new tweets using the name in reference to the Cornell rape since midnight Eastern time.

The Times reporters tell us:

On the fringes of the internet, bigots, attention-seekers and trolls have long seized on polarizing legal cases to air anger and disgust at women — and boost their following.

Now they were coming for Jane Doe.

Why use the phrase "On the fringes of the internet" when this particular doxxing campaign began, and largely spread, on the massive social media platform owned by the world's richest man? (One of today's 46 tweets using the unearthed name is from a prominent right-wing commentator who has written for the Times, Richard Hanania.)

Thompson reveals a name, and we get the tiniest suggestion that this is an ongoing problem:

Fifteen hours after sending the call out for Jane Doe’s identity, he shared a woman’s name and photos, calling it “BREAKING NEWS.”

“They have a right to face their accuser,” he wrote of the seven men, “and we have a right to publish her identity if we discover it.”

This time, his post ricocheted across X, shared by users and amplified by the platform’s own recommendation algorithm. It has since accumulated more than 19 million views.

The phrase "It has since accumulated" quietly makes clear that the post is still up, and is still getting views. If I were editing this story, I'd want to make that explicit. I'd also want to make clear that posts purporting to identify Jane Doe are all over X right now.

I'd especially want to do this because the story directs our attention to several online takedowns, like this one:

One series of posts on X included not only a name, but also an address, phone numbers and information about the woman’s apparent relatives. The posts, which violated X’s rules on sharing private information, racked up more than 1.4 million views, before being removed a few days later.

And this one:

Savanah Hernandez, a commentator for Turning Point USA, who has more than 700,000 followers on X, shared a woman’s name and photo and wrote that the accuser “was so embarrassed about everyone at Cornell knowing she was such a huge HOE.”

She deleted the post not long after....

Hernandez didn't just share "a woman's name" -- she shared the name everyone else in this doxxing campaign shared. (I found the text of her deleted tweet at a gun forum.)

And we're told that the most well-known doxxer took his post down as well:

Soon after Mr. Thompson claimed to have unmasked Jane Doe, Michael Tracey, an independent journalist with more than 350,000 followers on X, was preparing a post of his own.

Mr. Tracey, who had earlier gained notoriety for questioning the veracity of a prominent Jeffrey Epstein accuser, had recently fixated on people who file anonymous legal complaints making what he called “reputation-destroying claims” about others.

By Oct. 2, Mr. Tracey announced to his followers on X that he, too, had confirmed Jane Doe’s identity.

His post on X listed the name and photo of the woman Mr. Thompson had identified.

Separately, on Substack, Mr. Tracey posted a screenshot he said had come from a state court website that also listed the name in relation to the Jane Doe case....

But it appeared Mr. Tracey had been duped.

The site he referred to had no connection to the New York State court system. Instead, registration records show, it appeared to have been created by a 33-year-old man in Michigan who described himself on social media as a “digital creator.” That man did not respond to requests for comment, and the site is now offline.

Amid cascading criticism, Mr. Tracey deleted the posts with the woman’s name later on Oct. 2, arguing that “the principle has been served.”

And beyond that, we're told:

On Instagram, the same name was soon automatically labeled a “popular” search subject.

A spokeswoman for Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said such posts were prohibited by company policy and that the social network had removed some of the material. The company also removed the name from the ranked results on the platform’s search function.

YouTube, too, took down videos that claimed to identify the woman, saying they violated its harassment policies, a spokesman said.

I think it would be easy to read all this and imagine that the virus has been largely quarantined. It hasn't. The name and images said to be Jane Doe are still all over X. Meta may say that posts doxxing Jane Doe are "prohibited by company policy," but a quick Google search for the widely circulated name and "threads" will lead you to many posts on Meta's Threads that include the widely circulated name and images.

The story ends with a report of a swatting incident against Jane Doe and her family, along with a reference to an additional swatting attempt. But this is prefaced with a weird sentence:

As the online furor mounted, it appeared that at least some people on the internet had indeed learned Jane Doe’s true identity.

It's as if we're being told that the widespread dissemination of Jane Doe's purported name and image might have had nothing to do with the swatting. Hey, wasn't Michael Tracey "duped"? Maybe the name and identifying information he (and 11,000 other people) posted was false, and the swatting happened through some other means!

But that would be an equally horrifying story -- an 11,000-strong mob identifying (and slut-shaming) a person who had nothing to do with the incident. Do the five authors of this story believe that's possible? If so, there's the story: a person has been exposed who either is Jane Doe, which is appalling, or isn't, which is appalling in a different way.

The mob settled on one person. That person's privacy is being violated anew every single day, even now. This isn't over, and that's what the story should have made clear.