Sexual Assault Is a Free Speech Issue
It is a testament to the deeply misogynistic nature of social media that, shortly after the horrifying sexual misconduct allegations against seven Cornell frat members made news last month, people on the internet immediately started trying to dox the victim.
Over the past few weeks, right-wing provocateurs and random troll accounts alike have attempted to publicly identify Jane Doe, the anonymous former Cornell student who accused seven Chi Phi fraternity members of sexually assaulting her in 2024. The drive to publicize her name and other personal details is stomach-turning—but according to Mary Anne Franks, in the context of the history of social media and sexual assault, it’s all too common.
Franks is a professor at George Washington University Law School specializing in the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology. She is also the president and legislative tech policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, where she has spent years fighting online abuse and image-based sexual abuse. For decades, Franks has had a front-row seat to the myriad ways in which men on the internet have been abusive toward women, as well as some of the constitutional arguments invoked by independent commentator Michael Tracey, who has argued that his doxing of Jane Doe is legal under the First Amendment.
“When you have a cultural fetishization of an abstract notion of free speech, one thing that it does is it disembodies a conversation,” Franks says. “Somehow physical safety becomes oppositional to this supreme value of speech.”
https://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-mary-anne-franks/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
4 replies
I feel like doxxing, especially in this context falls under the "causing harm" exception like defamation and shouting fire in a crowded theater. And even if it is legal, it's still an evil thing to do
Seems like it should be libel to dox someone as it is pretty much exclusively done to besmirch reputations and cause distress.
Unfortunately truth is an absolute defense against defamation (which includes libel). Ironically this means that it protects everyone but Jane Doe from being doxxed as her. There definitely do need to be laws against this though, the court hid her name for a reason