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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.”

Sexual Assault Is a Free Speech Issuehttps://www.wired.com/story/the-big-interview-mary-anne-franks/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
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Let me back up and say, these kinds of experiences really show that when you take several men who have had all the privileges that one might want in a society, and you put them together, and you put them in an environment where the kinds of things they have been told are special about them may be challenged—and what I mean by that is college is sometimes the first place where a very privileged male, especially a privileged white male, might encounter the attitude that he is not particularly special or smart or interesting—that is going to create in that person a pretty pronounced sense of cognitive dissonance, and it’s the kind of thing that he is going to want to put out of his mind as quickly as possible, and the easiest way to do that is to dehumanize and to instrumentalize the very people that he thinks might be representative of his lack of specialness.

So I think that’s why you see these male bonding experiences at these highly privileged places in these highly privileged bastions, right? Fraternities and athletic teams. Part of what they are told is that you are entitled to feeling as though you are the person on top at all times. So when we think about how incredibly influential these fraternities are, when you look at members of Congress, you look at presidents, you look at Supreme Court justices and how many of them have been members of fraternities, you can see that it’s one of the places where all of that privilege builds up over and over in all of these different ways.

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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

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piefed.social

Seems like it should be libel to dox someone as it is pretty much exclusively done to besmirch reputations and cause distress.

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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

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