stLouISTHow the powerful hijack ‘doxxing’ to hide the truth
Government officials have discovered a new tactic for attacking reporting they don’t like: They just call it “doxxing.”
At the federal, state, and local levels, authorities are increasingly stretching the term doxxing beyond recognition to threaten journalists who report about immigration enforcement, potential misconduct by elected and appointed officials, and military actions.
Unfortunately, this reframing of routine journalism as doxxing works all too often exactly as intended, chilling reporting and leaving the public less informed.
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) recently spoke to four reporters who have firsthand experience facing accusations of doxxing based on their reporting, along with the harassment and legal threats that often followed. We discussed how this tactic works, and how journalists and others can fight back.
“Framing people who are in positions of, frankly, incredible power in the government — which we all pay taxes to and all deserve transparency from — as victims of doxxing for just naming what their roles are and what they’re supposedly doing is a great way to continue to demonize media,” Vittoria Elliott, a reporter for Wired, explained.
Elliott described how she was harassed online and faced legal threats from the Department of Justice after her reporting about the young engineers who held power at DOGE.
Elliott urged news media companies to recognize that journalists now report in an environment where the government is actively attempting to criminalize certain elements of their work. Journalists and media organizations must be “clear eyed” about the risks, she said, and explain the process of journalism to the public, while also doing more to “prepare for the fact that elements of our jobs are going to be recategorized as criminal activity.”
Doug Sovern, a former investigative reporter and political reporter for San Francisco’s KCBS radio, agreed that the “doxxing” label is a tactic of demonization, adding that government officials “also know that some media will back down” when faced with even spurious accusations of doxxing.
After the Federal Communications Commission threatened the license of KCBS for reporting on an immigration raid that happened in public, the station’s corporate owner “started basically spiking interviews,” Sovern said, “out of fear of more reprisal or antagonizing the Trump administration.”
“There’s been no loss of license. Nothing’s happened,” Sovern added. “But there was so much fear on the part of our corporation and their bottom line that it really had a chilling effect on everything we were doing in the political space.”
Gregory Royal Pratt, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, spoke about the harassment and threats he faced after a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson condemned him for reporting on a public immigration raid in Chicago. He echoed Elliott and Sovern, explaining that doxxing accusations are “clearly a very deliberate thing meant to intimidate me out of reporting.”
“At least for a moment I thought about it,” Pratt added, “Then it’s like, ‘All right, let’s get back to work.’”
Pratt also hailed as “American heroes” the ordinary people who record immigration agents in public and are themselves often accused of doxxing. “People recording and documenting history as it happens, without interfering, without being violent,” he said, “is really, really important.” He added that journalists and the public “would not be getting the truth out of the federal government without it.”
Charlie Kratovil, the founder and editor of New Brunswick Today, described his legal challenge to Daniel’s Law in New Jersey, which ultimately resulted in a loss before the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Under the law, which prohibits the publication of certain information about government or law enforcement officials, “We’ve seen governments wholesale just remove all kinds of records from the internet that used to be public, whether it’s property records, financial disclosure statements — and for people who are not police, not law enforcement, not judges,” Kratovil said. “The seemingly endless expansion of this is only going to lead to more corruption and more crime and people getting away with it,” he added.
Watch the whole event here.
If you’re a journalist facing online harassment as a result of your reporting, check out Freedom of the Press Foundation’s resource page on preparing for online harassment or request a training with our Digital Security Training team.