WikiLeaks Threatens to Doxx Verified Twitter Users

WikiLeaks has gone off the deep end and into straight up creepy evil with a new attempt to doxx verified Twitter users.

Remember those halcyon days when we could languidly contemplate a Twitter blackout as a form of protest? Remember when – oh, it must have been nearly two days ago now – we were starting to think that maybe Twitter was kind of turning into a cesspool?

After all, the inaction of Twitter execs led to a growing hate-filled underbelly of the social media giant. It may have helped Trump win the election, in a roundabout way, by failing to sanction hate speech and disinformation. It certainly led to people dropping out of the platform entirely, including writer and feminist Lindy West.

Perhaps, we wondered, was it worth it to be on Twitter anymore? Well, we may have gotten a definitive answer already.

Note the focus on family and housing information, for one. While WikiLeaks claims that this move is an effort “to develop a metric to understand influence networks based on proximity graphs”, such a justification is hard to believe.

This is a clear attempt to sow panic and discord amongst Twitter. The platform verifies its users if they deem the accounts to be “of public interest”. So this typically includes not only celebrities, but politicians, brands, and journalists. Currently, there are about 237,000 verified accounts on Twitter.

Wouldn’t it be awfully convenient for WikiLeaks to have a gigantic database of outspoken journalists, politicians, and other public figures, complete with information like their addresses, employers, income, and family relationships?

Obviously, this doesn’t sound like an effort to develop a vague “metric”. This sounds like a damn hit list. This is one step removed from directly threatening anyone who would dare to speak out against the organization.

Update: The Twitter official safety account has effectively subtweeted WikiLeaks with the following tweet:

“Posting another person’s private and confidential information is a violation of the Twitter Rules,” the tweet reads, with an additional link to the relevant article.

Next: Are Twitter Blackouts The New Protest?

Said one anonymous journalist with a verified account: “I’ll say that as a woman working in public, who has been targeted by harassers before and who has seen peers and colleagues go through far, far worse, this has me thinking ‘hate mob’ and ‘doxxing’ and about ready to dive for a bunker.”