That was first time we had heard that term in our campaign: “doxxed”.

I explained to her in depth our database... since it was pictorial-driven??, you couldn’t search by keyword (#Britney Spears) and expect all of the people to come up who had said something against her. I explained to her that you could only search by a real first and last name, so if a person wanted to discover who “John Doe” was on twitter, our database would be useless to them. ???? Because the screenshot would say John Doe, but that image would be registered under the real user’s name. ????? In essence, you’d have to know who you were looking for, and if you already knew their first and last name, you could head to their social media pages regardless of us. ????????

I had met with high schools, teachers and parents throughout the state of Connecticut who had seen my article and wanted to get involved... The working idea was that we could infiltrate their consciousness at a young age to understand the weight of the internet (hey kids! what you say can actually last forever). By holding their words on our database for a few (weeks? months?—we hadn’t decided anything yet ¯_(?)_/¯ )— then this sordid fact would register at a young age, and they wouldn’t make the same mistakes as an adult.

She told me that she KNEW those people were not bad people. That she herself had been a part of the online group Anonymous, and that it was really just “something they did”. She explained that she would never want the people that harassed her listed anywhere, and that she knew the first and last name of some of them, and yet had never reported them.

What?

I grew silent. I didn’t know what to say to someone telling me that they thought such internet aggression was light fun.

I told her I appreciated the feedback and that she had given us an idea. That maybe we should let celebrities and victims opt out somehow if they knew their attackers. It felt like a good way to end the conversation positively.

This is about the point where my red flags starting waving back and forth wildly.

I called a close friend and recounted the situation. I told him;

“either she is severely stockholmed, or she herself is a troll. No questions about it”.

Don’t hold your breath, bitch.