Why has doxxing people become so normalised??? People are sick. My brother just had his phone number, job, address, and worst of all MY phone number leaked. I won't stop getting calls from random people!!!!!

At least he's not getting swatted

Swatted? What's that?

It's when someone calls up the FBI with a fake emergency (for example, calling and saying that someone is holding a hostage and wants to bomb a building), so that a SWAT team has to respond. It's mostly an online gaming fad, and it's become extremely dangerous. The SWAT team has to take it seriously so they're all completely armed. In 2013, there was some creep that was terrorizing women on a gaming site, asking them for explicit photos and harrassing them. If they said no, he'd threaten them with all kinds of tactics but especially swatting. So a lot of these young girls had to see their parents and siblings being held at gunshot. There's another really bad story from 2017- two gamers were in an argument over a bet of $2.00, and one of them used swatting to get revenge, but gave the officers the wrong house. The man that lived in that house ended up getting shot and died, and didn't know either of the gamers. Long story short, it's pretty serious.

The worst part is it's become completely normalised too. I was on discord the other day and some 16 or 17 year olds were in a voice call talking about how they were going to send a swat team to some kids house because he argued with them on Call of Duty. So weird.

Wait sorry I'm new here. What's doxxing?

That's when someone reveals identifying information on someone anonymous online. It's usually their home address, workplace, phone numbers (sometimes even their family's phone numbers), financial and other personal information. That information is circulated around online within a community and can be used by anyone to cause harm. There used to be this site called doxbin where people would post doxes. So if you searched up a gamertag, or maybe even someone you know, an entire record of their personal information could come up. I'm pretty sure that site got taken down though. Anyway, the term 'dox' itself emerged in the 1990s, when hackers would would have fueds and drop 'docs' (documents) on one another. Unfortunately, it can pretty much be done by anyone now with a bit of geolocation searching. So many people post their locations and lives on social media daily- so all it really takes is a bit of a deep dive into their accounts to collect data.

Jesus, you sound like you've done this before...

Maybe I have :)