Are People ‘Doxing’ Elon Musk?
On Friday, Dec. 16, 2022, Elon Musk, the newish owner of Twitter grumbled in a live chat that if “you dox, you get suspended, that’s it.”
That was in response to a question posed to Musk about a journalist who was reporting on Musk’s sudden decision to permanently suspend an account that automatically posted when Musk’s private jet took off and landed. That information is, surprisingly, in the public domain. It is not private information.
Why, all of a sudden, did Musk think this deserved his immediate attention? Why did he suspend a half dozen journalists, without notice or warning, on Thursday?
Are people really ‘doxing’ Elon Musk?
What is doxing?
Merriam-Webster dictionary defines doxing as, “to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge.” In typical usage, someone who is doxxed has their home address, where they work, email address, and even their phone number shared in a specific online forum where that person is a member of, in order to engage in revenge. The hope of the doxing perpetrator is that it will bring some level of chaos or ill-will to the individual through others taking up that information and engaging in real-world harassment.
That is what doxing is and its intended purpose — to engage in revenge and hope it results in personal harassment. Note that a person’s address is really not “private information,” at least not in the sense that it’s not readily publicly knowable. Up until the 1990s, paper phone directories were published in local communities listing not only everyone’s home phone number, but also their street address. These directories are now available online, so most people’s addresses and phone numbers are still easily found (even if they’re behind a paywall now).
Is posting public information about someone ‘doxing’?
It depends. Since I just noted that most people’s home addresses are usually readily found online, it would be hard to consider the address alone as “private information.” There’s a sense that others shouldn’t be able to know where a person lives so easily. Yet that’s not really the world we live in today.
Yet posting a person’s home address is considered one of the hallmarks of doxing. Including a Google Map view of the house also is regularly done. It’s the sense of invasiveness that raises it to the level of doxing. Yes, this information may be publicly available, but it’s being made available to a targeted group of people who have a specific gripe about the person. The goal remains the same — harassment.
So just because a piece of information is generally publicly available doesn’t mean that it’s automatically not doxing.
Intent is the key
The real driver of defining doxing is the intent. The intent of doxing is nearly always malicious and mean-spirited. It is not meant to provide information to others that they could look up for themselves. It is meant to punish or exact revenge on the person. It is meant to cause them real-world harassment and even possible harm.
An account that is automatically posting the movements of a person’s private jet isn’t likely to have intent, per se. The developer behind the account is. And if that developer, Jack Sweeney, only did this for Musk’s jet, we could start to suggest perhaps there was some ill intent there.
But he doesn’t do it just for Musk’s jet. He does it for many rich people’s and celebrities’ jets, including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. He’s a 20-year-old college student who appears to just find this all interesting to do. And it reminds the world that the ultra-rich move in a very different way than the rest of us through this world. (In case you’re curious, this is the public website where this information is available to anyone; Musk’s jet’s tail number is N628TS.)
What drove Musk to redefine doxing for himself?
Musk claims this is all a security and safety issue. Even though he’s owned Twitter now for over 6 weeks, he kept the account tracking his jet active during that time. Shortly after his acquisition of Twitter was completed, he even interacted with the @ElonJet account:
What changed, of course, is Musk’s mind.
A billionaire is beholden to nobody. When you overpay for a company (Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter when its valuation was closer to $12 billion at the time) in order to take it private, you feel especially sensitive. Musk wants Twitter to become the idea he imagines it to be. Even if it means changing his mind constantly about what that actual idea is.
Musk once proudly exclaimed he is a “free speech absolutist,” suggesting any non-illegal speech on Twitter would be allowed. He continually backtracks on that statement every single week, carving out personal exceptions for himself and those that he politically aligns with (not surprising it’s right-wingers and white nationalists).
What brought it to a head this past week is an apparent harassment incident of one of his children in Los Angeles, California:
Yes, celebrities get unwanted attention all the time. But the line that people don’t cross is usually to leave their children alone.
Somehow, in Musk’s mind, he has connected this ground incident of somebody harassing one of his children to the tracking of his private jet. Even though the Musk jet tracking account clearly showed Musk himself was in Texas at the time of this incident.
If the Musk jet tracking account was effective, they would know the person in the car wasn’t Musk. It is assumed that a billionaire spends a good amount of money on personal security for both himself and his children, so unlike a normal person, that actual risk was likely overstated by a concerned father.
It angered Musk. And what does an angry, narcissist billionaire do? He lashes out.
Is private jet tracking really a security threat?
In fact, there have been zero reported incidents of private jet tracking leading to any harassment or criminal charges. Zero. While the industry would suggest that private jet tracking is a safety or security threat, nobody can point to any data to back up that wild, irrational claim.
What they can point to is a lot of upset millionaires and billionaires who don’t like the public knowing how often and where they fly to in their private jets.
So yes, it is a hypothetical security threat, much like someone taking too much liquid in their carry-on onboard a commercial flight. But in the case of a private jet, you really have to let your imagination run wild about how that information could be used to harm someone.
So is this ‘doxing’? And should it be banned?
It is clearly not doxing as used in the usual use of the word. Nobody’s personal address, phone number, or email address is being shared. Sharing a jet’s location isn’t sharing anything about the potential people inside that jet. We don’t actually know if Musk is on that jet, or if he lent it out to someone to use.
In short, you can’t dox an aircraft or other transportation vehicle. They are not people. They carry people, which is entirely different. And since nobody knows who’s on a private jet, it’s next to meaningless to suggest you’re doxing someone who is traveling from point A to point B.
Of course such behavior shouldn’t be banned, any more than you should ban apps that track the movements of subway cars or buses (of which there are many). Rich people already live in insular, secured worlds most of us can only imagine. A private jet is a luxury that only the ultra-rich can afford. People are naturally curious about just jet’s movements across the country, and the #ElonJet account was merely satiating that curiousity, just as any celebrity gossip site does.
But Musk is gonna Musk. And there’s nobody to stop him, even when he bans journalists from Twitter who dared to write about the incident. He’s going to continue to claim he’s being “doxxed,” even though he is intentionally misusing the world to drum up empathy for his lonely, isolated life.
