Source: New York Post
As the Supreme Court moved to overturn the Roe v. Wade ruling, various users on TikTok have reacted in their own way. Reportedly, they have come up with an online wave of protest videos as a form of retaliation. In fact. many of which claim to be doxxing the five conservative judges who voted to deny the federal rights to the procedure of abortion.
According to reports, some videos on the platform had shared personal information of the conservative judges and had received over thousand likes, comments and views. This included the ‘supposed credit card information,’ along with residential addresses for Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alto and Amy Coney Barett. However, it is not yet proved if the data on the credit card was legitimate or not.
Though not all, some of these videos are reportedly removed from the video streaming platform. However, despite the removal, the data shared on them could easily be reposted elsewhere through ‘smaller accounts.’ Moreover, the credit data is even somewhat censored in some of the videos. Essentially, with this was by means of thin white line or a transparent red box for the prevention of flagging it for removal by the algorithm by TikTok.
TikTok’s response to the developments:
The app gave a statement on the supposed doxxing noting how its policies are not against posts talking about abortion. However, users must follow Community Guidelines prohibiting the posting of such personally identifiable data.
The concerned authorities were not able to verify if the videos with credit card information actually showed the account information of the judges. However, they confirmed that the home addresses shown in the posts looked like they were linked to judges in the public records databases. Owing to the fact the addresses are already available on a public database, this did not qualify as doxxing.
Clearly, this ends up making the information somewhat easier to find for ones possibly planning protests outside the residences of the judges. Though such doxxing of judges can temporarily ban certain TikTok accounts, posting such data of these judges is not the only way by which TikTokers are showing their anger.
Evidently, some videos feature protests around the US, with a trend going on where users are creating certain explainer videos. Mainly, this showed content ‘how to debate anti-abortion views,’ ‘how to ‘poison’ data collected by period tracking apps through publishing ‘fake information.’ Recently, a post profiled a couple of influential Gen Z abortion advocates, one pro-choice and one pro-life, talking about how they use TikTok to engage thousands in the debate
Unless the platform gets a way in order to adequately locate these hidden doxxing content, users would continue seeing such videos.
