It remained unclear Tuesday whether the threatening emails sent to University of Pennsylvania staff members came from a student or someone unaffiliated with the Ivy League campus. Authorities are still looking for the driver behind the hit-and-run at Stanford, who was described by the victim as a white male in his 20s, and it was similarly unclear whether he was an enrolled student.
In recent weeks, concerns about potential campus violence have been fueled in part by anxieties over doxxing, the act of publicizing a person’s sensitive information for malicious purposes. Trucks with digital billboards flashing the names and photos of students who are said to be pro-Palestinian activists have recently circled Columbia University and Harvard University, for example; Columbia has created a “doxxing resource group.”
“Information about where they live or who their families are have been revealed as a way of penalizing speech … and in our social media era, that’s become a key tool in the repertoire,” said Amy Binder, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University who researches the intersection of politics and education.
In some cases, videos and images on social media have been viewed through the lens of potential violence, even when the exact events viewed online were disputed or not entirely clear.
In the last two weeks, for example, X users circulated a short video clip showing a student who was purported to be pro-Israel being surrounded by pro-Palestinian protesters during a “die-in” rally at Harvard, where demonstrators laid on the ground to recognize the civilians who have been killed in Gaza. In the video, a group of protesters are seen holding keffiyeh scarves (symbols of Palestinian nationalism) around the student as some of them shout the word “shame.”
In a statement to NBC News, the student-led Palestine Solidarity Committee, one of the groups that organized the protest, said “an individual unaffiliated with the protest began aggressively stepping over bodies to record the faces of protestors, who were laying on their back in vulnerable positions.” The student marshals at the rally were concerned about the person’s presence because pro-Palestinian students are mindful of doxxing and harassment.