And some people laugh at the notion of staying anonymous online.
Bingo. Like many in my generation, I used to not worry about it at all. Now I am a bit obsessive—constantly checking my name, number, and address on people finder sites and sending takedown requests when they pop back up, and currently trying to transition all my online accounts to use e-mail addresses provided by Hide My E-mail on iCloud (which is quite the project). Seems like changing my e-mail on different accounts could be useful, since people would be less likely to connect those different accounts. I keep reporting the links to the doxxed info on pastebin, Twitter, and google (pro-tip: you can ask google to remove doxxed information from their search results). I know I will never be able to ask the actual extremists to take down my name when I am mid-identified as that other person, which sucks. And it still feels like there might be some other exposure that’s just waiting to blow up in my face. Open to suggestions on the subject if anyone has any.
Can't you sue these people? This situation sounds pretty ridiculous.
I was advised by multiple sources not to try. The initial people took down the info pretty immediately, but now it persists over a lot of forums, blog posts, etc., so I imagine it would be a game of whack-a-mole that would require significant legal resources, and it would draw a lot of attention, which would be unpleasant.
Which is just to say that I experience these self-reinforcing divisions at a visceral and existential level, which I suppose is the case for everyone. It only leads me to want to withdraw. I would like to try to explain who I actually am to people who think I’m the devil, but i think that would just backfire. So the solution at an individual level is to pull back my online presence and, I don’t know, buy a gun. Which clearly doesn’t help at the macro level.
Edit: typo
Further edit: I guess the second paragraph there illustrates how the prisoner’s dilemma comes into play to reinforce the mass psychology of tribalism. I long for the days of my youth, when I could still talk with my ideologically-different family about issues, but extending that to others on the internet feels fraught with danger, leaving me more exposed. It feels like the best strategy is to stay in my bubble and armor it up—safety in numbers, and all that. Which must be the same on the other side. The better solution is cooperation, but given the unknowns, everyone has to act suspicious and fortify instead.