Created
Sun, 10/09/2023 - 10:00
I wonder what Franz Kafka would have to say about the social media phenom of “doxxing” (apart from “Whad’ya expect?!”). In case you missed it, here’s a chilling story from 2020: By the standards of the pandemic, Thursday had been a normal day for Peter Weinberg. A 49-year-old finance marketing executive, he worked from his home in Bethesda, Maryland, right outside of the District of Columbia, staying busy with Zoom meetings and the new rituals of our socially isolated world. Then, around 10 p.m., he received an irate message on LinkedIn from someone he didn’t know. He brushed it off, thinking it was probably just spam. Then he got another. And another. The third message was particular strange, as it mentioned something about the cops coming to find him. Perplexed, he watched as the messages continued to pile up. They were all so similar: angry, threatening, accusatory. His profile views suddenly soared into the thousands. He began to panic. He decided to check Twitter. Although he’d had an account for more than a decade, Weinberg didn’t use the social platform very much.