Censorship, Privacy and the Internet (week 11)

1) Twitch.tv and Corporate censorship

Twitch.tv is far far from dying. On the contrary, it is seeing greater viewership than ever before. However, the heart of Twitch seems to be withering away. It started way before becoming Amazon-owned but now it is in full swing.

Twitch used to burst with copyrighted music. Creators would play whatever they felt like, and it made streams look lively and organic. In late 2020 Twitch finally started regulating content under DMCA and pretty much forced streamers to delete their videos on demands (or VODs - recorded streams) and clips that contained copyrighted music. For many long-time streamers this meant taking down years' worth of archived video content. 

These DMCA issues not only affect streamers but also seem counter-intuitive for musicians. Some Twitch streamers are extremely popular and their content, playlists included, gets millions of views. Ultimately, music played on streams was promoting artists and their songs to a larger audience.   

Twitch has become notorious for handing out bans and censoring streams at the slightest reference to a copyrighted song or a banned word. This ultimately resulted in such comical event, that Twitch muted the recording of their own stream because it had Metallica songs. And those very songs were played by Metallica live for Twitch event. 

2) The phenomenon of doxing

Doxing has became a very common type of harassment on the Internet that can be carried out by anyone without great knowledge of computers. This term derived from a phrase "dropping dox" (documents -> docs -> dox). This practice is used to expose some shameful data about victim and then use this information to cause stress, harass or humiliate.

The easiest way to do doxing is to use digital fingerprint, through which a large amount of personal information can be obtained, such as the phone number, home address, date of birth, email accounts, hobbies, habits. However, it might go to some extremities like analysing person's videos or images to look for clues. One does not need any special type of equipment, knowledge, training or access to get this type information. It usually is a public domain. That's why it is also extremely dangerous.

The term "dox" went mainstream through media attention attracted by "Anonymous" hacktivist group. In December 2011 they exposed detailed information of 7000 law enforcement members in response to investigations into hacking activities. That might have started a number of online witch hunts and dangerous speculations.

Namely, following Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Reddit users wrongly identified a number of people as suspects. That ultimately led to a suicide of Sunil Tripathi, a student who was reported missing before the bombings took place.

Doxing can be really harmful and even lethal in some cases, and the fact that it is easy to find a lot of information about person knowing only his online handle makes phenomenon of doxing very real and very scary.