A new database called Social Autopsy is trying to stamp out online harassment by creating a massive list of cyberbullies. It lets users submit a troll’s full name and place of employment alongside screenshots of the harasser harassing people—so potential romantic partners can shun the abusers and employers can fire then. Last week, the founders began a Kickstarter campaign to fund their project.
But the site has ignited controversy from around the web—even drawing criticism from self-described anti-harassment advocates.
More: Social Autopsy Founder Accuses Zoe Quinn of Cyber Terrorism.
The site, ironically, has been criticized by some as a doxxing platform, or a way to get people harassed by linking their real identities with online behavior. Internet lynch mobs have been a real problem in the past: Just look at the case of Justine Sacco, a communications executive who lost her job and was pilloried en masse on Twitter over one admittedly racist tweet.
Social Autopsy’s founder, Candace Owens, says that her site can’t be used this way, but she doesn’t explain how exactly Social Autopsy prevents this. While the database can only be searched with full, real names and not keywords, that alone won’t completely mitigate the risk of a lynch mob. It would only stop crusades against racists and homophobes by searching certain keywords (such as racial slurs), but not the targeting of individuals.
More troubling is the decision to include minors in the database. As Owens was the victim of harassment herself as a minor, she believes having minors’ profiles on the site for a short amount of time would help change their lives.
“I personally think that being on our database as a minor is the best time to be there because there are no consequences for applying to jobs or scholarships,” Owens says. “If they are aware of that early on we can make a huge impact in their future.”
The problem with this reasoning is that although the profile may be on the database for a short amount of time, the Internet as a whole has a hard time forgetting. Profiles can easily be archived and be part of the web permanently.
And although Social Autopsy promises to vet each individual submission, there is no way to prove whether a screenshot was doctored or if the social media profile was a dummy account. Owens says the database will not be publicly accessible until they receive 100,000 profiles; currently she says they have about 45,000 names.
“When you actually see the database you are not going to say, ‘he didn’t deserve that,'” Owens says. “You are going to say, ‘is he fucking disturbed?'”
After starting the Kickstarter, Owens says she received a flurry of racist emails. The cyber harassers she hoped to target wound up targeting her. The origin of the email blast is unclear and has launched a controversy of its own.
On Thursday, Kickstarter suspended the campaign. “Projects that center on content that can be deemed hateful or offensive, or that involve people’s personal information tend to be against our community guidelines,” Kickstarter wrote in an email to Owens.
Multiple parties take credit for the suspension, from self-described anti-harassment activist Randi Harper in a Medium post to Vox Day, a prolific science-fiction writer and Gamergater.
The amount of controversy surrounding Social Autopsy should come as no surprise. Regardless of the potential for abuse, the database seeks to tear down a core tenant of the Internet, the ability to remain anonymous. And those with the most to hide online are usually not the people you want to be messing with.