Who gets to dox and who gets doxxed?

X is going through a flurry of changes right now. Most of these have been credited to the site’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, who has suddenly become a main character among the racists, trolls, and CEOs that still use the platform. And the bulk of the changes are focused on managing the very specific issues caused by those aforementioned power users. But it mainly boils down to a question of who gets to dox and who gets to be doxxed.

On Tuesday, Bier announced that the platform plans to start displaying what country a user is posting from — which you could argue is a light form of doxxing, itself — among other identifying information for all accounts on the site, such as the device the account posts from, as well as all previous usernames the account has used. Bier noted users could opt out of displaying the information, but that the site also would “likely” say they had chosen to keep it private. X users seem largely excited about this, though mostly because they’re racist and paranoid and accuse anyone they don’t agree with of being secretly Indian.

But assuming the changes roll out site-wide, they have the potential to change quite a lot about how we think about X. Bier says the changes are to help users “form judgements on authenticity” — in other words, you might finally know if the account you’re looking at is a bot. Which was a problem for Twitter long before Elon purchased it and renamed it (and then tried to back out of the deal by claiming there were too many bots). Reports from Fast Company suggest coordinated manipulation by elaborate networks of fake accounts have only gotten worse in the year and a half since Mashable reported that over 75% of X engagement was inauthentic.

But all the attention that Bier has received recently for a range of similar technical tweaks, it’s also the reason he’s now become personally embroiled in some very intense drama with a group of X users we’re pretty sure are human. They’re also virulently hateful, gleefully white nationalist, committed doxxers… and several of them seem to be crucial voices in X’s new, mask-off extremist communities, and count Vice President JD Vance and Musk among their fans.

On Monday, X banned this group of far-right accounts, many of which were connected to the doxxing of the liberals that are still on the platform. The platform is seemingly trying to decide where the line is between an extremist that is bad for the site and an extremist that is good for the site. And the most prominent user in this group was an account going by the handle @avaricum777.

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