Gabriella Coleman, an author and arguably the best-known expert on Anonymous, had a mixed reaction to the results of the operation shortly after it went live. She was impressed with the group’s “town hall” discussion on race and representation that took place on Wednesday, as a companion to the information dump. To her, that online conversation demonstrated that there were “thoughtful” individuals with experience working on racial justice issues involved in the operation, she said. But “since the data is impossible to verify, it does also make me a little suspicious as well,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Hard for me to wrap my head around this one.”

Although Anonymous has a long history of taking up causes that might align with grassroots racial and social justice issues, it also has a long history of doxxing the wrong people, often undermining the group’s own intentions by targeting innocent people with vigilante tactics. Those include incorrectly identifying a man as the officer who fatally shot Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Mo.