Univ. of Washington Grad Student Faces Torrent of Vile Harassment After Sticking Up for Immigrants

When Alan-Michael Weatherford woke up on January 21, he thought he already knew what the bad news was. Donald Trump had been sworn in as President of the United States the day before. How much worse could things get?

But the Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media Department doctoral candidate at the University of Washington awoke before dawn to find that things had gotten worse. He’d been doxxed—the practice people scouring the Internet to find and publish personally identifiying information. On Inauguration Day, Weatherford found “homophobic and transphobic slurs” and threats of rape and other violence posted on several of his social media profiles and in his UW email, he says, along with pictures, contact information and his class schedule. This splurge of bile was unprecedented for him. What caused it?

Weatherford started clicking around the web. Eventually he found a forum on 4chan—an online forum known for its vile content—dedicated solely to figuring out the identity of a protester in a YouTube video. The protester was him. The video was filmed the day before, when Weatherford was part of a teach-in at the UW’s Odegaard Library with undocumented students, he says.

As he and the students left the library, Weatherford says, a man began following and filming the group with his cellphone. Worried that the footage might be used to identify the undocumented students to federal immigration police, Weatherford tried to block the camera with a cardboard sign. The pair began dancing around each other in and out of the street like basketball players as the man tried to film and pursue and Weatherford tried to block him. All the while, they argued back and forth about whether the man was trying to dox the people he was filming, and whether Weatherford was using the term “dox” properly. Eventually, Weatherford says, another friend grabbed the camera-phone out of the man’s hand and refused to return it until the man stopped filming. He agreed, then started filming again as soon as he got his phone back, according to Weatherford. They danced and argued some more, he says, and then Weatherford and his confederates escaped via bus. The end.

Read more: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/uw-grad-student-faces-torrent-of-vile-harassment-after-sticking-up-for-immigrants/