As far as holiday weeks go, this one started out weird, with President Trump tweeting a video of himself beating up a CNN logo. Then it got weirder. CNN's KFile investigative team traced the video—a creative edit of footage from a 2007 professional wrestling match—back to a Reddit user. The Redditor in question, who goes by the username HanAssholeSolo, was apparently spooked enough by a reporter's inquiry that he issued an apology for his past bigoted and violent posts on the pro-Trump subreddit /r/The_Donald. And that should have been it: a milkshake duck tale of an average citizen riding that now-familiar arc from obscurity to virality to notoriety.

Except that wasn't it at all. Because, while CNN didn't disclose the apologetic Redditor's legal name or any other identifying characteristics, language in the piece stated that the company "reserves the right to publish his identity" if he relapses into trolling. (Reporting from Gizmodo suggests that such language came courtesy of a network executive, not the reporter himself.) The blowback was swift and strong; #CNNBlackmail began trending nationally on Twitter within hours, CNN-vilifying memes bloomed across social media, and everyone from Donald Trump Jr. to Julian Assange to (obviously) the rest of r/The_Donald expressed support for HanAssholeSolo.

Among the outraged tweeters and meme-makers, though, was a more worrisome character with a more worrisome tactic: neo-Nazi black-hat hacker Andrew Auernheimer, known online as weev, threatened to dox CNN reporters' families on hate site The Daily Stormer. And just like that, the original issue at play—the President of the United States tweeting content from an anonymous Redditor with a demonstrated history of racism and Islamophobia—vaporized, eclipsed by a war over privacy and journalism. CNN doxed a private citizen, goes the thinking among those advocating for harassing the reporter's family. We're just fighting fire with fire! While that argument is specious (and we'll get into why), the controversy demonstrates that confusion still clouds the issue. This allows bad actors like Auernheimer to conflate reporting with doxing, and thus destabilize the foundation of journalism. With that in mind, a little explanation might be in order.

A Brief History of Doxing and Weev

Doxing is the public, digital release of a person's private information without their consent, usually to exert some kind of power over the dox-ee. But the practice hasn't always been digital. "Lord Herman Ouseley, a race relations campaigner in the UK, used to get endless midnight phone calls in the 1990s," says Amy Binns, a media scholar at the University of Central Lancashire who studies online abuse. "Far-right activists had posted his phone number on cards in public toilets all over London." In fact, the term seems to have derived from a plain old analog word: documents, which begat "docs," and then "dox." Around the same time Lord Ouseley was getting those late-night calls, hackers were "dropping dox" to get revenge on previously anonymous rivals.

But politically motivated doxing has only become mainstream in the past ten years or so. That's partially because social media has made doxing easier, but also because it's gotten sexier. "Doxing tends to be used by those who see themselves as lacking power in order to exclude those who threaten their current norms" says David Douglas, a researcher who has published work on doxing. Of course, norms and power are all a matter of perspective, so regardless of ideology every notable doxer has seen themselves a righteous vigilante—including Auernheimer.

In fact, according to Know Your Meme, the progenitor of the modern political dox was a 2006 YouTube channel called Vigilantes, who doxed racist or otherwise hateful vloggers. (They were then, of course, doxed themselves.) But by 2007 and 2008, Anonymous had given social media–enabled (and –publicized) doxing a higher profile—first by doxing white supremacist radio personality Hal Turner, and then the Church of Scientology. The Scientology incident received international attention, and ushered in the wave of left-wing doxings the internet has seen since: the Ohio high-school football players accused of rape; the dentist who shot Cecil the Lion; Cincinnati police officers suspected of being involved in fatal shootings.