Doxing is all about control. In a doxing attempt, attackers hunt down and publish personal information about someone with the intent to cause harm, sharing items including addresses, phone numbers, places of employment, sexual orientation, age, social media accounts and even family members' information. Generally, there's an appeal to dig up even more sensitive information and further harass the victim -- calling dozens of times a day, sending items to their address or actually showing up at their home.

At its heart, doxing is an intimidation tactic meant to scare and silence someone -- generally, someone the attacker disagrees with online.

Doxing was one of the main weapons deployed by proponents of Gamergate, a loosely organized movement that led to the widespread harassment of women in the video game community around 2014. Gamergate targeted game developers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu and Feminist Frequency founder Anita Sarkeesian, among others.

The FBI got involved, and earlier this year the Bureau released a redacted 173-page document outlining its Gamergate investigation, including swaths of abusive tweets, emails and messages. One suspect apparently admitted to calling and threatening a victim 40 to 50 times a day, though it appears this person didn't face any punishment. The entire investigation was closed in September 2015.

Felicia Day, actress and all-around nerd goddess, penned a blog post in October 2014 about her personal reaction to Gamergate and to explain why she hadn't spoken up about the controversy before then. Essentially, she wrote, she was scared of being doxed:

I have been terrified of inviting a deluge of abusive and condescending tweets into my timeline. I did one simple @ reply to one of the main victims several weeks back, and got a flood of things I simply couldn't stand to read directed at me. I had to log offline for a few days until it went away. I have tried to retweet a few of the articles I've seen dissecting the issue in support, but personally I am terrified to be doxxed for even typing the words "Gamer Gate." I have had stalkers and restraining orders issued in the past, I have had people show up on my doorstep when my personal information was HARD to get. To have my location revealed to the world would give a entry point for a few mentally ill people who have fixated on me, and allow them to show up and make good on the kind of threats I've received that make me paranoid to walk around a convention alone. I haven't been able to stomach the risk of being afraid to get out of my car in my own driveway because I've expressed an opinion that someone on the internet didn't agree with.

Day was doxed minutes after publishing that blog post.

Doxing is a tool of silence, and it doesn't even have to be deployed to have monstrous effects. Its mere threat can close people out of conversations, pushing them away from entire communities and fandoms. Yes, even nerd goddesses.

Especially nerd goddesses. The Pew Research Center found in 2014 that men are more often the victims of name-calling, physical threats and embarrassment tactics in the digital world, while women "experience particularly severe forms of online harassment," including stalking and sexual harassment.

"Young women, those 18-24, experience certain severe types of harassment at disproportionately high levels: 26 percent of these young women have been stalked online, and 25 percent were the target of online sexual harassment," Pew writes. "In addition, they do not escape the heightened rates of physical threats and sustained harassment common to their male peers and young people in general."

Take former NFL player Chris Kluwe, for example. He railed against Gamergate just days before Day published her blog post, and he took a decidedly more antagonistic tone: