The end of anonymity?

Last week, popular online humourist “HowlingMutant” was exposed as being a random guy in New York City. This, I appreciate, is a bizarre sentence but bear with me. “HowlingMutant” is not just a jokester but a provocative right-wing jokester who, improbably, is followed by Vice President JD Vance.

(JD Vance also continues to follow me, despite my increasingly florid criticism of his colleagues, which suggests that he is open-minded, really loves photos of Upper Silesian landscapes, or — and I appreciate that this is most probable — is far too busy to scroll X.)

The justification for doxxing HowlingMutant is curious. “He frequently posts about rape and refers to himself as a rapist,” claim Decoherence Media, “And [he] makes antisemitic jokes.” The “posts about rape” are also jokes, predictably. There are two issues here: the moral acceptability of HowlingMutant’s jokes and the extent to which this justifies his “doxxing”.

HowlingMutant can be a very funny man. He has also said a lot of things which are offensive for the sake of being offensive. Dissecting comedy is notoriously difficult but let me do my best to illustrate the distinction.

In this commentator’s view, there is no subject which cannot inspire comedy. “Picked up a rape whistle for my safety,” HowlingMutant posted once, “But when I finally had occasion to use it it wasnt something that scared my rapist away at all – if anything it seemed to draw more rapists towards me.” The idea of a rape whistle that attracts rapists is so absurd, so counter-intuitive, and yet so theoretically plausible that it is very funny. 

Yes, any subject can inspire comedy. But that doesn’t mean the subject is inherently amusing. When HowlingMutant posts something like, “Everybody is one bad day away from being a rapist”, there is no comedic content unless one is (a) bizarre enough to think that the concept of rape is inherently funny or (b) puerile enough to think that being offensive is inherently funny. Granted, people being offended can be entertaining if their sensitivities are haywire. If the roots of their offence-taking lies in devastating personal trauma, though, this is not the case.

So, sure, you don’t have to tell me that HowlingMutant has bad posts. But the next question is why having bad posts means that someone deserves to have their real-world identity exposed — threatening their future employment and relationships.

For me, there is a simple answer: they don’t. Doxxing anons, in my opinion, should only be exposed when they are doing real-world harm. You should not get to mess with other people’s real lives, in other words, while protecting your own. True, I appreciate that what constitutes “real-world harm” is debatable. I don’t think that saying something mean about someone online counts as “real-world harm”, for example, but continuing to do so to the point that it impairs their mental health or relationships will eventually become harmful. Making bad jokes, though, seems to do no material harm beyond annoying people, and if someone is annoying on the internet there is no obligation to expose yourself to them. To attempt to impose life-altering consequences on people for the crime of being an irritant, and stifling free speech in the process, seems like an enormous, and enormously spiteful, overreaction.

Yet I fear that this argument has become futile. People no longer accept that free speech has inherent, and not merely functional, value. People no longer accept that different opinions can be discussed, and different jokes can be made, outside of the realms of political conflict. That this is true of left-wingers almost goes without saying, but right-wingers have followed suit. Various left-wing accounts were doxxed in 2025 — wrongly, in my opinion — for making unpleasant jokes about the death of Charlie Kirk.

Politics has become too zero sum to sustain norms like the idea that doxxing is wrong. Once you believe that your political opponents are outright enemies, it becomes absurd not to make use of lawful tools to silence them.

An internet of spies and snitches will harm inquiry and creativity

I don’t like this thought. I urge you to resist it. Firstly, it is plain untrue that most speech — beyond, say, threats of harm, or incitement to harm — have direct consequences. Yes, one could argue that speech helps to shape our culture, and that the nature of our culture determines how much harm is done, and I would not suggest that this is completely wrong. But a culture of censoriousness in which misguided or unpleasant speech is equated, by its very nature, with materially harmful actions is also damaging. An internet of spies and snitches will harm inquiry and creativity, and it will also make us more fragile and undignified.

Again, for the hard of reading, I appreciate that right-wingers online can have a problem with distinguishing between offensive comedy and offensiveness that masquerades as comedy. Hell, I even appreciate that humour can be a deliberate vehicle for political messaging. But I remain idealistic enough to think that bad jokes should be responded to with good jokes, and that bad political messages should be responded to with good political messages, rather than with trying to ruin someone’s life. That isn’t persuasive and it definitely isn’t funny.