In the past week, I have ‘doxxed’ four journalists to help them identify and secure their digital information following threats, intimidation, backlash or attempts being made to silence them or squash stories they have been working on.

When I started as the online safety editor at Reach back in 2021, a week like this one would have been relatively unusual.

But in 2025, I ‘doxx’ my colleagues almost every week.

‘Doxxing’ is the practice of finding personal information about an individual and using it maliciously in online spaces, often with the intention of intimidating a person or smearing their reputation.

To be clear, this is not how I operate. Instead, I take the principles of doxxing and apply them to help a colleague identify what information is out there about them and where they might want to make changes.

I always do this with the knowledge and permission of the individual and quite often we will sit on a call together while I share my screen and conduct the searches with them, so they can see what I find. Once we have identified any areas the journalist might want to make change, I provide links and information to help them do this quickly and easily.

It can be an eye-opening experience, even for the most private of online users, to look themselves up through the eyes of a relative stranger.

And it can be a bit of a shock to discover how quickly I can find their home address and personal phone number online, or the names of their family members in publicly available spaces. It is a surprise how easily we can build a picture of a person through a........

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