Here are Digital Security Tips to Protect Yourself from Doxing

CFA members support the rights of faculty to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech, as well as their right to academic freedom. Please see our Faculty Rights Tip on our commitment to uphold academic freedom and how we can defend ourselves.

We want to ensure that our colleagues, students, staff, and their families feel safe and supported in a political climate where right-wing activists target people with doxing and harassment.

Our members have been working on safety plans to protect our physical safety and curb online harassment, and we have been urging administrators on our respective campuses to reinforce the safety and well-being of our faculty, staff, and students.

To further support our efforts, we want to offer some guidance for digital security and encourage our campus communities to practice these protective measures. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) also offers digital security resources here and dox defense resources here, and Inside Higher Ed has offered tips on how to best protect yourself from doxing.

We don’t want to dictate what people do on their personal social media accounts, but one protective measure could be to refrain from posting content that may draw unwanted attention to your account. It’s fine to continue sharing posts about the work we are actively involved in, but be mindful that our members are actively being surveilled and that certain posts could expand the scope of targets.

Turning your social media accounts to private is another tool to help keep your posts among your followers. If you have accepted followers whom you do not know personally, it could also be a good time to clean up your followers list by removing accounts you don’t know.

We want to also remind our members to reach out to your chapter faculty rights for advocacy and representation if you are experiencing any form of discrimination or are aware of other faculty being targeted.

If you have CFA or any other organizational affiliations in your social media bios, removing those affiliations could be helpful (even for a brief time). It doesn’t solve everything but done in combination with the other measures could be helpful in case someone chooses to target your personal account based on a stated organizational affiliation. 

Our priority is and has been the safety of every one of our campus members, and we will continue our efforts to ensure that safety. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.