As mentioned in previous posts, extortion is a crime. People will use anything online to do it, and it’s rare that anything someone posts online for the public to see is something that’s embarrassing for them.
People constantly try to troll each other in SEO-friendly ways. There’s an entire industry of digital marketing called reputation management that involves covering any negative press about you. It works in tangent with SEO (search engine optimization), in which marketing agencies create good press about you.
Trying to blackmail someone by inserting yourself into that process is definitely going to leave a traceable mark that implicates you. I’ve never seen anyone try to blackmail someone in my entire life, but that’s not the kind of work I do.
I have seen people dox each other all the time, and I’ve been doxed on multiple occasions to varying level of annoyance or laughter, depending on how you look at it.
Doxing is closer to cancel culture, and it’s not uncommon to see people do it to each other across the internet, especially social media. People will leak private, personal, and confidential information about people and combine it with absurd and bizarre accusations often unfounded.
This stuff often goes viral, and if there’s validity found in the accusations, it’ll end up on the news. That ends up sparking a whole other level of debate.
Victoria Secret Karen was a fun one recently.
The woman has a rather lengthy freakout and tantrum about being filmed for attacking another woman. The woman filming is not doing so to blackmail anybody but is clearly repeating that she’s protecting herself.
As the incident continues, the customers in the store try to aid the aggressive woman in the video. Her pleas are that the woman is going to post the film online and get her in trouble. Nobody knows what to do, including the police when she calls 911, because she’s being filmed in public, which is legal no matter how much of a tantrum she throws about it.
Her attempts to stop the filming are what makes the filming so necessary and so compelling to watch. It ended up being given plenty of news coverage and from this woman’s clearly skewed and delusional perspective, was the worst case scenario of being “blackmailed,” by social media even though she’s the one at fault.
And let’s not forget Justine Sacco, the PR executive who tweeted in the airport while boarding a plane to Africa and was fired by the time the plane landed.Justine Sacco, the PR exec who was fired from IAC for her tweets, has landed back at IAC’s Match GroupSacco, who tweeted before she got on a plane, is back with Barry Diller’s company.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vox.com/platform/amp/2018/1/19/16911074/justine-sacco-iac-match-group-return-tweet
Tweets have long been used to cancel people, which is what people do when they don’t want money like extortionists do. They just want to destroy your life, get you divorced, fired, and banned from everything.
That rage is part of human nature we must all deal with from people. But as the lawyer previously said, it’s rarely ever as long lasting as the prison sentence given to people who are dumb enough to threaten extortion first.