Who is Jane Doe? Online vigilantes have tried to expose the Cornell University student who filed a lawsuit accusing seven fraternity members of gang rape, and in so doing have invited a torrent of abuse on several other women. Her lawyers say three women have been falsely identified and harassed — and the real Jane Doe is being inundated with threats, too.  “She’s not doing well,” her attorney Thomas Guiffra told CNN on Sunday. “She’s under siege on social media, where people are trying to identify her.”

The fact several women are now facing a torrent of online abuse in connection to Jane Doe’s lawsuit isn’t surprising. Targeted harassment and intimidation campaigns were a hallmark of the backlash to #MeToo. These targeted harassment campaigns were once organized on websites like Kiwi Farms and 4chan. But the effort to unmask Jane Doe — and to terrorize any woman they believe to be Jane Doe — is happening right in the open, on mainstream social media platforms that aren’t doing anything to stop it. 

Jane Doe’s identity isn’t a total secret: It’s known to her attorneys, the judge presiding over the case, the seven men she’s accusing of rape, and their attorneys, too. In civil cases, a plaintiff’s anonymity is ultimately up to the judge, who weighs several factors, including whether identifying the plaintiff by name will put them at risk of physical or mental injury. “In New York, there’s no automatic right to proceed anonymously,” said Annie Seifullah, a founding partner at the victims’ rights firm Incendii Law. Still, “the law recognizes that survivors’ lives are routinely put on trial, and that forcing them to sue under their real names would keep many victims of sexual violence from coming forward at all.” Similarly, journalistic ethics guides typically suggest showing sensitivity to victims of alleged sex crimes, and reporters will often allow people alleging abuse to do so anonymously, so long as their identity can be independently corroborated.

The attempt to expose Jane Doe began on X, where Substack author and podcast host Michael Tracey — who is perhaps best known for his skepticism toward the allegations made about Jeffrey Epstein — solicited information about her. Tracey said he considered her identity fair game “since her lawsuit didn’t hesitate to name & shame 7 of her peers as gang-rapists.” Aidan Thompson, founder of the AF Post — a publication dedicated to articulating “the ideas, beliefs, and values of the America First Movement” — also asked for help identifying Jane Doe. “Beev, please help me discover the Cornell girl,” he posted on September 29th, referring to the “burnerverse,” a network of anonymous X accounts whose members discuss college sports and wage harassment campaigns against women with equal zeal.

“The fact that people are trying so hard to dox her and are harassing her and others — women they just think might be her — underscores how serious her privacy interest really is,” said Katie McKay, a senior associate at C.A. Goldberg, a victims’ rights firm that specializes in tech-facilitated abuse. “Obviously the anonymity is necessary. It’s protecting her, to some extent, from even more harassment, even more targeting and retaliation.”

X’s terms of service expressly prohibits users from sharing a person’s private information without their consent, and from threatening to do so; the site has also banned people who post the alleged names of pseudonymous users. But non-users’ names and photos aren’t considered “private information,” even if they can be used to dig up actual private details like their phone number or home address. X’s rules also say users “may not target others with abuse or harassment, or encourage other people to do so,” but the platform is flooded with posts disparaging women believed to be Jane Doe. X did not respond to a request for comment.

On X, Thompson posted photos and biographical details of a woman he claimed was Jane Doe. Tracey later identified the same woman as Jane Doe on his Substack, claiming to have seen her name on court records. In fact, Tracey got the name from a court records aggregator — a website that, according to disinformation researcher Jared Holt, was registered in mid-September and seems to selectively post information about polarizing cases, like Clavicular’s and Lindsay Clancy’s.

Despite Tracey’s repeated assertions that Jane Doe’s identity was a matter of public interest, many comments on his Substack post focused on the purported Jane Doe’s sex appeal and how this related to the veracity of her allegations. On X, dozens if not hundreds of people — ranging from anonymous accounts to prominent right-wing commentators — are now scrutinizing her appearance, making sexual comments about her, and disparaging her boyfriend. Anonymous accounts have circulated her Instagram and TikTok posts and made AI deepfakes of the woman Tracey and Thompson named.

Substack, too, is known for its lax content moderation policies. The platform has taken a laissez-faire approach to publishing, and in 2023 infamously refused to remove or demonetize several Nazi publications from its website. Tracey has seemingly benefited from his posts about Jane Doe: Substack lists his newsletter as 66th on its politics leaderboard. Substack did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tracey, for his part, deleted the post in which he claimed to have identified Jane Doe — not because of his shoddy sourcing but because he claimed to have made his point: High-profile litigants shouldn’t be allowed to be anonymous, especially when accusing others of rape. “That’s all I ever sought to accomplish here,” he wrote. “Not to impugn this young woman on a personal level. I have no animus toward her, and never have. I sincerely wish her the best, and hope her life is not defined by this calamity.” Tracey did not respond to a request for comment.

Jane Doe isn’t anonymous to the court. “Underlying this is the belief that it’s somehow unfair to these defendants that she’s anonymous and they’re not. But they know who she is,” McKay said. “I don’t see a lack of accountability, even as a Jane Doe, in voluntarily subjecting your claims to the scrutiny of a court, with the subpoena power and the discovery power of the court.” Because the defendants know Jane Doe’s identity, their attorneys will be able to request access to her medical records, psychiatric records, and personal communications. “If the worry is that she wouldn’t be held accountable for any kind of false allegation, the whole process is designed to vet these allegations and only allow the claim to move forward — and her to potentially recover anything — if it’s deemed meritorious upon examination of all this evidence.”

And regardless of their stated motivations for doing so, anyone who has spent any time on X since 2022 (or the internet more broadly) would know that identifying a woman as Jane Doe would inevitably result in that woman getting a torrent of abuse. Either Thompson and Tracey identified and directed harassment toward an alleged rape victim, or they directed harassment toward an unrelated woman in their quest to expose the identity of an alleged rape victim. These harassment campaigns reverberate beyond their intended targets, creating a broader culture of intimidation. “I’ve already had many clients call me to ask if they should be worried about being doxxed over their Jane Doe status,” said Seifullah, the victims’ rights attorney. “Most survivors don’t report and this is why.”

Ironically, Tracey is now complaining that an online mob is not only going after his family but also targeting the new owners of his childhood home, to which he has no relation. 

Harassment of people who come forward with sexual assault allegations isn’t a new phenomenon, and McKay noted that stringent efforts were taken to protect the identity of Emily Doe, woman who accused Stanford swimmer Brock Turner of rape in 2015, and “I don’t recall much of a doxxing campaign,” McKay said — even after Emily Doe’s victim impact statement went viral. When Chanel Miller came forward four years later, the news of her identity was truly revelatory even to those who had criticized her during Turner’s high-profile trial. 

“I think the interest in ‘exposing’ victims is going to be magnified these days,” McKay said. Though it’s impossible to pinpoint what changed, McKay pointed to harassment campaigns directed at Amber Heard and E. Jean Carroll, two women who publicly accused famous men of rape. “Those women were publicly identified, and they were torn to shreds, viciously attacked by the public,” McKay said. “I don’t know if perhaps that’s created more of an interest or an expectation that every case is going to let observers who are non-litigants pick apart the victim, but it seems pretty clear to me that’s what they want to do here.”

Just like the #MeToo movement encouraged women to share their stories, the attempt to expose Jane Doe has generated a new wave of solidarity. On TikTok and Instagram, hundreds of women responded to Tracey’s request for information about the alleged Cornell victim with an “I am Spartacus”-esque campaign in which they proclaim to be Jane Doe. Some women are even coming forward with their own stories of sexual assault.

Sarah Lupica, a 24-year-old content creator with more than 1.5 million followers on TikTok, posted a video about being sexually assaulted when she was 16 years old. “For the longest time, I blamed myself for being in that situation,” Lupica told me. Until now, she said, she lacked the language to explain what happened to her. Lupica was 13 years old at the height of #MeToo and had no recollection of the movement. It didn’t reach her. The moment passed, the culture changed, and the abuse of women persisted in a culture that is even more hostile to survivors.

For Lupica, #IAmJaneDoe is a way of not only sharing her own story but showing other women that they aren’t alone. Lupica said she felt emboldened by the amount of other women who were coming forward. “I was really touched by it, and the whole movement of saying ‘I am Jane Doe,’” she told me. “It’s saying you stand with her and with everyone who’s been scared to speak — survivors who never got justice and girls who are really trying to understand what happened to them.”

San Francisco is suing the Trump Media & Technology Group, the parent company behind Truth Social, for selling early access to President Donald Trump’s posts on the social media site. The lawsuit, filed today in California state court, alleges that the Truth API feed is a “corrupt business scheme” that violates both California’s Unfair Competition Law and federal ethics and anti-corruption laws that prohibit insider trading.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle recently called Truth Social the “most powerful and popular social media platform in the world.” While the latter part of that statement is objectively untrue based on any credible estimates — in fact, Truth Social traffic has declined over the last year — Trump often makes high-stakes announcements in his capacity as president on the platform, and his posts there have a clear effect on the global economy. To capitalize on this, Trump Media recently launched Truth API, a service that charges select customers $100,000 a month for early access to the 10 most influential accounts on Truth Social, including Trump’s and those of other White House officials. Trump Media’s interim CEO, Kevin McGurn, acknowledged as much in his announcement of Truth API, saying that “markets already move on Truth Social posts.” 

The San Francisco lawsuit cites several examples of this, some of which took place after the launch of Truth API. On August 21st, for example, Trump posted that the federal government was going to “lower the price of ground beef for working families” by exempting some ground beef imports from tariffs. When the market opened a few hours later, cattle futures declined significantly, according to the complaint. 

“Trump Media has unlawfully created, priced, marketed, and operated a commercial mechanism that knowingly and willfully facilitates Trump’s use of nonpublic information for private profit,” the complaint alleges. The San Francisco suit alleges that Truth API is a way of making the floundering Trump Media — which reported a net loss of more than $238 million earlier this year — profitable. 

Per his agreement with Trump Media, Truth Social has a six-hour exclusivity window on Trump’s posts, meaning he can’t post the same material elsewhere in that time frame. Even before the launch of Truth API, Trump’s Truth Social profile was extremely valuable for investors — so valuable that the company has sought to capitalize on it. The San Francisco complaint cites reports of hedge fund executives who say they feel pressured to buy the service even though they think it’s legally risky. “It’s a pay-to-play scheme for early access to the president’s market-moving government statements,” San Francisco city attorney David Chiu said in a Tuesday press conference. “In today’s markets, early access means millions of dollars. This business scheme has turned public trust into private property.” Beyond violating insider trading laws, the suit claims, Truth API disadvantages everyday investors by paywalling financially valuable information.

Trump Media hasn’t disclosed its list of Truth API clients, but the company has said it plans on marketing the product to AI companies and large news organizations.

The city has asked a judge to forbid Trump Media from offering Truth API or similar services, and to impose a fine of $2,500 per violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law.

This isn’t the first time Trump has been sued over Truth API. In August, The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed a joint lawsuit in a New York federal court over the product, which it called “extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional.”

From Florida to Washington state, local governments across the country are canceling their contracts with Flock, the company behind the controversial AI-enabled license plate readers, in response to public outcry. But ending the contracts doesn’t necessarily mean the cameras will come down immediately — or that the information they’ve gathered will be deleted anytime soon.

Even as state and local governments decide to rein in their surveillance capabilities, uncertainty remains about what Flock can and will do with data that has already been collected. Each jurisdiction’s contract is different, but many of them let Flock retain data long after it’s been collected. “Let’s say they terminate,” said Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has reviewed dozens of municipal Flock contracts. “What happens to the data, and how long is it able to be searched? That question appears to be unresolved.”

The backlash against Flock was slow to mount, but now it’s everywhere, and it’s bipartisan. Founded in 2017, Flock pitched its cameras — which are sold not only to local governments but to private businesses and citizens — as an unobtrusive tool to enhance public safety. Early in the company’s history, some cities even offered grants for homeowners associations that wanted to install Flock cameras in their neighborhoods. Flock’s footprint has grown quickly. The company has installed more than 120,000 cameras across the US. 

This rapid expansion, along with alarming reports of misuses of Flock’s surveillance network, has fueled a new wave of opposition, making Flock a kind of shorthand for privacy invasion. In recent months, activists in big cities and small towns have urged local governments to end their contracts, citing concerns about privacy, harassment, and mass surveillance. Local leaders have said the public pressure — coupled with Flock’s data-sharing and retention policies, and what the company can do with the information its cameras collect — spurred them to end the contracts.

Lawmakers in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, unanimously voted to end the city’s Flock contract after learning that Flock reportedly tried to sell anonymized data collected in Sheboygan back to the city’s public works department. Elsewhere in the state, the mayor of Stevens Point not only ended its contract with Flock but also covered up the 10 cameras scattered throughout the city. “We really have no way of auditing where the Flock data goes once it’s collected,” Mayor Mike Wiza said on a local radio show. “Our community is not comfortable using these cameras without some assurances that it’s being used in a manner we have authorized.” (Flock maintains that it doesn’t sell consumer data.)

Local leaders across the country say they were misled about how Flock data could be used, and some have admitted that they didn’t realize the degree to which the data would be accessed by third parties.

In Bridgewater, Virginia, the town council put bags over its Flock cameras after voting to cancel its contract. Bridgewater is home to fewer than 7,000 people, but the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism found that because of the town’s information-sharing agreement with Flock, data collected in the town was searched 7 million times by law enforcement in 12 months.

The EFF, which sued the city of San Jose, California, over its usage of Flock cameras, argues that these information-sharing agreements violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure. 

“Through these searches, police are able to identify patterns of where people live and work, where they may drop off their kids to school, who they associate with, where they worship, seek reproductive care, seek an immigration consult,” Hussain said. “What we’re talking about here is a mass surveillance technology that is by design intended to identify where people are going and track people’s movements.”

Like many movements against law enforcement overreach, the backlash against Flock began with stories about particularly egregious abuses. There have been several reports of law enforcement officers using Flock to track exes and romantic partners. In response to these and other concerns, Flock recently rolled out new guardrails, including a new requirement to run case codes — which were previously optional — for all searches. Flock is also mandating a feature called Audit Assistance, which flags “abnormal” queries. 

“This is such an obvious way to curb abuse,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley recently told The Verge. “And I said, ‘Fine. You know what? I think that’s right, and we got this one wrong. We should make it a requirement.’”

Flock has also shortened its standard data retention period from 30 to seven days, though it will let individual jurisdictions lengthen these time frames. Agencies that use Flock will also be able to limit what kinds of information they share with other entities. For example, a city or police department could let other jurisdictions access its Flock data for homicide searches, but not for queries related to immigration enforcement.

But privacy advocates say Flock’s reforms don’t go far enough. The American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing San Jose alongside the EFF, said the changes are “more focused on addressing a perceived PR problem than the significant harms its products create.”

It’s unclear what would stop someone from falsely or incorrectly tagging a Flock search. For example, after sheriff’s deputies in one Texas county used Flock to track a woman suspected of violating the state’s abortion ban, the sheriff described the queries as a search for a missing person.

Flock has repeatedly emphasized that Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t have access to its cameras. But local agencies that have deputized their officers under federal 287(g) agreements — which let local law enforcement conduct immigration arrests — can use Flock for immigration enforcement, and many do. Public recordsobtained by 404 Media revealed that Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission uses Flock to carry out ICE arrests. The agency is reportedly also using Flock to surveil and track its critics. Florida’s Department of Transportation has since banned Flock cameras from state highways, but law enforcement can still tap into city- and county-level Flock cameras, or to those installed on private property. Shopping centers, retail giants like Home Depot and Lowe’s, and homeowners associations have reportedly installed Flock cameras on their properties. Activists are urging beauty retailer Ulta to drop its Flock contracts, citing numerous reports of officers using the surveillance network to track women.

Privacy activists note that ending Flock contracts won’t be enough to stop mass surveillance. Some cities that have ended their relationships with Flock — including South Pasadena, California, and Durango, Colorado — are now considering alternatives. The Flock backlash has reportedly enriched Axon, the company that also makes Tasers and body-worn cameras. Hussain notes that Axon’s system is arguably more integrated than Flock’s.

“Axon has other technologies as well that they stack on top of their automated license plate readers. They have a bunch of other data streams, including coming from their body-worn cameras, so you’re able to build out quite a surveillance system,” she said. “You’re not going to be able to stop this mass surveillance technology by moving to another vendor. The only thing that is going to solve this whole problem is not relying on this technology.”

In the span of a few hours on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would be implementing a fee of over $103,000 on H-1B visas, and news broke that the State Department plans on revoking the visas of up to 200,000 asylum seekers — which, according to The Associated Press, would be the largest mass visa revocation in US history. 

More than a year into President Donald Trump’s second term, it’s become clear that the only way Trump can get the deportation numbers he wants is by stripping legal immigrants of status. Beyond having ICE arrest, detain, and deport immigrants, the administration is pressuring noncitizens to “self-deport,” in some cases imposing civil fines on them and threatening to seize their assets. It’s creating legal hurdles not only for new legal immigrants but for those already in the country, and in the process, likely hurting businesses and social services nationwide.

H-1B visas are often seen as synonymous with Big Tech, in no small part because Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are the three biggest employers of H-1B workers. A federal judge struck down Trump’s previous attempt to raise the cost of these high-skilled employment visas in June, but not until over 70 employers paid the $100,000 fee. Now Trump wants to raise the cost to $103,265. Advocates and business leaders are worried Trump will soon come after the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which DHS hinted may soon carry a $100,000 fee of its own. OPT lets international students work in their field of study for 12 months, with extensions of up to 24 months for some STEM students and additional extensions for holders of certain graduate degrees.

“This is clearly unlawful,” said Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration reform organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives in 2013. “We don’t have to guess what this is for. This is to get rid of the OPT and H-1B program, which will have upstream and downstream devastating consequences: companies will be started elsewhere, people will be hired elsewhere.”

This won’t just hurt the tech industry. The previous fee hike exacerbated labor shortages at rural hospitals across the country and Alaska public schools, both of which have increasingly turned to high-skilled immigrant workers in the wake of local population decline. If the $100,000 fee was an inconvenience for Amazon and Meta, it was utterly catastrophic for rural communities already having trouble attracting qualified candidates. 

Foreign workers aren’t the only legal immigrants Trump is targeting. According to the AP, which broke the news, the State Department will rescind up to 200,000 business and travel visas issued between 2016 and 2026 to people who applied for asylum after arriving in the US. Beyond limiting their ability to travel outside the country, this move won’t change much for asylum seekers who came to the US on nonimmigrant visas — at least not for now. But Schulte said the visa revocations are part of Trump’s efforts to gut the humanitarian immigration system. “Every single other pathway is harder, outlawed, eliminated, more bureaucratic, more difficult across the board,” he said. “It’s an all-of-government approach.”

The administration is framing this change as a way of closing a loophole in the asylum system: people coming to the country on nonimmigrant visas, ostensibly for work or pleasure, only to ask for asylum upon setting foot in the country.

“We are coordinating with DHS to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told the AP.

But the people who applied for asylum this way didn’t break any laws. In fact, a person needs to be present on US soil to apply for asylum; there’s no way to apply from outside the country. And Trump has closed most other avenues for humanitarian migration. There’s an effective “asylum ban” in place at the US-Mexico border. Refugee admissions have dropped to record lows, and the administration is now prioritizing the resettlement of white South Africans and denying almost everyone else. 

In his second term, Trump has shown that the only immigrants he wants are those who look a certain way — or who can pay a small fortune for the privilege of working in America.

Correction, August 26th: A subhead in a previous version of this post misstated the cost of the fee. The fee is $103,000, not $130,000 as stated in the subhead.