Doxxing campaign against pro-Palestinian college students ramps up

(NEW YORK) — The man leading the doxxing campaign of pro-Palestinian Harvard students said his group is going to take it a step further.

Adam Guillette, 42, the president of Accuracy in Media, a conservative organization dedicated to holding “public and private officials accountable,” according to its website, facilitated a truck displaying the names of Harvard students who signed onto a controversial letter denouncing Israel in the wake of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas. Hamas has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.

The debate on campus has made Harvard a microcosm of sorts, reflecting the national debate on the conflict.

Guillette, who is Jewish, said his organization’s next move, which has already started, is to create online domains essentially using the students’ first and last names to create sites identifying them as antisemitic.

“I think it’s incredibly important for people to know who the antisemites are on their campus and in their community,” Guillette told ABC News. “Ideally, I’d love for everyone to abandon any hateful beliefs they might hold. I’d love for them to apologize for the antisemitic proclamation that they signed.”

The statement that Guillette is referring to was released by the Harvard Palestine Solidary Committee hours after the attack by Hamas. It said that Israeli policies are “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced,” the statement from the Harvard Palestinian Solidarity Committee read.

Days later, the pro-Palestinian student groups released a second statement saying they were opposed to violence “against all innocent life” and lamented “all human suffering.” The groups also affirmed their initial stance and said they have been “flooded with racist hate speech and death threats,” and alleged that “hundreds of students have been persecuted” on campus and online.

“When they apologize, we remove them from our billboards and from our website immediately,” Guillette told ABC News.

Students ABC News talked to asked that their names not be used, saying they are scared and facing intense backlash, including death threats, doxxing and harassment.

“Falling into the old trope of conflating valuing Palestinian lives with antisemitism is an unfortunate and lazy response, and I condemn it,” a Harvard law student, who is a member in one of the groups that signed onto the statement, told ABC News. “Of course, I feel for the students being intimidated into silence.”

When asked what his thoughts are on how Israel has dealt with Palestinian issues over the last 75 years, Guillette said it was a nuanced situation and he wasn’t a foreign policy expert. According to Guillette, his group isn’t intimidating anyone, rather they are amplifying their message.

“Targeting civilians for rape and murder is never acceptable,” Guillette said. “And the fact that these student leaders, despite that, hold Israel directly responsible for the actions of butchers makes it clear that they’re antisemites.”

Guillette believes that his organization isn’t doxxing anyone because they are only sharing names and photos that they gathered from the Harvard school newspaper, The Crimson, and the students’ LinkedIn pages.

A Harvard Kennedy School student told ABC News that these CEOs and public individuals speaking out “mobilizes more people” [to do the same.] The student said the backlash and harassment students have been facing has been scary from a safety perspective and said “I have my career on the line.”

Harvard students who spoke to ABC News said one of their colleagues lost a job offer due to the statement released by the pro-Palestinian student groups.

“There is like a level of ‘you did something wrong for this to be happening to you, you did commit some kind of crime and you are kind of like deserving of this happening to you,'” one of the students said.

Guillette believes that the university didn’t do enough to discipline the students who signed on to the letter. When asked, he didn’t elaborate on what the disciplinary measure should be, saying it’s up to Harvard and their rules.

A student at a different Harvard college said they think speaking out is worth the potential consequences.

“The situation is too great to stay silent. And there are repercussions, but although there are doors that I’m sure will close, there are also many doors that are going to open,” the student said. “I truly believe that there are a lot of people looking at the situation right now. And knowing it’s messed up and are just scared to say something.”

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.