To minimize the impact of harms like Swatting Location Misuse Doxxing, change the design of Search Comments.
Intervention:

Allow immediate location takedown

Definition: Enable any user to immediately censor a physical address from public content.
Kind of Intervention:
User Control
Reversible:
Easily Tested + Abandoned
Suitability:
General
Technical Difficulty:
Challenging
Legislative Target:
Yes

In most cases when users report malicious content or behavior to platforms, a human review evaluates the veracity of the report, and decides on next steps. However in issues of Location Misuse, this is not particularly useful, because the highly contextual nature of location data means that a typical reviewer often can't discern the validity of a location takedown based on the content itself. This, in tandem with the imminent harm that can come from physical location sharing, suggests that a different approach might be useful.

  1. Use well established patterns to discern what constitutes a geo-location: latitude longitude pairs, an address, a postal identifier, ex.
  2. Allow users to report geo-location data specifically, not a full post, as location misuse.
  3. Immediately remove the location from the content, without further review.
  4. Have caps in place to prevent this from being misused. For example, a platform could only allow a user to censor three distinct locations on their platform.

This kind of feature would make harms where location data is posted as a threat (Doxxing) significantly less likely.

Is something missing, or could it be better?
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