So let’s return to the Swifties, who always get their man. Tweeting as @Zvbear, the account holder bragged he would never be found: “I don’t care how powerful Swifties are they’ll never find me … I’m like the Joker I use fake numbers and addresses for everything I do ... As long as my account is still active I can never lose.”

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Wait, there’s more. “Bro what have I done … They might pass new laws because of my Taylor Swift post,” @Zvbear posted. “If Netflix did a documentary about AI pics they’d put me in it as a villain. It’s never been so over.”

Next minute, meet the fellow, discover where he lives (Toronto, Canada), his age (27), his exact location (in his mum’s basement … made this bit up. Sorry). He Swiftly locked his account.

While I’m pretty sure Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and US President Joe Biden have better things to do, protecting Taylor Swift’s safety would be right up there. She’s an American national treasure, a billionaire and now she’s on her way to the Super Bowl.

Wouldn’t it be glorious if politicians got this exercised about women’s safety on the reg? Still, the Swifties fixed it and we should follow their lead. Dox the buggers. OK now, doxxing – the revelation of identifying details for public consumption – isn’t really the right thing to do. But for @Zvbear and others like him, I can make an exception.

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The exception is doxxing in the public interest, grappling with the power dynamics that occur when you get non-consensual disclosure of personal information, even if it’s fake personal information. Academic Briony Anderson’s entire PhD is on doxxing. She says it’s clear that there is a difference between doxxing which has the intention to harass, intimidate, blackmail or doxxing to defeat dickheads.

“The faked images of Taylor Swift were a simulation of personal and sensitive information motivated by misogyny. It was about ‘taking her down a peg’. We can expressly call that out,” Anderson says.

The bigger problem is that it’s exceptionally difficult to get justice, says University of Melbourne criminologist Bianca Fileborn. It’s hard to identify exactly who is responsible for particular actions and there are networks of actors around the globe, she says, and there are different legal jurisdictions with different responses.

It turns out that once again we have to turn to digilantism, digital tools that enact a different type of justice. Naming and shaming. Now that’s real payback.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.

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