when, if ever, is doxxing ok?
traditional media gets a taste of crypto's reporting challenges.
Welcome back to The Angle 👋 I am settling in for a weekend of sport from the Six Nations to the Superbowl 🏈 And for once I might actually stay up past midnight to watch it…
The end of the free money era is officially here. Litquidity, the anonymous meme account who served as a gospel for young Wall Streeters during a time of excessive exuberance, revealed his identity. Yet not all is as it seems.
Litquidity’s identity was revealed in an article from the Financial Times titled “‘Meme-lord’ Litquidity reveals his true identity.” When it came out, intrigued, I saved the article to read later and went on with my day.
Before I even got a chance to read it — hours later — a similar sounding story appeared on my Twitter (X) feed from my former employer Business Insider.
Strange. Maybe Litquidity wanted to make a big splash revealing his identity in two different publications with two different types of exclusives? But the timings were off.
You would only expect to see a one to two hour time gap max between the publishing of each exclusive story.
A look at both Business Insider’s own story and Litquidity’s Twitter account gives us more insight into what went on behind-the-scenes. It suggests Litquidity front ran Business Insider’s deeply reported story to reveal his identity in a profile with the Financial Times.
About 36 hours after BI sent Lit a list of facts and allegations appearing in this story, the Financial Times published an interview with Lit in which he revealed his name. Upon BI's publication, Lit emailed to note "inaccuracies" in the story but did not elaborate. - Business Insider’s report
As an outsider, I am not privvy to the timeline of events nor the conversations between Litquidity and Business Insider as well as Litquidity and the Financial Times.
Maybe, Litquidity received Insider’s request for comment/interview, panicked, jumped to conclusions and went straight to the FT when in fact Insider might have worked with him and his discomfort about being doxxed… Or maybe, Business Insider were stubborn on wanting to reveal Litquidity’s identity and he felt backed into a corner.
Whatever happened it’s clear from Twitter that Litquidity was uncomfortable with his identity being revealed and wanted to do it on his terms.
Ethically, Business Insider was completely within its rights to publish his identity. Firstly, Litquidity is technically a public figure (though I would argue a niche public figure who was probably held a much higher celebrity status in 2020/2021 than 2024) . Secondly. as pointed out in the article, the information is already publicly available and easily accessible.
But just because it was ethically ok to reveal the identity, does that mean it should have been revealed? And does the revelation over his identity actually dull the impact of the rest of Business Insider’s reporting?
(Side note: If you were a conspiracy theorist you might even argue that media savvy Litquidity’s concern about his identity being revealed was fabricated to detract attention away from other more damning points in the Business Insider story. But let’s set that to one side for now.)
With more and more anonymous online identities launching companies or creating brands with huge followings, does the journalism industry need to have set more detailed set of standards when it comes to revealing the names behind those anonymous brands?
This is a challenge we face in crypto reporting all the time. There is so many anonymous identities and such ferocious uproar if an identity is revealed unnecessarily.
In the few cases that I’ve dealt with this scenario, these are some the questions that myself and my editors have asked:
Could the story have been told without revealing this person’s identity?
Should the story be told without revealing this person’s identity?
Behind-the-scenes, are we able to get enough information about their identity to fact check any information being provided publicly by this “anonymous” person?
When these questions are applied to the Business Insider story, I think yes could be answered to all three.
As a media nerd, the Business Insider article about Litquidity is fascinating. As someone who wrote investing content during the peak of the 2020/2021 bull market, I saw first-hand how readers devoured content related to meme stocks, crypto and investment banking culture. I am not at all surprised that Litquidity’s attempts at a media empire faltered when that easy money environment shifted.
But could all these juicy tidbits on Litquidity’s media empire be told without revealing his identity? I think so.
In my opinion, the least interesting part of the whole article is his identity.
I wonder how much of this decision to reveal it was driven by a desire to fit stories into nice neat little boxes that are consumable for social media. For example, there are loads of scoopy details within the Insider story but none are very easy to capture succinctly in a tweet with the words “SCOOP.”
Are we catering our stories more to capture the attention of other journalists than readers themselves?
I’ve grappled with this issue myself. For a brief period, in one of my roles, I would need to hit a required number of “exclusives” every week. I quickly started to wonder about the relevance of the exclusives I chased and whether they were only providing value to the company that gave us “the exclusive” and the internal metric system that counted them.
And speaking of serving readers, was anyone really asking for Litquidity’s identity to be revealed? I do not cover the crazy world of financial markets with the same intensity that I once did but even at his peak I am not sure anyone was really demanding for Litquidity’s identity to be revealed. As Insider points out half of Wall Street already seems to know his name.
Since the information was all publicly available and easy to find, I wonder if the publication would have been better hinting at where to find his identity rather than revealing it completely.
It’s a shame. The focus on whether Litquidity’s identity should or should not be revealed detracts away attention from an overall great story. While the FT piece hits on some similar points, you get the sense it was rushed and a bit fluffy. To the point that many readers even mentioned that detail in the comments.
It feels as though both publications got played to a certain extent.
The question of revealing identities is only going to become a bigger issue in the years to come. We are seeing the prevalence of anonymous identities not just in crypto but also in AI. It’s going to be an issue that tech journalists will have to be prepared to grapple with. In some cases it’s going to be right to reveal anonymous identities. As an industry and with our readers, we need to decide what those standards are. Maybe as a starting point, the Financial Times and Business Insider should come together post publication to understand the series of events that led to the publication of the two articles and whether communication between the two outlets could have led to a stronger singular piece.
And while the revealing of Litquidity’s identity might not sit right with some, the stories themselves are still very interesting reads about a burgeoning media company emerging in a strange economic environment. Here is some of the highlights from the Insider article:
💰 Litquidity charges $1,000 an hour for consulting calls (This reminds me that I really need to up my consulting rates…).
🤝 Litquidity tried to bring in Bloomberg correspondent Sonali Basak to work on a venture with the firm. Allegedly she wanted to take a "wrecking ball through it all" and hold Wall Street heavy hitters accountable in this venture, but that didn’t fit Litquidity’s vision.
⛔️ While trying to poach Bloomberg’s on-air talent, Litquidity was also pitching a collaboration between his media upstart and the financial media giant. The show ultimately went nowhere.
🙃 Litquidity’s podcast “Big Swinging Decks” averaged about 5,000 listeners. It was sponsored by Coinflex, a cryptocurrency exchange on its last legs, in a $1.5 million deal — two thirds of that amount was paid in Coinflex equity and tokens, which was agreed just months before the collapse of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and the start of the crypto industry’s deep bear market. One investor told Insider that the podcast deal with Coinflex made up the majority of the company's income.
🤑 Litquidity estimated that the firm was worth $20 million in the fall of 2021 and enticed former investment banker and reality star Mark Moran to join Litquidity. An internal spreadsheet showed projections that Moran could make $7.6 million at some point in the future 🤷♀️ Moran left less than a year after joining due to clashes over the direction of the business.
🏓 The article also shows how Litquidity is increasingly trying to replicate the success of the Wall Street bosses he often mocks. He’s had a patchy start in the world of VC and is also looking to launch a private members club focused on racket sports.
🤨 Describing the sports club vision to the New York Post, Litquidity said:
“It’s the Hamptons… there are tons of celebrities and billionaires so I’m not worried someone will take a photo and out me.”
So maybe the fear of an identity reveal only comes when paired with a critical look at Litquidity’s business model?
— Kari
Image preview credit: (Max Bender/Unsplash)