>What does this mean?

"to go mask off" means to drop a façade, and show the true nature.

Here, it means they are not even trying to hide what they are doing anymore: Digging into every DOGE employee they can identify, and slandering them for political gain.

Why else would they care what a random administration employee did in this free time when he was 15 years old?

It is disgusting articles like this are what passes as "journalism" these days.

> slandering them

Is anything in the article factually incorrect? If not, then it's not slander. (Well, not libel. Slander involves speech, while libel is for words.)

It seems these websites did exist, and he admitted to doing all this destructive, anti-social hacking as a teenager. These seem to be facts.

Sure, the article is taking a moral stance on that, but most do. And I happen to agree with them that someone like this guy should be nowhere near sensitive governments systems, especially part of a task force of people who are dismantling democracy in the US.

Slander (or more properly in this case "libel") involves saying things that aren't true. Is that actually happening here?