Norms of Online Privacy
I think it is generally agreed that if you write something in a published book or article other people do not need your permission to quote it. If you say something in a private conversation or correspondence, on the other hand, quoting it requires your permission, at least if you are alive to give it.
What about things published online? My instinct is that if it is up somewhere where anyone can read it,1 the status is the same as for something published in print, but I have been told by members of the younger generation, people who grew up with the internet, that they disagree. Their view is that online spaces are more nearly equivalent to your living room than to the public square, that as a rule you are not free to quote things written in them without the author’s permission. The strength of that norm, as they describe it, varies by how likely a random stranger is to see things, strongest for comments on a forum, blog, or Substack, weaker for posts on a blog or Substack, weakest, perhaps nonexistent, for a post on a blog or a substack with a lot of readers. The argument is that a comment on a small blog is public in that anyone can see it but will in fact be seen by very few — privacy through obscurity, the same thing that makes a big city more private than a small town. Quoting something from such a blog somewhere that may be read by many people destroys that privacy.
The question is relevant for me because I sometimes want to quote something I saw online, a comment here or a post on a forum where I am active, in a Substack post. My assumption was that I needed permission if I quoted with attribution but not necessarily if I quoted without.
An argument against that distinction is that if I quote something someone wrote verbatim a Google search can find the source and identify the author, at least by the name he comments under.2 I could, however, prevent that by deliberately making a few minor changes in the text so that a Google search could not find it.
I am interested in comments from readers on what they think the relevant norms are:
For what range of online publications should I feel free to quote without permission, for what range only with permission?
Does the answer depend on whether I name the author?
If I don’t name the author should I tweak the text to make it difficult to use a search to locate the original?
Should the rules be different for authors who post under their own name than for authors who protect their anonymity by using a pseudonym?
A related point, a story and an example
When I put this question to the forum, it became clear that some who responded were reacting not to the sort of quoting I was thinking of, where someone has said something interesting, said it well, and I would rather put it in his words than in mine, but to quoting something someone has said in order to attack him, an issue discussed in an old post by Scott Alexander.
The underlying issue there is whether it is appropriate to try to suppress speech you disapprove of by publicizing both the speech and the identity of the speaker in order to impose costs on the speaker, for example by making it harder for him to get a job. I agree with Scott that it is not, that for the same reasons it is desirable to have laws against government actors suppressing speech by imposing costs on the speaker it is desirable to have norms against private actors doing the same thing. It is appropriate to quote someone saying something you disagree with in order to answer the argument but not in order to deter him from making it.
I do not think any of the quotes I have posted in the past were intended for any such purpose. There is, however, one quote from a recent comment here that I am thinking of using in a future post as an example of bad writing, a modern equivalent of the examples Orwell quotes in “Politics and the English Language” and parodies with a modern rewrite of a famous biblical passage, converting
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Into
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
If I do decide to use that quote from my comments I have the author’s permission. My purpose would not be to impose costs on her but to convince her, and others, not to write that way.
Thinking about these questions reminds me of a mistake I made online a very long time ago, back in the days of Usenet. I mentioned my opinion of a fellow libertarian intellectual, that he was a nice enough fellow but not very bright. I was treating the exchange as a private conversation, forgetting that it was open to the world, including the person I was mentioning. I don’t know if he came across it himself or someone quoted it to him but he saw the comment, asked me if I had made it, and I had.
Fortunately, we still get along.
And finally, an example of the sort of thing I like to quote:
A good model for anyone close to being a generic Democrat wrt abortion and gun control: When a conservative hears about some proposal for minimal, "common-sense" gun control measures, he hears it in exactly the same way a liberal hears proposals for minimal, common-sense restrictions on abortion. That is, the default is "the other side wants to make this right go away entirely, so all their common-sense minimal restrictions will be carried out/implemented toward that goal." (Albatross11 on DSL)
Past posts, sorted by topic
A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing
That would not apply to something written online in a place not open to the public, such as a Discord server which requires an invitation to join.
As it happens, the forum I mostly read and post on is not indexed by Google, but I only discovered that today and am unlikely to know it about other places I might want to quote from.
I think that this problem is older than the internet, although it did, indeed, become more pronounced. Journalists of popular publications had the power to character-assassinate people by publishing some obscure, but theoretically publicly available information about them that quickly became what they were known for by the vast majority of people who had any interest in them. I have seen it happen to an acquantance, with whom I had some business before his character assassination. I was really dismayed when my actual friends shared articles about him as outrage porn, without actually knowing anything about the person beyond what they had just read in that article, not realizing that they are actively turning a real person's life into hell. The person in question now struggles with alcoholism and in general had his life irreversibly destroyed by people who didn't even know him and whom he didn't hurt in any way; they just felt that they needed him as an example for a point to make. That is when I understood that the freedom of speech and the freedom of press are two very different things and the latter is actually journalist privilege rather than any freedom at all.
That being said, I don't think that there is a solution in the direction of trying to devise social norms about restricting what people can communicate to those who listen to them. If any of such social norm becomes enforcable, the very mechanism to do so will be abused as a means of censorship.
My opinion is that it is other social norms that should change, namely the weight we give to information from various sources. I know how hard it is to ignore information to which we have been exposed, but it can be learned. And it is worth learning. For example, I learned to ignore all professional journalism. The 2023 ACX prediction contest organized by Scott Alexander was about events that typically appear in traditional media; I do not think that these are the most important kinds of events, but nevertheless, I decided to give it a shot. I performed shockingly well, beating all major prediction markets and more than 99.5% of other participants, even though I really don't "follow" these kind of stories. I even admitted to my complete ignorance on many questions by setting their probability at 50% in my predictions. I think, that people who allow their worldview to be too strongly influenced by professional journalism and overly popular blogs that are, in essence, the same thing, do themselves a huge disservice, severing important links between reality and their mental model thereof. I think, people will learn, mostly the hard way.
However, I do believe that some discipline (self-censorship, if you want to call it that way) in what and how we write is warranted. Actually, I learned a great deal of that from you. In a world where I am very likely to disagree on some hot-button topic with almost everyone and "my tribe" by any definition of it is a small minority in almost any social context, it is worth giving a second thought to what and how we communicate with the rest of the world. I think, I did manage to get some fairly controversial opinions across and even convince some people with whom I previously disagreed, without significant backlash. While many of my firends complain about various platforms regularly censoring them either automagically or by some busybody reporting their posts, it never happened to me. I think, I have learned how to be acceptable and to some extent even respectable to people who otherwise consider "my kind" their outgroup. I even have friends like that.
That abortion/gun control quote at the end of this column is definitely a keeper! I think if I were to quote it online I'd just...link here? Like, even if you had a link to the original. I'd want to be sharing the context I heard it in, since that's the context I understood it in.
There's a C.S. Lewis quote I absolutely love about "omnipotent moral busybodies" that I'm often afraid to share, because I haven't read the original work it's taken from, and for all I know, Lewis could be putting it in the mouth of an antagonist and the author's point might be quite the opposite of the quote itself.