With the caveat that there are at least several hundred different legal jurisdictions in the world, I don’t see an obvious reason under U.S. law others can’t quote forum posts. The forum is public and accessible to the world, so there’s no plausible tort involving intrusion on private affairs. Forum posts and comments may well be copyrighted—but the doctrine of fair use pretty clearly allows reasonable quotation in news articles. I don’t see how quotation would be legally different from quoting a tweet. Pasting someone’s treatise of several thousand words might well be a different story.
To me, the biggest risk as a journalist to quoting is that you have no independent verification of who wrote the post/comment. If the journalist attributed a controversial quote to an identifiable real person, and it turns out the post was written by someone masquerading as the real person, there could be some liability there if the real person suffered reputational damage.
With the caveat that there are at least several hundred different legal jurisdictions in the world, I don’t see an obvious reason under U.S. law others can’t quote forum posts. The forum is public and accessible to the world, so there’s no plausible tort involving intrusion on private affairs. Forum posts and comments may well be copyrighted—but the doctrine of fair use pretty clearly allows reasonable quotation in news articles. I don’t see how quotation would be legally different from quoting a tweet. Pasting someone’s treatise of several thousand words might well be a different story.
To me, the biggest risk as a journalist to quoting is that you have no independent verification of who wrote the post/comment. If the journalist attributed a controversial quote to an identifiable real person, and it turns out the post was written by someone masquerading as the real person, there could be some liability there if the real person suffered reputational damage.