I agree that the Forum’s rules and norms on privacy protection are confused. A few observations:
(1) Suppose a universe in which the first post on this topic had been from from Nonlinear, and had accused Alice and Chloe (by their real names) of a pattern of mendaciously spreading lies about Nonlinear. Would that post have been allowed to stay up? If yes, it is hard to come up with a principled reason why Alice and Chloe can’t be named now.
If no, we would need to think about why this hypothetical post would have been disallowed. The best argument I came with would be that Alice and Chloe are, as far as I know, people with no real prominence/influence/power (“PIP”) within or without EA. Under this argument, there is a greater public interest in the actions of those with PIP, and accepting a role of PIP necessarily means sacrificing some of the privacy rights that non-PIPs get.
(2) Another possibility involves the idea of standing. Under this theory, Alice and Chloe had standing to name people at Nonlinear because they were the ones who allegedly experienced harm. Ben had derivative standing because Alice and Chloe had given him permission to share their stories on the Forum. Under this theory, Nonlinear (and individuals named in Ben’s post) would have standing to name Alice and Chloe as the parties allegedly harmed by their conduct. The rest of us would not have standing. [Edit to add footnote here.[1]]
Maybe the aggrieved party isn’t the best imaginable arbiter of whether someone should be unmasked, but it’s probably better than concluding that each and every one of us get to make that decision. That could more easily lead to a situation in which 99% of us agree that the names shouldn’t be disclosed, and the 1% gets to decide. Of course, that could happen under a standing theory as well, but the 1% minority opinion has to coincide with the list of parties with standing. That at least narrows the problem.
(3) This situation involves a mix of Forum and non-Forum conduct. I sense that the norm for not doxxing people is stronger for Forum conduct (or at least for conduct involving similar sorts of speech) than from non-Forum conduct. This may reflect a difference in the norms of Internet communities vs. physically-grounded communities, or a sense that Forum speech is often core expressive speech or otherwise entitled to extra solicitude.
In any event, based on the fact that a number of people seem to know their identities, it sounds like the tale of Alice and Chloe was not a closely-kept secret before Ben’s post went up. Presumably this information came, directly or indirectly, from Alice and Chloe. In other words, there has been potentially relevant non-Forum conduct that did not magically morph into Forum conduct merely because Ben decided to write a post sharing the same information.
That raises the following hypothetical. Let’s say that Dan allegedly made some homophobic, racist, sexist, and/or otherwise offensive comments.[2] Does the location in which the comments were made change whether he can be identified. For example, is it OK to write a Forum post identifying Dan by name if those comments were posted on the Forum under a pseudonym? What if they were said at an EAG afterparty? In a non-EA space on Reddit? With a mask on in public (by someone who recognized Dan’s voice)? If the answers are not the same, why is that the case? I don’t claim to know the answers, by the way; this isn’t a trick question.
(4) I do not at present have a clear opinion on whether naming Alice, Chloe, or both should be allowed on the Forum. I do have an opinion that there needs to be a clear, logical set of rules or at least principles—ideally, laid out in advance as far as that is practical. I don’t like the idea of apparently ad hoc decisions about who gets privacy protections and who does not.
[Added footnote: I should note that standing, which is used as a legal metaphor here, does not mean “is none of your business.” We often impose standing requirements to make sure the person making the decision has appropriate incentives, context, etc.
Here, the various people who A & C have allegedly spread lies about are in a much better position than I am to know the relevant facts. If they have not concluded that disclosure of A & C’s names is warranted, it’s not clear why I—or any other reader of the relevant posts—would do a better job as decisionmaker.
Another reason for limited standing is practicality. For instance, in US law, we don’t usually allow suits where the alleged harm is “I’m a taxpayer, and I paid two cents of tax toward this program I think is illegal.” You’d have hundreds of millions of people who could challenge any line item in the federal budget, and if you multiply that by how many line items someone might object to . . . Even though there is de minimis financial harm, and that’s usually enough, we’ve decided that isn’t enough where the taxpayer’s interest is basically of the same nature as every other taxpayer’s interest in the matter. The analogy here is that we don’t want 100 different people being able to unilaterally decide that A & C should be named. If 99 of them decide that maintaining anonymity is appropriate, and 1 disagrees, the odds of the 1 being correct are pretty low.]
If yes, it is hard to come up with a principled reason why Alice and Chloe can’t be named now.
I expect no one was interested in writing something about Alice and/or Chloe (A/C), by name or otherwise, before Ben’s post, and people only want to name them now because they think A/C should face consequences for falsely (they believe) alleging abuse. Which is very close to retaliating against whistleblowers, and we should be very careful, which includes maybe accepting a rule that will have some false positives.
To take a different example, my non-professional understanding is it would normally be legal for an MA employer to report their employee to immigration authorities, but if the employer did this right after the employee had filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office, even a false one, this is probably actually illegal retaliation. This will have the occasional false positive, where the employer really was going to report the employee anyway but can’t prove it, but we accept that because avoiding the harms of retaliation is more important.
Jeff—actual ‘whistleblowers’ make true and important allegations that withstand scrutiny and fact-checking. I agree that legit whistleblowers need the protection of anonymity.
But not all disgruntled ex-employees with a beef against their former bosses are whistleblowers in this sense. Many are pursuing their own retaliation strategies, often turning trivial or imagined slights into huge subjective moral outrages—and often getting credulous friends, family, journalists, or activists to support their cause and amplify their narrative.
It’s true that most EAs had never heard of ‘Alice’ or ‘Chloe’, and didn’t care about them, until they made public allegations against Nonlinear via Ben Pace’s post. And then, months later, many of us were dismayed and angry that many of their allegations turned out to be fabricated or exaggerated—harming Nonlinear, wasting thousands of hours of our time, and creating schisms within out community.
So, arguably, we have a case here of two disgruntled ex-employees retaliating against a former employer. Why should their retaliation be protected by anonymity?
Conversely, when Kat Woods debunked many of the claims of Ben Pace (someone with much more power and influence in the EA/Rationalist community), why was she not considered a ‘whistleblower’ calling out his bullying and slander?
Yet again, the gender bias in ‘moral typecasting’ becomes important, as I mentioned in a previous comment here.
So, arguably, we have a case here of two disgruntled ex-employees retaliating against a former employer. Why should their retaliation be protected by anonymity?
Highlighting that is an important crux (and one on which I have mixed feelings). Not all allegations of incorrect conduct rise to the level of “whistleblowing.” A whistleblower brings alleged misconduct on a matter of public importance to light. We grant lots of protections in furtherance of that public interest, not out of regard for the whistleblower’s private interests.
Is this a garden-variety dispute between an employer and two employees about terms of employment? Or is this a story about influential people allegedly using their power to mistreat two people who were in a vulnerable position which is of public import because it should update us on how much influence to allow those people?
In Australia people can be, and have been, prosecuted when they whistleblow on something commercially or otherwise sensitive (that was of major public importance!) by disclosing it publicly without completely exhausting internal whistleblowing processes. So even in cases of proper whistleblowing, countervailing factors can dominate in what the consequences are for whistleblower.
actual ‘whistleblowers’ make true and important allegations that withstand scrutiny and fact-checking. I agree that legit whistleblowers need the protection of anonymity.
I think that’s too strong? For example, under my amateur understanding of MAlaw I don’t see anything about the anti-retailation provisions being conditional requiring a complaint to withstand scrutiny and fact-checking. And if this were changed to allow employers to retaliate in cases where employees claims were not sustained then I think we’d see, as a chilling effect, a decrease in employees raising true claims.
I agree that requiring that the claims be sustained would have a chilling effect. However, in many contexts, we don’t extend protections to claims submitted in bad faith. For instance, we grant immunity from legal retaliation against people who file reports of child abuse . . . but that is usually conditioned on the allegations were made in good faith. If a reported individual can prove that the report was fabricated out of whole cloth, we don’t shield the reporter from a defamation suit or other legal consequences.
Note that this is generally a subjective standard—if the reporter honestly believed the report was appropriate, we shield the reporter from liability. This doubtless allows some bad actors to slip through with immunity. However, we believe that is necessary to avoid reporters deciding not to report out of fear that someone will Monday-morning quarterback then and decide that reporting was objectively unreasonable.
In your example, I suspect that knowingly filing a false report with a state agency is a crime in MA (as it is with a federal agency at the federal level), so there is at least some potential enforcement mechanism for dealing with malicious lies.
I expect no one was interested in writing something about Alice and/or Chloe (A/C), by name or otherwise, before Ben’s post [ . . . .]
(Correctly) surmising a lack of interest in writing a hypothetical expose about A/C isn’t quite the same thing as reaching a conclusion that the post shouldn’t have been allowed to remain. However, I think there is a lot of overlap between the two; the reasons for lack of interest seem similar to the arguments for why the post shouldn’t be allowed. So I think we are both somewhere vaguely near “there would be no legitimate/plausible reason for someone to write an expose about A/C, unless one accepted that their whistleblowing activity made it legitimate.”
One interesting thing about this framing is that it raises the possibility that the whistleblowers’ identities are relevant to the decision. If a major figure in EA were going around telling malicious lies about other EAs, that would be (the subject of an appropriate post / something people would be interested in writing about) independently of any specifically whistleblowing-retaliation angle.
One could stake out an anti-standing argument in which Nonlinear et al. would not be able to identify A/C because we would be worried that vindictive or retaliatory desires were affecting their judgment, but an truly disinterested person (e.g., not friends of Nonlinear employees) could identify them—because they are likely to be acting from purer, less emotionally-invested motives (e.g., protection of the community from those they perceive as brazen liars). I’m not endorsing that view, but it is interesting to ponder.
Continuing with your analogy, if you were a random person who found out about the employee filing with the AG independently of the employer, and you somehow were able to determine that the employee knowingly filed a false report out of (e.g.) racial animus, would it be OK for you to report the employee to the immigration authorities? [Asking ethically, not under MA law.]
Relatedly, your example relates to a situation with a significant power imbalance (employer/employee). It probably isn’t illegal for me to report someone to the immigration authorities where my real motive is that they cheated on me, they cheated on my friend, etc. [I didn’t specifically check that example.] So it seems that we often protect individuals exercising socially-important functions like whistleblowing from retaliation by some actors but not others.
My use of core expressive speech was inspired by “core political speech” in U.S. First Amendment doctrine. E.g., this article describing a hierarchy of protected speech. I meant that Forum speech may be more likely to be speech about the stuff that matters, discouragement of which (including by denying psuedonymity) poses particularly great harms. Probably “high-value speech” would have been clearer here.
Solicitude is care or concern, so here I meant that we might particularly care about protecting Forum speech as opposed to other kinds of speech for some reason.
I agree that the Forum’s rules and norms on privacy protection are confused. A few observations:
(1) Suppose a universe in which the first post on this topic had been from from Nonlinear, and had accused Alice and Chloe (by their real names) of a pattern of mendaciously spreading lies about Nonlinear. Would that post have been allowed to stay up? If yes, it is hard to come up with a principled reason why Alice and Chloe can’t be named now.
If no, we would need to think about why this hypothetical post would have been disallowed. The best argument I came with would be that Alice and Chloe are, as far as I know, people with no real prominence/influence/power (“PIP”) within or without EA. Under this argument, there is a greater public interest in the actions of those with PIP, and accepting a role of PIP necessarily means sacrificing some of the privacy rights that non-PIPs get.
(2) Another possibility involves the idea of standing. Under this theory, Alice and Chloe had standing to name people at Nonlinear because they were the ones who allegedly experienced harm. Ben had derivative standing because Alice and Chloe had given him permission to share their stories on the Forum. Under this theory, Nonlinear (and individuals named in Ben’s post) would have standing to name Alice and Chloe as the parties allegedly harmed by their conduct. The rest of us would not have standing. [Edit to add footnote here.[1]]
Maybe the aggrieved party isn’t the best imaginable arbiter of whether someone should be unmasked, but it’s probably better than concluding that each and every one of us get to make that decision. That could more easily lead to a situation in which 99% of us agree that the names shouldn’t be disclosed, and the 1% gets to decide. Of course, that could happen under a standing theory as well, but the 1% minority opinion has to coincide with the list of parties with standing. That at least narrows the problem.
(3) This situation involves a mix of Forum and non-Forum conduct. I sense that the norm for not doxxing people is stronger for Forum conduct (or at least for conduct involving similar sorts of speech) than from non-Forum conduct. This may reflect a difference in the norms of Internet communities vs. physically-grounded communities, or a sense that Forum speech is often core expressive speech or otherwise entitled to extra solicitude.
In any event, based on the fact that a number of people seem to know their identities, it sounds like the tale of Alice and Chloe was not a closely-kept secret before Ben’s post went up. Presumably this information came, directly or indirectly, from Alice and Chloe. In other words, there has been potentially relevant non-Forum conduct that did not magically morph into Forum conduct merely because Ben decided to write a post sharing the same information.
That raises the following hypothetical. Let’s say that Dan allegedly made some homophobic, racist, sexist, and/or otherwise offensive comments.[2] Does the location in which the comments were made change whether he can be identified. For example, is it OK to write a Forum post identifying Dan by name if those comments were posted on the Forum under a pseudonym? What if they were said at an EAG afterparty? In a non-EA space on Reddit? With a mask on in public (by someone who recognized Dan’s voice)? If the answers are not the same, why is that the case? I don’t claim to know the answers, by the way; this isn’t a trick question.
(4) I do not at present have a clear opinion on whether naming Alice, Chloe, or both should be allowed on the Forum. I do have an opinion that there needs to be a clear, logical set of rules or at least principles—ideally, laid out in advance as far as that is practical. I don’t like the idea of apparently ad hoc decisions about who gets privacy protections and who does not.
[Added footnote: I should note that standing, which is used as a legal metaphor here, does not mean “is none of your business.” We often impose standing requirements to make sure the person making the decision has appropriate incentives, context, etc.
Here, the various people who A & C have allegedly spread lies about are in a much better position than I am to know the relevant facts. If they have not concluded that disclosure of A & C’s names is warranted, it’s not clear why I—or any other reader of the relevant posts—would do a better job as decisionmaker.
Another reason for limited standing is practicality. For instance, in US law, we don’t usually allow suits where the alleged harm is “I’m a taxpayer, and I paid two cents of tax toward this program I think is illegal.” You’d have hundreds of millions of people who could challenge any line item in the federal budget, and if you multiply that by how many line items someone might object to . . . Even though there is de minimis financial harm, and that’s usually enough, we’ve decided that isn’t enough where the taxpayer’s interest is basically of the same nature as every other taxpayer’s interest in the matter. The analogy here is that we don’t want 100 different people being able to unilaterally decide that A & C should be named. If 99 of them decide that maintaining anonymity is appropriate, and 1 disagrees, the odds of the 1 being correct are pretty low.]
This is not to equate Dan’s hypothetical conduct to what Alice and Chloe are alleged to have done.
I expect no one was interested in writing something about Alice and/or Chloe (A/C), by name or otherwise, before Ben’s post, and people only want to name them now because they think A/C should face consequences for falsely (they believe) alleging abuse. Which is very close to retaliating against whistleblowers, and we should be very careful, which includes maybe accepting a rule that will have some false positives.
To take a different example, my non-professional understanding is it would normally be legal for an MA employer to report their employee to immigration authorities, but if the employer did this right after the employee had filed a complaint with the attorney general’s office, even a false one, this is probably actually illegal retaliation. This will have the occasional false positive, where the employer really was going to report the employee anyway but can’t prove it, but we accept that because avoiding the harms of retaliation is more important.
Jeff—actual ‘whistleblowers’ make true and important allegations that withstand scrutiny and fact-checking. I agree that legit whistleblowers need the protection of anonymity.
But not all disgruntled ex-employees with a beef against their former bosses are whistleblowers in this sense. Many are pursuing their own retaliation strategies, often turning trivial or imagined slights into huge subjective moral outrages—and often getting credulous friends, family, journalists, or activists to support their cause and amplify their narrative.
It’s true that most EAs had never heard of ‘Alice’ or ‘Chloe’, and didn’t care about them, until they made public allegations against Nonlinear via Ben Pace’s post. And then, months later, many of us were dismayed and angry that many of their allegations turned out to be fabricated or exaggerated—harming Nonlinear, wasting thousands of hours of our time, and creating schisms within out community.
So, arguably, we have a case here of two disgruntled ex-employees retaliating against a former employer. Why should their retaliation be protected by anonymity?
Conversely, when Kat Woods debunked many of the claims of Ben Pace (someone with much more power and influence in the EA/Rationalist community), why was she not considered a ‘whistleblower’ calling out his bullying and slander?
Yet again, the gender bias in ‘moral typecasting’ becomes important, as I mentioned in a previous comment here.
Highlighting that is an important crux (and one on which I have mixed feelings). Not all allegations of incorrect conduct rise to the level of “whistleblowing.” A whistleblower brings alleged misconduct on a matter of public importance to light. We grant lots of protections in furtherance of that public interest, not out of regard for the whistleblower’s private interests.
Is this a garden-variety dispute between an employer and two employees about terms of employment? Or is this a story about influential people allegedly using their power to mistreat two people who were in a vulnerable position which is of public import because it should update us on how much influence to allow those people?
In Australia people can be, and have been, prosecuted when they whistleblow on something commercially or otherwise sensitive (that was of major public importance!) by disclosing it publicly without completely exhausting internal whistleblowing processes. So even in cases of proper whistleblowing, countervailing factors can dominate in what the consequences are for whistleblower.
I think that’s too strong? For example, under my amateur understanding of MA law I don’t see anything about the anti-retailation provisions being conditional requiring a complaint to withstand scrutiny and fact-checking. And if this were changed to allow employers to retaliate in cases where employees claims were not sustained then I think we’d see, as a chilling effect, a decrease in employees raising true claims.
I agree that requiring that the claims be sustained would have a chilling effect. However, in many contexts, we don’t extend protections to claims submitted in bad faith. For instance, we grant immunity from legal retaliation against people who file reports of child abuse . . . but that is usually conditioned on the allegations were made in good faith. If a reported individual can prove that the report was fabricated out of whole cloth, we don’t shield the reporter from a defamation suit or other legal consequences.
Note that this is generally a subjective standard—if the reporter honestly believed the report was appropriate, we shield the reporter from liability. This doubtless allows some bad actors to slip through with immunity. However, we believe that is necessary to avoid reporters deciding not to report out of fear that someone will Monday-morning quarterback then and decide that reporting was objectively unreasonable.
In your example, I suspect that knowingly filing a false report with a state agency is a crime in MA (as it is with a federal agency at the federal level), so there is at least some potential enforcement mechanism for dealing with malicious lies.
(Correctly) surmising a lack of interest in writing a hypothetical expose about A/C isn’t quite the same thing as reaching a conclusion that the post shouldn’t have been allowed to remain. However, I think there is a lot of overlap between the two; the reasons for lack of interest seem similar to the arguments for why the post shouldn’t be allowed. So I think we are both somewhere vaguely near “there would be no legitimate/plausible reason for someone to write an expose about A/C, unless one accepted that their whistleblowing activity made it legitimate.”
One interesting thing about this framing is that it raises the possibility that the whistleblowers’ identities are relevant to the decision. If a major figure in EA were going around telling malicious lies about other EAs, that would be (the subject of an appropriate post / something people would be interested in writing about) independently of any specifically whistleblowing-retaliation angle.
One could stake out an anti-standing argument in which Nonlinear et al. would not be able to identify A/C because we would be worried that vindictive or retaliatory desires were affecting their judgment, but an truly disinterested person (e.g., not friends of Nonlinear employees) could identify them—because they are likely to be acting from purer, less emotionally-invested motives (e.g., protection of the community from those they perceive as brazen liars). I’m not endorsing that view, but it is interesting to ponder.
Continuing with your analogy, if you were a random person who found out about the employee filing with the AG independently of the employer, and you somehow were able to determine that the employee knowingly filed a false report out of (e.g.) racial animus, would it be OK for you to report the employee to the immigration authorities? [Asking ethically, not under MA law.]
Relatedly, your example relates to a situation with a significant power imbalance (employer/employee). It probably isn’t illegal for me to report someone to the immigration authorities where my real motive is that they cheated on me, they cheated on my friend, etc. [I didn’t specifically check that example.] So it seems that we often protect individuals exercising socially-important functions like whistleblowing from retaliation by some actors but not others.
All good points! I’m quite conflicted here.
Could you explain what “ core expressive speech” and “extra solicitude” are?
My use of core expressive speech was inspired by “core political speech” in U.S. First Amendment doctrine. E.g., this article describing a hierarchy of protected speech. I meant that Forum speech may be more likely to be speech about the stuff that matters, discouragement of which (including by denying psuedonymity) poses particularly great harms. Probably “high-value speech” would have been clearer here.
Solicitude is care or concern, so here I meant that we might particularly care about protecting Forum speech as opposed to other kinds of speech for some reason.