12 ms·

The death of the private citizen?

134 points by apsec112 6y ago

sandworm101 6y ago
All of the examples in the article are people who spoke up about various things online that are clearly in the public interest. If you want to maintain a blog about a subject, if you want to speak out publicly and gain some sort of online rep, then you risk your identity being released. That's freedom of speech. If you are the author of a meme that becomes nationally significant (ie the president adopts it) then CNN will be on your lawn. If you want to be actually anonymous, I suggest not using facebook or any other online identity tied to your real name. Get a VPN. Learn to use tor. It isn't very hard, just inconvenient. Don't post on facebook.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  That's freedom of speech. To avoid making an incorrect assumption, and reading this in context with the rest of your post: are you saying it's "Freedom of speech" if someone has a blog or "Freedom of speech" is having your identity revealed as the owner of said hypothetical blog? Just trying to make sure if I've read and interpreted your comment the way you're wanting it to be consumed and understood by people reading it.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    Both publishing on your own blog and publishing true, not-legally-protected facts about someone who owns a blog are exercises of free speech. It's not either/or.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      I assumed that was the meaning, but I'm also trying to defer to authorial intent-a bit risk averse to assume with how hot this topic has been lately and all.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    When you become a public figure, the press has the ability to come after you as a private person. That is the press exercising their freedom of speech. Many would say it is actually the duty of the press to investigate public figures and expose things like hypocrisy or conflicts of interest. Would anyone here argue that an elected official operating an "anonymous" twitter feed for political purposes should not be exposed? What if they are just running for office? What if they are just a backer/patron of a political party? At what point does the public's interest in honest communication on public issues give way to the privacy of an individual wanting to speak publicly?
    - zepto 6y ago
      If the press has a duty to expose conflicts of interest and hypocrisy they should investigate themselves. Let’s not kid ourselves. The press are political actors and nothing more. That isn’t necessarily avoidable in itself, but we get to decide what norms we expect them to follow.
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Let’s not kid ourselves. The press are political actors and nothing more. "The press" is made up of tens of thousands of people making individual choices (within their individual editorial requirements) about what to cover, how and with what inflection towards a given topic or trend, are they all political actors? I suppose if one takes "the person is political" calculus far enough, they might be. It's been my experience people tend to like the news sources they've self-selected as trustworthy and reliable, and complaints about "the media" are usually borne out of a specific gripe, not anything that can actually be provably shown as an accurate generalization of every single outlet that generates news content. This is not to attack or refute your position, this is just idle conjecture and pondering the topic.
        zepto 6y ago
        people tend to like the news sources they've self-selected as trustworthy and reliable, and complaints about "the media" are usually borne out of a specific gripe, not anything that can actually be provably shown as an accurate generalization of every single outlet that generates news content I’d say this is just a reflection of people choosing outlets that reflect their views which is politics. No news organization is immune from this. That is my point. Pretending that news organizations are apolitical is the problem. Also, the press simply isn’t made up of tens of thousands of people making individual choices. It’s made up of people working for hierarchical corporations with owners whose direction they must follow in order to remain employed. You can certainly argue that the individuals are just doing their jobs and are not political actors per se, but they are definitely working towards the goals of politically driven organizations.
- BolexNOLA 6y ago
  It is kind of crazy how many people can’t - or won’t - connect the dots about this. If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. Some of our parents, whether they know it or not, were actually pretty wise to tell millennials “everything you post online is forever.” The corollary being it will be linked back to you eventually.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. So "The Dead Past" (by Isaac Asimov) is our only option? I reject that. The problem is that our laws have not caught up to the fact that the Internet makes some things too accessible. We have too many things which link our personal identities exposed online because of the government which assumed that it was too much work to go to the county courthouse and look up a deed without good reason. Now, that's not to say that someone determined cannot link things together. They obviously can. However, right now it's simply far too easy.
    - BolexNOLA 6y ago
      I guess I should have been more clear. I’m not saying that literally anyone can easily grab anything about you, though that isn’t entirely untrue in the current moment. What I am saying is that once you put it out there, once you link accounts or make a comment or really do anything online, someone determined can find you.
  - op03 6y ago
    Things will change. It's not a static world. The wild west period is over where companies or people could do whatever they felt like with personal data. Forget about privacy advocates, mgmt in many data hoarding companies have suddenly realized it effects them too, their kids, their parents, their employees, clients etc etc. We just fired someone at work recently for moving customer data off site. Few years back no one would have batted an eyelid. Not only was data moving all over the place, few people had any idea who all had access or in what ways the data could be used. Today after one debacle after another, 200 alerts go off if people touch the wrong data. But there is so much inertia behind what has happened over the last 10 years that it will take some time for people to see the trajectory change.
- livueta 6y ago
  I don't think anyone's arguing that doxxing should be illegal or that doing news-worthy things doesn't make people interested in unmasking you, but that's kinda orthogonal to the main point that, generally, doxxing someone is a shitty thing to do, especially in a context like this where it has a solid chance of doing serious harm to public discourse. It's like codes of journalistic ethics: few to no violations are actual criminal violations, yet we look disfavourably at news orgs that don't publish retractions or whatever. Your advice is good advice for the status quo, but it highlights how fucked up the status quo is. "Just have perfect opsec and do everything through tor" is hard/inconvenient enough in practice even for tech people that the barrier to entry it poses to other groups is significant. There's your chilling effect. So, yeah: I can get behind raising awareness around/increasing usability of anonymizing techniques, but without societal/political legs to match that tripod just tips over.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > If you want to maintain a blog about a subject, if you want to speak out publicly and gain some sort of online rep, then you risk your identity being released. No, you shouldn't risk your real-world identity being released. People have good reasons for having pseudonyms; Scott Alexander gave a number of them in his post explaining why he took down his blog. Freedom of speech does mean being willing to stand behind your speech and defend it. But that can be done perfectly fine under a pseudonym. The reputation simply attaches to the pseudonym. > If you want to be actually anonymous, I suggest not using facebook or any other online identity tied to your real name. You do realize that you just contradicted yourself, right?
ycombonator 6y ago
So NYTIMES policy is to Dox their sources ? I don’t see them dox the opinion column of the famous “anonymous” government official or other tyrants.
- vimax 6y ago
  I was always under the impression that journalistic integrity was staked on providing anonymity to anonymous sources. In the past it was something the most respected journalist would have gone to prison over, but in today's world I guess it's whatever keeps those click rates high.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > anonymity to anonymous sources. That is a trade. The journalist is trading anonymity for information as if they don't they will not get information.
  - electricviolet 6y ago
    Journalists are ethically obligated to keep sources anonymous once they have promised anonymity. They are not obligated to offer anonymity to every source.
  - evamvid 6y ago
    Well, yeah, for anonymous sources. A random blogger they're writing an article about usually isn't an anonymous source. The ethics publishing name etc. are absolutely debatable, but the anonymous sources you are talking about are something completely different. Those are people who only agree to be sources for the story on the condition that their anonymity will be protected.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > So NYTIMES policy is to Dox their sources ? Both revealing facts about the subjects of news pieces and offering the subject the opportunity to contribute at iroutine in journalism, and, yes, that generally includes clarifying the identity of the subject if possible. A subject, merely by being offered the opportunity to be heard, does not transform into a protected source.
swayvil 6y ago
I think that ideological groups "naturally" seek to quell all differing groups. Like dueling beehives. In decades past they could exist peacefully, insulated by a natural inability to communicate. An inability to rub against each other. But now we are in the age of communication. We have the internet. The sensitivity and power of the hive has grown vastly. It touches much that it never touched before. Various ideological groups are now crowding each other. Grinding cheek and jowl. A thousand new "threats" become apparent. A thousand new demands for quelling. So now we see more of that inter-ideological friction happening. This is not a conscious act. It's more like gravity. Gallivanting glaciers. Or weather. Charles Fort examined this phenomenon a bit. Check out his "Book of the Damned" for more on that.
- radomysisky 6y ago
  It would be naïve to believe the west is immune. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
  - tspike 6y ago
    I am curious what (if anything) OP wrote that leads you to believe OP thinks the west is immune?
    - radomysisky 6y ago
      OP says: > This is not a conscious act. It's more like gravity. Gallivanting glaciers. Or weather. I'm saying it's naïve to believe this, along with the other incidents mentioned within the article, aren't intentional. As if the west is immune to concerted censorship efforts and the only explanation is unconscious bias.
      - swayvil 6y ago
        We might intentionally choose to quell the infidel, but the quelling-urge is implicit to ideology-attachment, I think.
- 6y ago
mmm_grayons 6y ago
Very interesting article. I'd hypothesize that this comes out of the fact that this is rooted in the idea that "the personal is political". This has led to the growing idea that not taking a stand on an issue is supporting the status quo and therefore just as political. Therefore, everyone must "pick a side". This is reflected in the attacks on people who don't condemn political movements, but refuse to support them. While this isn't directly related to the situation with Scott Alexander, it sets the precedent that everyone is now "fair game".
- diffrinse 6y ago
  >I'd hypothesize that this comes out of the fact that this is rooted in the idea that "the personal is political". A lot of these concepts are derived from the French historian Michel Foucault (he was not a philosopher or a "critical theorist", he was the chair of history at a major French university) and bear out the interpretations that won out in American humanities departments and trickled down to street level as a generation of grad students hit the streets after 2008 as humanities depts shuttered left and right. Occupy Wall Street wouldn't happen today because it was the last vestige of '68 style old school European Left politics. In 2008, good ol' class consciousness was the last thing critical theory and Humanities depts were discussing. 'Identity politics', itself the evolution of 80/90s Critical Race Theory, had already started to dominate academic circles in the late 90s/early 00s, to the point that the popular, heralded Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek dedicated a whole book to the topic, arguing on behalf of good ol' universality as pivot point for politics against popular writers like Judith Butler (gender/sexuality) and Wendy Brown (race). Coming to software as I did from continental European philosophy study it's been quite fascinating watch a species of Foucault interpretation become the mainstream Left ideology in America (and one that differs in my reading by quite a bit).
noncoml 6y ago
Maybe it’s not a bad thing. Look up the etymology of idiot.
- noncoml 6y ago
  I think it got misunderstood
radomysisky 6y ago
NYT subscribers: to cancel your subscription online, change your address to California and a button will appear allowing you to cancel immediately. Unsubscribing won’t change much, as they can afford it. What will is freezing them out. By RTing #ghostnyt you commit to not talking to NYT reporters or giving them quotes. Go direct if you have something to say. https://twitter.com/hashtag/ghostnyt https://twitter.com/hashtag/ghostnyt
- Infinitesimus 6y ago
  Do we cancel every org that makes a misstep? It might be more beneficial to write to NYT if you're a subscriber asking for change.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    The best way to ask for change is to not patronize them.
jdashg 6y ago
There's a great guideline: Always be at least two of: kind, necessary, or true. Publishing Scott's legal name is truthful, but neither necessary nor kind.
zozbot234 6y ago
So, the SSC outing/doxxing story is now hitting the Spectator, National Review, Washington Examiner and Free Beacon websites, at least. It will probably spread to other parts of the mainstream media soon enough. How the NYT will react to this whole ruckus is anyone's guess, but sticking to their previous policy of publishing the article without removing sensitive info would be pretty hard at this point. Quite amazing, regardless.
- catalogia 6y ago
  It doesn't really seem they ever had such a policy. Not in a meaningful way anyway. There's a twitter thread filled with instances of the NYTs respecting pseudonymity. https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1275460707069210624 https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1275460707069210624
  - zepto 6y ago
    So the individual reporter who spoke with Scott Alexander was just lying?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- 0xy 6y ago
  This is par for the course for mainstream media outlets. In 2017, CNN threatened to dox an anonymous Twitter user making political memes. I don't know why people continue to speak to these outlets while their records, actions and ethics are appalling. The slide into clickbait and yellow journalism over the last few years has been devastating to the industry. There isn't a major outlet left that hasn't been behind some whopping journalistic errors (usually repeatedly). Not even self-described neutral outlets like AP are immune. At this juncture, I'd sooner trust an independent journalist with 50k followers and a handheld camera on YouTube than a major news outlet.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Sadly NPR, and I don’t mean the local programming, are also prone to lapses in journalism—even though I give props to Greene and Shapiro. They’re usually pretty even keeled, unlike Bob Mondello who seems a bit narcissistic.
julianeon 6y ago
I saw a comment on Twitter that what you're really seeing here is dueling philosophies, and I agree. Ever heard the expression, Sunshine is the best disinfectant? I think you're seeing it's logical endpoint with the SSC story. And while it seems to have fallen out of fashion, for the most part, I agree. It seems to me that no matter where you turn, when it comes to 'the truth and nothing but the truth' about someone or something, you face bad choices. The problem with allowing some people to be pseudonymous sometimes is that immediately all kinds of bad actors will rush in and try to claim that in their defense. Polluters claiming anonymity because they don't want to be targeted by eco-terrorists, for example. Rather than parsing ever-smaller hair-thin rules about - legitimate - illegitimate - legitimate - and getting docked on every one on charges of political bias - there's an easier solution. Give no one pseudonymity. Problem solved. The only exception - national security - doesn't require your agreement to accept; it just takes a willingness to not go to jail. It's an appeal to power, really. So you don't have to debate it on moral grounds, it's the law. Incidentally, for all those stories where the NYT allowed pseudonyms, I agree there was an inconsistency, but my conclusion was: resolve it by publishing them all. Publish Bansky's name, publish Ferrante's name, publish the name of whoever wrote that tell-all book. Make that the norm, instead of half-applied psuedonyms. Now if you arranged an interview with them about something other than their identity, and they agreed to talk to you on condition of you not revealing it - that's different. That news outlet can't break the story. But another one can. No exceptions. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. I do believe this in principle, believed it long before this story broke, and could be brought around to disallowing most anyone's pseudonymity, before this news became news. It doesn't matter to me at all what the content or leaning of the blog is. Whether they're left or right or 'good' or 'bad' - I believe in the secular version of 'you shall know the truth & the truth shall set you free.' There is a cost, a real human one. But, rather like capitalism and democracy, it happens to be less than every other alternative. It's not great that people can't be pseudonymous - but it prevents worse problems.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  >but it prevents worse problems. Like you, I also comment on the internet under my real name, so pulling back the curtain on everything else is an exciting prospect. But for that not to ever bite us, that requires that we never offend too many people, even for a brief second. I naturally stay within bounds, so that is fine for me, but I suspect many opinions would need to remain hidden if a war were waged on anonymity. Why can't ideas be allowed to exist on their own, detached from any known person?
mrkurt 6y ago
"The death of the private citizen who publishes publicly with their own personal information attached". First name + middle name + occupation + city isn't "private".
- 0x8BADF00D 6y ago
  The article states numerous examples of media outlets outing anonymous and pseudo anonymous identities.
Simulacra 6y ago
Just like the Gawker case.. To decide to pursue a story that may not be all that newsworthy, or to unmask someone and say it's just presenting the facts, must have some emotion driving that. Because if there is no emotion driving those decisions, then it's a really rotten way to run a newspaper.
topkai22 6y ago
Good article. I find the reaction of the “private citizen” symptomatic of a larger rejection of the idea that people can be multi-faceted, and that different facets can be valued while others not.
Spooky23 6y ago
This isn’t really new. Based on the few encounters I’ve had with journalists, I cannot imagine a reason I would voluntarily interact with one unless I was reaching out for a reason. 5/7 interactions, the reporters were a lazy turds who strung together some drivel to meet deadline, missing key facts and mangling the story.
hawaiian 6y ago
I am in no way a fan of the Failing New York Times (if I may quote a prominent contemporary statesman), but am I missing something by thinking that this is overblown? They haven't printed his name, only asked if they may do so. I also don't see where they threatened him with exposure, but the article claims they have.
- zepto 6y ago
  They didn’t ask. He asked them not to, and they refused and said they were going to publish the article about him even without his cooperation.
throwaway4666 6y ago
I still have no idea why people are making this whole thing about a political point or 'controversial opinions'. The facts are: -The NYT wanted to write about SSC notably because SA warned about covid ahead of time, wrote a nice piece about the effectiveness of masks, etc. -The NYT did not care enough about Scott's pseudonymity to keep it intact -Scott, fearing that his relationship with his patients might be jeopardized if they got linked to his personal blog, deleted it. Where do 'the mob' or 'controversial opinions' or 'ideological differences' factor in this at all? It is not 'the mob' that triggered this, in fact Scott upset a lot of people over the years with some of his articles and that hasn't deterred him from keeping them up blogging further. The NYT isn't reporting on the SSC commentariat's curious obsession with the IQ of black people either. So why do 90% of posts on here are making it about politics? If I were not charitable beyond reason I would start to believe HN's love of neutral, level-headed and impassionate discussion might be an act.
- BraveSnoo1028 6y ago
  Scott didn't take down his blog just because of his relationship with his patients. It's one of his core arguments, yes, but it's tied with modern cancel culture, where speaking your mind if it deviates from accepted norms and ideas can result in significant personal and professional consequences, even if your intent isn't to oppress, spread hate speech, promote racism, etc. and even if the ideas you express are valuable in some way. It's dangerous nowadays to toe the line of what's "acceptable", where what's acceptable is decided by what people happen to feel on any particular day and how something can be spun into something it's not. Any number of character assassinations we've seen (such as the attempt on Stallmann) show that there are risks to being visible if some people suddenly decide they don't like you. Which connects with his other concern, that he may become too much of a liability for the place he works if some group or other finds something he's said controversial and tries to punish him or his employers for it.
  - throwaway4666 6y ago
    At no point did he mention cancel culture or 'the norm'. In fact, his argument entirely revolved around his relationship with his patients and that has little bearing on what he believes about the IQ of black people, since, as he says, his patients run the full gamut of the political spectrum (so any opinion would be controversial to some of them). It's more about the fact that psychiatrists are apparently supposed to act as blank slates to their patients and his blog contains a lot of deeply personal stuff. Even without the politics stuff it'd be a problem.

134 points by apsec112 6y ago

All of the examples in the article are people who spoke up about various things online that are clearly in the public interest. If you want to maintain a blog about a subject, if you want to speak out publicly and gain some sort of online rep, then you risk your identity being released. That's freedom of speech. If you are the author of a meme that becomes nationally significant (ie the president adopts it) then CNN will be on your lawn. If you want to be actually anonymous, I suggest not using facebook or any other online identity tied to your real name. Get a VPN. Learn to use tor. It isn't very hard, just inconvenient. Don't post on facebook.

dvtrn 6y ago
That's freedom of speech. To avoid making an incorrect assumption, and reading this in context with the rest of your post: are you saying it's "Freedom of speech" if someone has a blog or "Freedom of speech" is having your identity revealed as the owner of said hypothetical blog? Just trying to make sure if I've read and interpreted your comment the way you're wanting it to be consumed and understood by people reading it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  Both publishing on your own blog and publishing true, not-legally-protected facts about someone who owns a blog are exercises of free speech. It's not either/or.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    I assumed that was the meaning, but I'm also trying to defer to authorial intent-a bit risk averse to assume with how hot this topic has been lately and all.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- sandworm101 6y ago
  When you become a public figure, the press has the ability to come after you as a private person. That is the press exercising their freedom of speech. Many would say it is actually the duty of the press to investigate public figures and expose things like hypocrisy or conflicts of interest. Would anyone here argue that an elected official operating an "anonymous" twitter feed for political purposes should not be exposed? What if they are just running for office? What if they are just a backer/patron of a political party? At what point does the public's interest in honest communication on public issues give way to the privacy of an individual wanting to speak publicly?
  - zepto 6y ago
    If the press has a duty to expose conflicts of interest and hypocrisy they should investigate themselves. Let’s not kid ourselves. The press are political actors and nothing more. That isn’t necessarily avoidable in itself, but we get to decide what norms we expect them to follow.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Let’s not kid ourselves. The press are political actors and nothing more. "The press" is made up of tens of thousands of people making individual choices (within their individual editorial requirements) about what to cover, how and with what inflection towards a given topic or trend, are they all political actors? I suppose if one takes "the person is political" calculus far enough, they might be. It's been my experience people tend to like the news sources they've self-selected as trustworthy and reliable, and complaints about "the media" are usually borne out of a specific gripe, not anything that can actually be provably shown as an accurate generalization of every single outlet that generates news content. This is not to attack or refute your position, this is just idle conjecture and pondering the topic.
      - zepto 6y ago
        people tend to like the news sources they've self-selected as trustworthy and reliable, and complaints about "the media" are usually borne out of a specific gripe, not anything that can actually be provably shown as an accurate generalization of every single outlet that generates news content I’d say this is just a reflection of people choosing outlets that reflect their views which is politics. No news organization is immune from this. That is my point. Pretending that news organizations are apolitical is the problem. Also, the press simply isn’t made up of tens of thousands of people making individual choices. It’s made up of people working for hierarchical corporations with owners whose direction they must follow in order to remain employed. You can certainly argue that the individuals are just doing their jobs and are not political actors per se, but they are definitely working towards the goals of politically driven organizations.
BolexNOLA 6y ago
It is kind of crazy how many people can’t - or won’t - connect the dots about this. If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. Some of our parents, whether they know it or not, were actually pretty wise to tell millennials “everything you post online is forever.” The corollary being it will be linked back to you eventually.
- bsder 6y ago
  > If you have an online presence you cannot be anonymous. So "The Dead Past" (by Isaac Asimov) is our only option? I reject that. The problem is that our laws have not caught up to the fact that the Internet makes some things too accessible. We have too many things which link our personal identities exposed online because of the government which assumed that it was too much work to go to the county courthouse and look up a deed without good reason. Now, that's not to say that someone determined cannot link things together. They obviously can. However, right now it's simply far too easy.
  - BolexNOLA 6y ago
    I guess I should have been more clear. I’m not saying that literally anyone can easily grab anything about you, though that isn’t entirely untrue in the current moment. What I am saying is that once you put it out there, once you link accounts or make a comment or really do anything online, someone determined can find you.
- op03 6y ago
  Things will change. It's not a static world. The wild west period is over where companies or people could do whatever they felt like with personal data. Forget about privacy advocates, mgmt in many data hoarding companies have suddenly realized it effects them too, their kids, their parents, their employees, clients etc etc. We just fired someone at work recently for moving customer data off site. Few years back no one would have batted an eyelid. Not only was data moving all over the place, few people had any idea who all had access or in what ways the data could be used. Today after one debacle after another, 200 alerts go off if people touch the wrong data. But there is so much inertia behind what has happened over the last 10 years that it will take some time for people to see the trajectory change.
livueta 6y ago
I don't think anyone's arguing that doxxing should be illegal or that doing news-worthy things doesn't make people interested in unmasking you, but that's kinda orthogonal to the main point that, generally, doxxing someone is a shitty thing to do, especially in a context like this where it has a solid chance of doing serious harm to public discourse. It's like codes of journalistic ethics: few to no violations are actual criminal violations, yet we look disfavourably at news orgs that don't publish retractions or whatever. Your advice is good advice for the status quo, but it highlights how fucked up the status quo is. "Just have perfect opsec and do everything through tor" is hard/inconvenient enough in practice even for tech people that the barrier to entry it poses to other groups is significant. There's your chilling effect. So, yeah: I can get behind raising awareness around/increasing usability of anonymizing techniques, but without societal/political legs to match that tripod just tips over.
pdonis 6y ago
> If you want to maintain a blog about a subject, if you want to speak out publicly and gain some sort of online rep, then you risk your identity being released. No, you shouldn't risk your real-world identity being released. People have good reasons for having pseudonyms; Scott Alexander gave a number of them in his post explaining why he took down his blog. Freedom of speech does mean being willing to stand behind your speech and defend it. But that can be done perfectly fine under a pseudonym. The reputation simply attaches to the pseudonym. > If you want to be actually anonymous, I suggest not using facebook or any other online identity tied to your real name. You do realize that you just contradicted yourself, right?

ycombonator 6y ago

So NYTIMES policy is to Dox their sources ? I don’t see them dox the opinion column of the famous “anonymous” government official or other tyrants.

vimax 6y ago
I was always under the impression that journalistic integrity was staked on providing anonymity to anonymous sources. In the past it was something the most respected journalist would have gone to prison over, but in today's world I guess it's whatever keeps those click rates high.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > anonymity to anonymous sources. That is a trade. The journalist is trading anonymity for information as if they don't they will not get information.
- electricviolet 6y ago
  Journalists are ethically obligated to keep sources anonymous once they have promised anonymity. They are not obligated to offer anonymity to every source.
- evamvid 6y ago
  Well, yeah, for anonymous sources. A random blogger they're writing an article about usually isn't an anonymous source. The ethics publishing name etc. are absolutely debatable, but the anonymous sources you are talking about are something completely different. Those are people who only agree to be sources for the story on the condition that their anonymity will be protected.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> So NYTIMES policy is to Dox their sources ? Both revealing facts about the subjects of news pieces and offering the subject the opportunity to contribute at iroutine in journalism, and, yes, that generally includes clarifying the identity of the subject if possible. A subject, merely by being offered the opportunity to be heard, does not transform into a protected source.

swayvil 6y ago

I think that ideological groups "naturally" seek to quell all differing groups. Like dueling beehives. In decades past they could exist peacefully, insulated by a natural inability to communicate. An inability to rub against each other. But now we are in the age of communication. We have the internet. The sensitivity and power of the hive has grown vastly. It touches much that it never touched before. Various ideological groups are now crowding each other. Grinding cheek and jowl. A thousand new "threats" become apparent. A thousand new demands for quelling. So now we see more of that inter-ideological friction happening. This is not a conscious act. It's more like gravity. Gallivanting glaciers. Or weather. Charles Fort examined this phenomenon a bit. Check out his "Book of the Damned" for more on that.

radomysisky 6y ago
It would be naïve to believe the west is immune. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
- tspike 6y ago
  I am curious what (if anything) OP wrote that leads you to believe OP thinks the west is immune?
  - radomysisky 6y ago
    OP says: > This is not a conscious act. It's more like gravity. Gallivanting glaciers. Or weather. I'm saying it's naïve to believe this, along with the other incidents mentioned within the article, aren't intentional. As if the west is immune to concerted censorship efforts and the only explanation is unconscious bias.
    - swayvil 6y ago
      We might intentionally choose to quell the infidel, but the quelling-urge is implicit to ideology-attachment, I think.
6y ago

mmm_grayons 6y ago

Very interesting article. I'd hypothesize that this comes out of the fact that this is rooted in the idea that "the personal is political". This has led to the growing idea that not taking a stand on an issue is supporting the status quo and therefore just as political. Therefore, everyone must "pick a side". This is reflected in the attacks on people who don't condemn political movements, but refuse to support them. While this isn't directly related to the situation with Scott Alexander, it sets the precedent that everyone is now "fair game".

diffrinse 6y ago
>I'd hypothesize that this comes out of the fact that this is rooted in the idea that "the personal is political". A lot of these concepts are derived from the French historian Michel Foucault (he was not a philosopher or a "critical theorist", he was the chair of history at a major French university) and bear out the interpretations that won out in American humanities departments and trickled down to street level as a generation of grad students hit the streets after 2008 as humanities depts shuttered left and right. Occupy Wall Street wouldn't happen today because it was the last vestige of '68 style old school European Left politics. In 2008, good ol' class consciousness was the last thing critical theory and Humanities depts were discussing. 'Identity politics', itself the evolution of 80/90s Critical Race Theory, had already started to dominate academic circles in the late 90s/early 00s, to the point that the popular, heralded Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek dedicated a whole book to the topic, arguing on behalf of good ol' universality as pivot point for politics against popular writers like Judith Butler (gender/sexuality) and Wendy Brown (race). Coming to software as I did from continental European philosophy study it's been quite fascinating watch a species of Foucault interpretation become the mainstream Left ideology in America (and one that differs in my reading by quite a bit).

noncoml 6y ago

Maybe it’s not a bad thing. Look up the etymology of idiot.

noncoml 6y ago
I think it got misunderstood

radomysisky 6y ago

NYT subscribers: to cancel your subscription online, change your address to California and a button will appear allowing you to cancel immediately. Unsubscribing won’t change much, as they can afford it. What will is freezing them out. By RTing #ghostnyt you commit to not talking to NYT reporters or giving them quotes. Go direct if you have something to say. https://twitter.com/hashtag/ghostnyt https://twitter.com/hashtag/ghostnyt

Infinitesimus 6y ago
Do we cancel every org that makes a misstep? It might be more beneficial to write to NYT if you're a subscriber asking for change.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  The best way to ask for change is to not patronize them.

jdashg 6y ago

There's a great guideline: Always be at least two of: kind, necessary, or true. Publishing Scott's legal name is truthful, but neither necessary nor kind.

zozbot234 6y ago

So, the SSC outing/doxxing story is now hitting the Spectator, National Review, Washington Examiner and Free Beacon websites, at least. It will probably spread to other parts of the mainstream media soon enough. How the NYT will react to this whole ruckus is anyone's guess, but sticking to their previous policy of publishing the article without removing sensitive info would be pretty hard at this point. Quite amazing, regardless.

catalogia 6y ago
It doesn't really seem they ever had such a policy. Not in a meaningful way anyway. There's a twitter thread filled with instances of the NYTs respecting pseudonymity. https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1275460707069210624 https://twitter.com/hradzka/status/1275460707069210624
- zepto 6y ago
  So the individual reporter who spoke with Scott Alexander was just lying?
deleted 6y ago
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0xy 6y ago
This is par for the course for mainstream media outlets. In 2017, CNN threatened to dox an anonymous Twitter user making political memes. I don't know why people continue to speak to these outlets while their records, actions and ethics are appalling. The slide into clickbait and yellow journalism over the last few years has been devastating to the industry. There isn't a major outlet left that hasn't been behind some whopping journalistic errors (usually repeatedly). Not even self-described neutral outlets like AP are immune. At this juncture, I'd sooner trust an independent journalist with 50k followers and a handheld camera on YouTube than a major news outlet.
- mc32 6y ago
  Sadly NPR, and I don’t mean the local programming, are also prone to lapses in journalism—even though I give props to Greene and Shapiro. They’re usually pretty even keeled, unlike Bob Mondello who seems a bit narcissistic.

julianeon 6y ago

I saw a comment on Twitter that what you're really seeing here is dueling philosophies, and I agree. Ever heard the expression, Sunshine is the best disinfectant? I think you're seeing it's logical endpoint with the SSC story. And while it seems to have fallen out of fashion, for the most part, I agree. It seems to me that no matter where you turn, when it comes to 'the truth and nothing but the truth' about someone or something, you face bad choices. The problem with allowing some people to be pseudonymous sometimes is that immediately all kinds of bad actors will rush in and try to claim that in their defense. Polluters claiming anonymity because they don't want to be targeted by eco-terrorists, for example. Rather than parsing ever-smaller hair-thin rules about - legitimate - illegitimate - legitimate - and getting docked on every one on charges of political bias - there's an easier solution. Give no one pseudonymity. Problem solved. The only exception - national security - doesn't require your agreement to accept; it just takes a willingness to not go to jail. It's an appeal to power, really. So you don't have to debate it on moral grounds, it's the law. Incidentally, for all those stories where the NYT allowed pseudonyms, I agree there was an inconsistency, but my conclusion was: resolve it by publishing them all. Publish Bansky's name, publish Ferrante's name, publish the name of whoever wrote that tell-all book. Make that the norm, instead of half-applied psuedonyms. Now if you arranged an interview with them about something other than their identity, and they agreed to talk to you on condition of you not revealing it - that's different. That news outlet can't break the story. But another one can. No exceptions. Sunshine is the best disinfectant. I do believe this in principle, believed it long before this story broke, and could be brought around to disallowing most anyone's pseudonymity, before this news became news. It doesn't matter to me at all what the content or leaning of the blog is. Whether they're left or right or 'good' or 'bad' - I believe in the secular version of 'you shall know the truth & the truth shall set you free.' There is a cost, a real human one. But, rather like capitalism and democracy, it happens to be less than every other alternative. It's not great that people can't be pseudonymous - but it prevents worse problems.

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MattGaiser 6y ago
>but it prevents worse problems. Like you, I also comment on the internet under my real name, so pulling back the curtain on everything else is an exciting prospect. But for that not to ever bite us, that requires that we never offend too many people, even for a brief second. I naturally stay within bounds, so that is fine for me, but I suspect many opinions would need to remain hidden if a war were waged on anonymity. Why can't ideas be allowed to exist on their own, detached from any known person?

mrkurt 6y ago

"The death of the private citizen who publishes publicly with their own personal information attached". First name + middle name + occupation + city isn't "private".

0x8BADF00D 6y ago
The article states numerous examples of media outlets outing anonymous and pseudo anonymous identities.

Simulacra 6y ago

Just like the Gawker case.. To decide to pursue a story that may not be all that newsworthy, or to unmask someone and say it's just presenting the facts, must have some emotion driving that. Because if there is no emotion driving those decisions, then it's a really rotten way to run a newspaper.

topkai22 6y ago

Good article. I find the reaction of the “private citizen” symptomatic of a larger rejection of the idea that people can be multi-faceted, and that different facets can be valued while others not.

Spooky23 6y ago

This isn’t really new. Based on the few encounters I’ve had with journalists, I cannot imagine a reason I would voluntarily interact with one unless I was reaching out for a reason. 5/7 interactions, the reporters were a lazy turds who strung together some drivel to meet deadline, missing key facts and mangling the story.

hawaiian 6y ago

I am in no way a fan of the Failing New York Times (if I may quote a prominent contemporary statesman), but am I missing something by thinking that this is overblown? They haven't printed his name, only asked if they may do so. I also don't see where they threatened him with exposure, but the article claims they have.

zepto 6y ago
They didn’t ask. He asked them not to, and they refused and said they were going to publish the article about him even without his cooperation.

throwaway4666 6y ago

I still have no idea why people are making this whole thing about a political point or 'controversial opinions'. The facts are: -The NYT wanted to write about SSC notably because SA warned about covid ahead of time, wrote a nice piece about the effectiveness of masks, etc. -The NYT did not care enough about Scott's pseudonymity to keep it intact -Scott, fearing that his relationship with his patients might be jeopardized if they got linked to his personal blog, deleted it. Where do 'the mob' or 'controversial opinions' or 'ideological differences' factor in this at all? It is not 'the mob' that triggered this, in fact Scott upset a lot of people over the years with some of his articles and that hasn't deterred him from keeping them up blogging further. The NYT isn't reporting on the SSC commentariat's curious obsession with the IQ of black people either. So why do 90% of posts on here are making it about politics? If I were not charitable beyond reason I would start to believe HN's love of neutral, level-headed and impassionate discussion might be an act.

BraveSnoo1028 6y ago
Scott didn't take down his blog just because of his relationship with his patients. It's one of his core arguments, yes, but it's tied with modern cancel culture, where speaking your mind if it deviates from accepted norms and ideas can result in significant personal and professional consequences, even if your intent isn't to oppress, spread hate speech, promote racism, etc. and even if the ideas you express are valuable in some way. It's dangerous nowadays to toe the line of what's "acceptable", where what's acceptable is decided by what people happen to feel on any particular day and how something can be spun into something it's not. Any number of character assassinations we've seen (such as the attempt on Stallmann) show that there are risks to being visible if some people suddenly decide they don't like you. Which connects with his other concern, that he may become too much of a liability for the place he works if some group or other finds something he's said controversial and tries to punish him or his employers for it.
- throwaway4666 6y ago
  At no point did he mention cancel culture or 'the norm'. In fact, his argument entirely revolved around his relationship with his patients and that has little bearing on what he believes about the IQ of black people, since, as he says, his patients run the full gamut of the political spectrum (so any opinion would be controversial to some of them). It's more about the fact that psychiatrists are apparently supposed to act as blank slates to their patients and his blog contains a lot of deeply personal stuff. Even without the politics stuff it'd be a problem.