Is it appropriate to include "suspected identity" clues in questions about Elena Ferrante?

[henrygoff]

In 2016, an investigative journalist published an article which claimed to have discovered the identity of pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante. The article, which revealed a multitude of private documents without the consent or approval of the accused author, was widely deemed as a flagrant invasion of the privacy of an author who has often discussed how much she values her anonymity. Yet, in the five years since the article’s release, 12 quizbowl sets have included Ferrante as an answerline; all but 2 of them have used clues which explicitly name the author accused of being Ferrante, despite the literary community’s consensus to disregard the “exposé” and respect the privacy of both Ferrante and the accused author. (One such set even recognizes that these clues are bad form--2020 Oxford Open’s tossup on Ferrante directs moderators to “glare at” players who answer with a suspected identity, despite cluing those identities in the very same question!)

I understand that, regardless of the misconduct displayed by the journalist in such an accusation, this suspected identity of Ferrante is one of the most notable things known about her, and as such makes for a good late clue for questions about her. But do we as a question-writing community have a responsibility to respect the privacy of an author who prioritizes privacy above all else, and an author who is still (presumably) living and breathing today? I would argue that we do. Quizbowl questions do not exist in a vacuum of only tournaments and practices; whenever we include information in a question, we are teaching that information as fact to the hundreds of players who hear the question in a tournament, and the thousands of players who read it on the archive, who then take that information with them outside of the game room and into the world at large. We should not be teaching players a piece of information that is not factual, was obtained in an inappropriate way, and has not been approved by its subject. If you disagree, or you previously included this sort of clue in a Ferrante question while having reluctance about doing so, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

[Cheynem]

I think it would be appropriate to clue that speculation and interest in Ferrante's true identity has remained high over the years, but I don't see much of an upside in cluing the people she is suspected of being (mainly because, as as you point out, aside from unethically obtained and unverifiable reporting, we don't know if that's actually whom she is). For instance, in the Oxford Open 2020 tossup you reference, virtually the entire tossup is fine using this standard--I would just remove the sentence speculating Ferrante is a certain person and perhaps say something like "In 2016 reporter Claudio Gatti was condemned for claiming whom this author really was" [This is an awkward sentence, I know]. In that way, I think we clue something that is well known about Ferrante without actually violating the privacy. You could argue this does raise attention to the unethical reporting and that may make people search for Gatti's claims, but I don't think that's inherently the fault of the question.

[Stained Diviner]

There are two separate issues here.

One is the uncertainty of the identity, which should be treated as uncertain. This is pretty easy to handle with the way a question/answerline is worded, and it should be handled as such.

The other issue is the privacy of a living person, which I don't think we have an obligation to follow. Naming the person in a quizbowl question isn't going to change their life in any way (especially if that person lives in a country that does not have quizbowl), and it would be difficult to apply a policy consistently. The policy would be something along the lines of not naming living people who explicitly put a high priority on privacy and possibly did not have anything to do with what they are famous for. I'm ambivalent about that and don't see the harm in treating controversies as controversies.

As somebody who writes a fair amount of Current Events, the idea that we should avoid content that was "obtained in an inappropriate way and has not been approved by its subject" would be harmful, though it could be made less harmful if we agree that it is OK to use such information about public figures. There are some obvious differences between the person who might be Elena Ferrante and the person who is Bashar al-Assad, so it should be easy enough to treat them differently.