I imagine it can. It’s part of the reason the protection of quoted material doesn’t extended to material that isn’t in VBulletin quote boxes.
However, think of how someone who doesn’t use the quote function on this board quotes someone. They tend to copy and paste a section from a post and stick quote marks around it. You can then track back and see which post they were quoting. If they were to do that, but then change a salient word, or replace some of text while keeping the rest, it’ll be pretty obvious it was an altered quote. It was that type of alteration I believe Twickster was (erroneously) referring to.
However, my point was that just because something is in quotation marks doesn’t always imply that it was meant to be a direct quote of spoken or written text. I think in the case here, it was obviously an indirect quote (paraphrase) as I only put two words in quotes that couldn’t be found anywhere in the poster actual posts. Even then any confusion that it was meant to be a quote (and was therefore an altered quote) was clarified very quickly that it was a paraphrase. So even under Twickster’s broader rule 9which isn’t a rule), there was no violation, in my opinion.