Corpus 2

Cutnpasters! Aston University are complete and utter cutnpasters!

cutnpaster seems even ruder than the good old Anglo=Saxon anatomical word. I like it - it gets to the intellectual shallows rather than the part known for having more sensitivity and depth.

And lastly, here’s Freya India’s Substack:

https://www.freyaindia.co.uk/

If Eden is lurking this thread I hope Eden can do us the courtesy of watching the video,.

(I still don’t consent to Eden/Aston using my MN posts tho)

Here’s Lee’s intro to the video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H9DdUwQrByg

it occurred to me that Eden Palmer should probably watch this…

(Lee was a transman who spent some time identifying as NB as a step down but after reading Holly’s book ‘Gender Critical Feminism’ Lee now self describes as a ‘weird woman’.

Weird is used in a neutral to good way.

Being a weird woman is extremely freeing, I recommend all ‘nonbinary AFABs’ try it out.

The paper in case others are interested to read it…https://www.bmj.com/content/323/7321/1103?trk=public_post_comment-text

@JustineMumsnet it would be interesting to know Aston's response to this.

I’ve just read Eysenbachand and Till (2001) and it gets worse. Not only has Eden cited a 23 year old paper (which is a 2 page BMJ paper) as their specious justification for not seeking MN permission for data scraping, but Eden has completely misrepresented the whole premise of this paper.

I’ve copied quite a bit to give an indication of the direction of their arguments:

Internet communities' members do not expect to be research subjects

Although publication on the internet may have parallels to publishing a letter in a newspaper or saying something in a public meeting, there are important psychological differences, and people participating in an online discussion group cannot always be assumed to be “seeking public visibility.” On the internet the dichotomy of private and public sometimes may not be appropriate, and communities may lie in between.
**
Several measures can be used to estimate the perceived level of privacy. Firstly, if a subscription or some form of registration is required to gain access to a discussion group then most of the subscribers are likely to regard the group as a “private place” in cyberspace.
**
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the perception of privacy depends on an individual group's norms and codes, target audience, and aim, often laid down in the “frequently asked questions” or information files of an internet community.

Such as MN T&Cs?

…it should be considered whether publication of the results (especially when mentioning the group name) may negatively affect group members or harm the community as a whole.

Such as misrepresenting and labelling MN and the entire FWR as transphobes expressing hate crime for which actual humans have been arrested? The authors go on to suggest best practice that includes:

Obtaining permission from the “list owner” (the individual responsible for maintaining the mailing list) or moderator (if any) is rarely adequate… [but they] may know the online community better than the researcher, so they can be a useful starting point to find out what the group norms are and what would be the best way of obtaining informed consent from group members.

As other researchers interested in MN data have done. The short paper concludes (my emphasis):

Privacy and confidentiality
**
The internet holds various pitfalls for researchers, who can easily and unintentionally violate the privacy of individuals. For example, by quoting the exact words of a newsgroup participant, a researcher may breach the participant's confidentiality even if the researcher removes any personal information… Participants should therefore always be approached to give their explicit consent to be quoted verbatim...
**
Conclusions
**
The main problem with using internet communities for research is that researchers may have difficulty separating spaces regarded as private from spaces regarded as public. We recommend that researchers and institutional review boards should carefully consider these points when developing and reviewing research protocols and should involve members of the group they want to study in these considerations...

It is appears to me that Eden (and possibly Nikki) strongly suspected that permission would not be granted but felt FWR and other posters ought to be outed as transphobic to such an extent that, in my opinion, they both have appeared to disregard key ethical and methodological issues in terms of consent. I’d have failed a first year student for misrepresenting their key ethical justification for not seeking permission.

Edited to clarify this is my opinion and conjecture, not fact.

I'm curious about the reputational damage to Aston, and why they seem so cavalier about it.

Bearing in mind Mumsnet has 9 million users, many of whom are - guess what? - mothers! With offspring that may be seeking a university.

It's bloody weird, really, to accuse a great chunk of potential customers of hate crime.

It'd be interesting to see what impression Mumsnet users as a whole have gained of Aston University.

😆

Only realised what it looked like after I posted 😏

@DrBlackbird "cutnpastin" I know we're not happy with Aston but calling them cutns seems a bit rude.

Along with other posters here, I also state that I do not consent to Aston University using, copying, quoting, or otherwise usilising any of my posts, past or present, in any way at all. I further refuse consent for them to try to cross reference my writing here with posts on any other type of social media and especially not to try to identify me in real life.

AstonUniversityScrapedMyCorpus · Today 16:23

My reasons for repeatedly stating my lack of consent are moral as well as legal.

^I have been posting here for 7 odd years and a large percentage of my posts are about the gender distressed teen in my
life. Most of those posts have been made in solidarity with other mothers/fathers/aunties/grandparents/family friends as we try to find ways to support our beloved children who are grappling with gender non conformity, body hatred, eating disorders, autism, adhd, social anxiety, emergent same sex attraction, bullying and academic struggles.^

Mx Eden Palmer wants to use these posts (made in LGBT Children and Feminism sections) to construct some sort of half baked witch-hunt to prove theyself, what? A saviour of vulnerable children whose parents cruelly deny them medically unnecessary breast and genital amputations?

My love for my child is not a Hate Crime.

How very eloquently put, your whole post, but the above really stood out, for me.

If Aston at all believed they would have consent of posters in this research, they would have asked.

One of their other students referred to in the first thread did an exemplary job of working with MN and posters to gain permissions and preserve anonymity. That was in 2016 if I recall and it was about motherhood. So it’s not like no-one ever considered these issues at Aston, but for some reason, they are now choosing to ignore the excellent practice which one of their former students established and has published on.

I also think AstonUniversityscrapedmycorpus (with apologies for the missing capital letters) makes an excellent point about MN supporting research which benefits parents, mothers, fathers, families, children and so on. Clearly when posters agree to the terms and conditions, this is what they expect - that their posts are part of the product, yes, but one which helps other women (including mothers), plus parents and carers and people needing support, sustain the business which MN is and the support it provides and generally be ‘for’ mothers and parents and carers. The PhD I refer to was in that spirit.

If the premise of the PhD was at all reasonable, then why didn’t they just ask permission? Because they knew MN would not consent.

If Aston publish any of my words under any of my (possibly 100+) user names I will not hesitate to explore legal remedy, or alternatively make the whole lot of you look like absolute arseholes in a tabloid newspaper, whichever feels most satisfying^ at the time.^

Not wanting my child to amputate her breasts is not a hate crime.

This is grim Aston. You really want to be supporting this research?

Many good points.

I want to add that I do not consent to any student of linguistics, be they at school, undergraduate, postgraduate or post-doctoral level, using any material generated by me and posted on Mumsnet under this name or any other name as a basis for their coursework, assignments, presentations, or publications.

Since it seems to be that time of year again.

My reasons for repeatedly stating my lack of consent are moral as well as legal.

I have been posting here for 7 odd years and a large percentage of my posts are about the gender distressed teen in my
life. Most of those posts have been made in solidarity with other mothers/fathers/aunties/grandparents/family friends as we try to find ways to support our beloved children who are grappling with gender non conformity, body hatred, eating disorders, autism, adhd, social anxiety, emergent same sex attraction, bullying and academic struggles.

Mx Eden Palmer wants to use these posts (made in LGBT Children and Feminism sections) to construct some sort of half baked witch-hunt to prove theyself, what? A saviour of vulnerable children whose parents cruelly deny them medically unnecessary breast and genital amputations?

My love for my child is not a Hate Crime.

I am grateful to Mumsnet for hosting a conversation of mutual support between parents and sympathetic non-parents, women’s rights campaigners and concerned professionals.
I consent to Mumsnet using the content I have generated in ways that either sustain Mumsnet’s financial viability, thus keeping the site free to use for other mothers like me, or in research projects that Mumsnet has expressly approved in the belief that the research is helpful for parents and/or women.

I do not consent for Aston University to use any of the content I have authored, at all, for any reason, but I especially object that Aston intends to use content created by MN users to defame Mumsnet the Company and to accuse me and other users of committing Hate Crimes (or contributing to Hate Crimes committed by others).

I post here because I LOVE my child and want my child to grow up in a healthy body. My child is not allowed to smoke, drink alcohol, get a tattoo, stay out after 10pm or get a backy on a friend’s motorbike. My child is encouraged to eat whole foods and be active, be cautious around animals and always keep in mind a safe route home.

The injustices currently inflicted on gender distressed children are coming from the adults who lie to them and claim that changing sex is possible, those who normalise parental alienation and encourage teens to run away to glitter families, those who convince children that becoming a life long medical patient is desirable.

I posit Eden Palmer and Aston University are, in their pursuit of using Mumsnet for this PhD thesis, going to become complicit in the medical abuse of children and vulnerable adults. Smearing responsible and loving parents, professionals who fight for adequate safeguarding and women’s rights campaigners as transphobes and hate crimers will actively harm GNC & T identifying minors, not help them.

If Aston publish any of my words under any of my (possibly 100+) user names I will not hesitate to explore legal remedy, or alternatively make the whole lot of you look like absolute arseholes in a tabloid newspaper, whichever feels most satisfying
at the time.

Not wanting my child to amputate her breasts is not a hate crime.

I do not grant permission for what I write now, will write & have written on Mumsnet, under all my usernames, to be taken, copied or used in any way by any other party.

I could quote this until the end of time. am certain they will give no hoots and to me, that is so wrong.

I do have an exceptionally pretty new user name though thanks to a post above should I wish to reaffirm my opinion that women don’t have male genitalia.

And that despite beliefs to the contrary, people cannot change sex.

I do not grant permission for what I write now, will write & have written on Mumsnet, under all my usernames, to be taken, copied or used in any way by any other party.

Eden might also take a look at Emile Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method, of which I only remember (some decades after reading it) that one must eradicate one's preconceptions.

A quick google produces this:

Durkheim wrote, "The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things." This implies that sociology must respect and apply a recognized objective, scientific method, bringing it as close as possible to the other exact sciences. This method must at all cost avoid prejudice and subjective judgment.