Corpus 2

@SinnerBoy and @NoBinturongsHereMate you've just got yourselves another follower!

I saw there were 7 replies but I’m not on X so can’t read them. It sounds like we’re still all slandered / libelled as transphobic.

Ah, found ya!

OK. Have you posted on the Aston thread?

And I've spotted I wasn't yet following you. I'm a more feathery animal over there.

I've left them a message on that Twitter feed. I retweeted it immediately, as I suspect it may be deleted. Nothing rude, or aggressive, just facr and my opinion.

https://x.com/AIFL_Aston/status/1837237551830073629

'Congratulations to AIFL’s Eden Palmer, Lauren Morgan, and Jenna Elliott for passing their Qualifying Reports and becoming fully-fledged PhD researchers. All 3 demonstrated excellent progress over their first year, and we’re excited to see how the projects unfold!'

'Eden’s work looks at the nature and development of transphobic language online, using corpus assisted critical discourse analysis to unpick implicitly discriminatory discourse.'

Does it, aye?

I’m resurrecting this thread to ask @JustineMumsnet if any new information has arisen since the last post in Feb in relation to Eden’s unethical use of our data but also to confirm that / explain if the changes with the pay or consent model means that third parties can now access users data without breaking MN T&Cs?

I have at least 20 usernames and a detransitioned child.

How does Mx Palmer plan to avoid causing additional harm to trans people/detrans people whilst also framing their family members as transphobic hate-crimers? Could individual trans people be identified by things supposedly said by their mothers?

I’m starting to think that Mx Palmer is only interested in they/themself and has no interest in the physical and mental wellbeing of the the transgender community.

Is Eden Palmer the real transphobe here?

Maybe the new "pay or consent" wall will interfere with scrapers?

(It won't. The point is that Mumsnet are no longer your allies when it comes to "consent" about your data being hoovered up by third parties. And I say that as a long-time Premium subscriber.)

W

The ICO were very helpful when I contacted them before.

The first thing you're supposed to do is complain directly - however if you feel you can't (because you don't want to compromise anonymity, for example) - there is scope to complain directly to the ICO.

Too late for an edit. My last comment probably isn’t phrased very well - I meant that the researcher determines whether the poster’s post is hateful.

Thankyou @Dumbledoreslemonsherbets

I can’t get my head round a British university funding a researcher to seek out self-determined ‘hate criminals’ on mumsnet, finding out ways to identify them and putting their quotes out on the internet.
There are people out there that are very vengeful (just look at the child abuse images that mumsnet was bombarded with in a cyber attack last night). Those people don’t need more incitement.

It does if it makes people identifiable, which if you're cross referencing posts can be done - and Aston in fact do this as part of their research. Any data by which people can be identified is covered.

I doubt GDPR will cover things you've written in an open forum.

The problem isn't that they are making posts public- they're already public. It's the framing of them as 'phobic' and 'hate crimes'.

MN can challenge it as a T&C breech and damage to their reputation becase they are explicitly named (or near enough named, when described as a parenting forum and confirmable by a quick google) . Individual posters would probably have to go the libel route. Much harder to prove you've been personally identified unless your username is your actual name.

@Astontacious I think Aston have shown they have zero moral qualms about harming women.

The problem with the ICO complaint is that it would help if we actually have the quotes Aston are using. However I might put in a complaint highlighting that since they've stolen my sensitive data (under GDPR) and haven't said what bits they'll be using, I can't know if it will definitely make me identifiable and subject to real life harm, but it's possible.

I think this might be the way to go.

Because I'm pretty sure under GDPR they shouldn't be doing this. I think they are breaking the law.

Aston - I do not give permission for any of my postings, under any of my usernames, to be used or published by your researchers either. I don’t even know how many usernames I have had over the years so please can you tell me what quotes you are going to use with the username so I can look back and tell if it’s me.

I really don’t think anything I have written will be in your greatest hits but I don’t know what your parameters are. How do I know you wouldn’t use part of a sentence out of context? That’s not fair without a right of reply.

You will know I have said the above before but I think it needs repeating after the latest feedback.

You are going ahead with this so you should tell mumsnet hq which quotes you are going to use and their usernames so that those posters can be notified before anything publishable goes online. Ethically, if you are effectively publicly ‘convicting’ someone of something hateful, you should tell the accused what’s going on before sentencing. It now feels intimidating as your replies back to mumsnet seem repeatedly unrelenting.

For example, if you were to link my usernames there is a chance my family and I could be identified in real life. We fall under certain vulnerable categories and I am feeling stressed by your monitoring and collection of my social media. You will tell I am stressed writing this. I am writing and rewriting my words trying to be really careful as I am not an expert in any of this, especially the legalities. Ironically I don’t even think I have said anything wrong in the first place!

The context is worrying. When this came to light on mumsnet around April last year, it has been shown that your professor deleted the word ‘feminist’ from her bio and replaced a picture of a ‘Votes for Women’ march to a banner saying ‘Trans Rights are Human Rights’ which still stands on her social media. Of course every human should have human rights but in this context the timing of the replacement was intimidating particularly as there are screenshots to show the researcher wrote she was going to be researching ‘hate crimes on mumsnet’, then she deleted her LinkedIn.

Is the research not on hates crimes now?

You are aware you hold a huge amount of power over mums who were/are worried about their vulnerable children and used mumsnet for support to navigate parenthood. You must clearly be aware the lengths any type of activist will go to investigate perceived wrongs against their ideology on the web. Especially if those ‘wrongs’ are seemingly endorsed by a university.

Can you tell us is this legal? From googling about this level of involvement, I would have thought it would only be legal if preventing or detecting a crime? Presumably it is for the latter. This fits with the researcher’s quote above which surely implies, at the beginning of the PhD, she believes ‘hate crimes’ are already there to study?

Regarding your quotes that will be published: are you exposing the quoted people just to the public, or are you submitting these to the police too and if not, could you be accused of withholding evidence? If anyone reads your research in the future and feels you should have gone to the police, don’t you need to hold on to the research ‘evidence’ indefinitely? Otherwise could you be accused of destroying evidence? Therefore there can never be a permanent deletion that MumsnetHQ requested.

To alleviate further distress, misinformation and damage why don’t you do an AMA on mumsnet? We have a lot of questions.

p.s. I have a lot of love for Mumsnet. Women are silenced a lot but Mumsnet have helped so many women and families by enabling women to communicate with one another. Please consider the wider moral implications of what you are doing.

My feeling is a complaint as an individual to ICO might be the best way to go for anyone who doesn't have vast wealth to pay for lawyers.

Has anyone considered taking their own legal advice over this?

Borrowing @Dumbledoreslemonsherbets
Just to be clear I explicitly do not consent to any of the words I have written on MN to be used or quoted in any academic research. I consider any such use to be a breach of GDPR because of the potential for identification, which as PP have shown above is virtually impossible to avoid if you use quotes.

I imagine lots of tears and cries but think of the poor doctoral student (similar to how they thought about the ethics of using/misrepresenting views posted on FWR).

Just to be clear I explicitly do not consent to any of the words I have written on MN to be used or quoted in any academic research. I consider any such use to be a breach of GDPR because of the potential for identification, which as PP have shown above is virtually impossible to avoid if you use quotes.

I also do not think it's ethical for academics to impose labels on anonymous (or not, several people on this site aren't anonymous e.g. Glinner) internet users without their knowledge or consent.

The irony is that these are people who claim they believe in self-identification, then they label people against their consent or knowledge which is about as far from self ID as it's possible to get.

Ah, was Jai McKenzie the academic who started studying MN threads and then realised her approach wasn't ethical and then revised it?

I'm shit with names, but that researcher did an exemplary job of reflexive and thoughtful practise. So if that was her then apologies and I take back what I said about irony.

However overall I still find.it hypocritical for work produced under the banner of Aston to talk about ethical practise.

It's be a shame if good work got tainted by Aston's sloppy and underhand actions.