Corpus 2

I suppose they/them meant that they/them would be secretly studying us, not interacting with us?

If we were to write a (nice, polite) letter directly to Eden Palmer c/o Aston University Forensic Linguistics Department (and CC’d to supervisors and members of the ethics committee) would that totally scupper they/them’s assertion that no interaction with participants would occur?

Thus sending they/them back to the drawing board for new ethics consideration?

I am wondering if we need to alert the users who post under their real names about this.

Actually, it should be Mumsnet who alert them. So I'll report this post.

God that's disingenuous.

The fact is that some usernames could be linked to real world identities, we have no trust in their hollow assertion they didn't try to do this. Whilst also setting out in other research proposals that they plan to do exactly this.

Lying liars who lie.

Also, people like DNK, Jo Phoenix and Sarah P do post here under their real world names on FWR, I think also Glinner and Maya - did they delete all of posts from users who used their real names? Or address this? Hmm? These people have suffered real world abuse and in some cases very serious threats and financial losses from speaking up - how did Aston ensure that these real world names' posts were removed? Or make any effort to determine which usernames were real names? There may well be others on here who post under their true name.

It's such total bollocks that is up there with 'I didn't mean to' when your child has broken something. The equivalent of 'what did you think the result of kicking a football in the house would be, dear?' seems the appropriate answer to this.

did not involve interaction with human participants

Do Aston not see women as human then? Or is it because it's online and not face to face interaction? That's one hell of a get out clause.

FOI only requires that the institution provide its records. If it doesn't have them, it can't provide them.

I suspect that between the story breaking on MN and that FOI being submitted, there was some hasty deletion going on. It's illegal to delete records once a FOI has been submitted, but not if you can see from social media etc that one is likely to be submitted soon.

I know right!

Luckily it was Mumsnet and rather than share the number far and wide posters instead went out of their way to alert the university to their fuck up!

We are not the monsters people think we are!

Aston University published a nonbinary student’s phone number online knowing that said student was under scrutiny due to they/thems unfounded Hate Crime accusations directed at users of the UK’s biggest parenting website?

Lucky we aren’t actually committing Hate Crimes and we don’t actually hate Eden Palmer or this would be far worse than just a GDPR breach.

Also didn't address the issue of obtaining consent from the forum operators.

That one really needs a "Can you actually answer the questions" response

Completely ignored the last two queries about naming MN but not the others.

It took them that long to write that??

Aston have responded to the other FOI request
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ethics_and_data_protection_for_t/response/2664248/attach/html/4/FOI%20Response%20FOI%202324%20215%2022.05.24.pdf.html

Please send to me any and all records that you hold about the ethics
approval and Data Protection Act 2018 due diligence surrounding
acquisition of the source material for the "Toward linguistic explanation of
idiolectal variation – understanding the black box" conference talk found at
At the time this project was conducted the University’s ethics procedures not require approval for projects which used publicly available online

Aston's response to P. Murray's FOI request is in. It's startlingly short and doesn't answer all the questions.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ethics_and_data_protection_for_t

Can I suggest someone makes sure @JustineMumsnet know about all this. Maybe email with relevant original screenshots etc.

ethicling, the first part of your post... the clap emoji is inadequate to express how incredibly glad I am that you have spelt this out.

And I posted some posts on behalf of another posters 14 year old daughter using the daughters chosen username once. What do they do with that? And whilst everyone in the thread knew that was what I was doing how many other posts are there out there that aren't actually written by the person who posts it?

Ethics committee?

There's no way of proving all MN posts aren't Winnading using many socks. Or children working in a sweatshop overseas. Or bots. Or an army of TRAs.

Ouroborus/quicksand/weasel sounds accurate, and for much of academia tbh

There was the thread where the chat bot malfunctioned!😁

There's no way of proving that any of the posts on MN are from humans. There have certainly been threads where people (including me) became convinced that the naive questioning OP was an IT construct.

And even ones that are from humans may be from linguistics students constructing straw men that they can attack and expose.

The whole discipline seems an ouroboros living in quicksand inhabited by weasels.

Aston is a shoddy institution with poor governance and without even a basic understanding of ethics.

I just wanted to repeat this excellent part of a post as I thought it aptly summed up where we are.

@GCITC Thanks for the names. I was just curious; the text had been redacted on the html by the time I found it.

I'd wondered if the inadequate supervision problem and approval for the PhD topic had gone wider than Aston but obviously it hasn't. I've known people doing PhDs who've had supervisors from different universities with their main one being at the university where they were enrolled. Although it adds complications, I wonder if it benefits everyone to filter thinking through, one hopes, a wider safety net of good practice.

To have all supervisors employed by Aston (whose own ethics monitoring and ability to even keep their own staff's data safe, let alone the stuff they've taken without permission) and to have the main supervisor as an ex-Aston student herself whose own PhD is raising questions about ethics on here, makes it look as if the problem is in danger of self-perpetuating.

It's also occurred to me this morning that there is no way of proving that any of the posts on MN are from adults is there? There are plenty of articulate under-18s out there. We can make assumptions that we are talking to adults, but none of us know for sure.

@ArabellaScott I'm so proud! And so you should be 😀

I'm so proud!

Weetabix with cold milk otoh is heaven, and one of the things I can never eat again. So sad.

But, important public service announcement, it your arse is on fire DON'T RUN

Stop. Drop. Roll.

discussions over how horrifc hot weetabix is.

Not just any hot weetabix. Hot weetabix with... I can scarcely bring myself to say it... banana not envy