A couple of things (or maybe more):
Reflecting on this, I recall that Aston updated their ethics policies around using social media after the PhD debacle had started. The question would be whether this student’s PhD fits the new ethics policy, as it passed ethics initially with significant issues. It is quite hard to see how it does because a fundamental principle would be to act in line with the terms and conditions of the website, which is clearly not done if you work results in a lawsuit from the owners of the website. This is of course why Aston need to settle in some way with MN; I would guess neither party wishes to take it to court as costs would be high. But within Aston’s new ethics policy, is this research considered ethical?
The other reason Aston needs to settle with MN is because it seems that a substantial part (all?) of their research depends on data scraping or other uses of discussion forum content. It seems to me that they are using MN as a ‘control’ for the most part (the PhD is an outlier here) because otherwise their work uses extremist sites (eg about white supremacy) and dark web material. Nonetheless, in selecting their control, they seem to have thought about the well-being of their researchers (the Newshome and Grant paper upthread mentions reducing the amount of disturbing content researchers view, p113), but not about the ethics of being extractive and using sensitive material from eg adoption and infertility threads without any form of permission or consent which can then be linked back to users (as it can be in some cases, this was also true in the papers discussed in the previous thread; which also raises ethical issues). Second question: can the student and the supervisors guarantee that users will not be identifiable?.
These papers will have been done before MN asked them to delete the dataset but they demonstrate the issues. I cannot find any reference to ethics in the Newshome and Grant paper but that maybe because I was reading it on my phone.
The purpose of the Newshome and Grant paper is given as developing a framework that can be applied to the analysis of anonymous interactions on criminal online fora. In the Newshome and Grant paper, MN (the parenting discussion forum which is identifiable as MN) is clearly positioned as non-criminal. The problem with the PhD for MN and indeed users is that this is not the case for the PhD as I understand it, particularly in a context where people, primarily women, have lost their jobs for expressing their views in more public contexts and have had to take matters to court to defend their rights to hold certain beliefs.
Finally, with regard to the paper ArabellaScott links to, I read some of Jai McKenzie’s work when this situation started and I thought she did a very thorough and well-considered job of thinking through the ethics of digital research. She had sought permissions and indeed, as I recall, contacted users. Also her work was aimed at highlighting issues affecting women as mothers, as I recall, so was not extractive in the sense of ‘let’s just use this data to our own ends and further our careers’. I have not (yet) read the paper you link to, but seeing as Jai McKenzie is a co-author, I would be interested to read it as potentially offering a useful way forward (I will come back when I have read it). There are important issues to be grappled with here (just not the way the FoLD team at Aston have done it) in my opinion.
And finally, because there is surely an interesting paper here about how users of an anonymous parenting forum react when they find out they are the subject of academic research by people investigating language patterns and relationships of power and community in criminal contexts, let me note that I do not give permission for anyone to use what I have written on these threads or any others in any way for any linguistic or other research.