I got banned because other mothers on the board wouldn't allow it to be said openly that there are risks to formula feeding.
They complained to Bounty that I was being offensive and making personal attacks on other members over their feeding choices, and that's why Bounty banned me.
I assume that Bounty never actually read any of my posts because I was always very careful NOT to make personal comments about how people fed their babies.
It was mainly on the debates board. People would start ff vs bf threads and it would tick along quietly with the usual platitudes. The minute I came on and made the point that there were important health issues to be considered, the whole thing would fall apart in a frenzy of bitchiness and accusation. There was some really odd logic going on there - along the lines of 'if I feel a sense of hurt and failure when I read what you say about formula then that's evidence that you've personally attacked me'. So if I raised the issue of say, necrotising enterocolitis in preterm babies I'd come back half an hour later and there'd be someone posting about how vile I was to tell her that she'd risked her preterm baby's life on purpose by not breastfeeding. Everyone would be agreeing with her about what a horrible person I was. Two months later someone would start another debate on the subject and if I posted I'd get a whole load of obscene personal abuse in response - really nasty stuff, and someone would say 'do you remember she told so and so that she told them off for not breastfeeding their preterm baby and tried to make them feel bad about themselves' and everyone else would insist that that's what I'd really said and I shouldn't try to wiggle out of it!
It kind of went on in that sort of mode - with accusation piling on accusation so that everyone lost sight of what I actually HAD said and just responded to other people's reports of it- which were always madly distorted. I've never experienced anything like it - it was a total witch hunt. Someone even sent me private message telling me she'd gone back through all my old posts to try to suss out who I worked for and that she was going to contact my employers and tell them I was spreading malicious lies about formula on the internet!
If I'd made reference to really obscure and unsubstantiated research you could understand some of the anger, but I only ever referred to the most common issues - gastro-enteritis, respitory infections, atopic disease, obesity - you know, all the things that are listed under 'Cons of bottlefeeding' on NHS Direct! They would NOT accept that ff babies have higher rates of these illnesses and got angrier and angrier every time I said it! I was shocked - some of these women are educated professionals who have clearly made the choice to formula feed without the slightest knowledge of the drawbacks for their babies. Incidentally I was always really clear about the importance of women feeling they had a choice, and always acknowledged what a challenge bf can be - that it's not women's fault if they can't bf - that women choose to do what they genuinely believe is best for their babies, based on the information they've been given. I only ever tried to make a point about the quality and breadth of information that's being made available to mothers - not what they did with that information.
The other thing I got banned for was for posting information on the bottlefeeding board in response to one of the many queries about how you prepare a bottlefeed. I explained the new recommendations and was shouted out for 'scaremongering' - despite the fact that I'd pointed out that illness identified as beindg due to contaminated formula was 'extremely rare', involving only a handful of cases in Europe. Not good enough apparently. None of the other ff mums who regularly post on that board had any idea why the recommendations had been changed, or were that clear about what the new recommendations had to say about how to make up a feed, and thoroughly objected to someone they saw as a 'bf nazi' coming on that board and referring to contaminated formula.
There's one mum on the bottlefeeding board who sets herself up as an authority on the subject. She was telling women on the board that she used to make up formula in advance for her preterm baby, sometimes give half the bottle and save the other half and give it a few hours later, and that she'd been told it was fine to do this by a neonatal nurse! Not one person dared to point out that there might be safety issues with feeding preterm babies in this way...... No - there's some serious weirdness going on there and it's very troubling.