Mumsnet Corpus

[TokyoBouncyBall]

Not a TAAT, but a bit of googling as a result of a now deleted thread has led me to this:

https://fold.aston.ac.uk/handle/123456789/18

I note it says that the License is uncertain. Can you confirm that you have given permission for posts to be used in this way, or is there something that Aston might like to look into?

I note it says Users who wish to access this dataset must make a detailed application to FoLD and the researcher, as well as potentially gain additional agreement from an external organisation before they can be approved for access.

Given one of the uses it is being put to, I think it is a bit dubious to say the least.

If that 'poor student' wanted my sympathy, that 'poor student' shouldn't have accused me of a crime.

The self-righteous young can be very dangerous.

It does feel like an attack on women. Why us? Why our forum, and not Reddit? It's because we are women and this is a space for women to be vocal and connect, so they think that they can push us around and silence us.

Reddit is many orders of magnitude more abusive than Mumsnet.

Yet upthread (?) there's a link about Reddit selling their posters' data (posts) to Google for use in training AI bots in how to be informal, more conversational and in tune with likely users of such chat bots and functions.

MN data is being assessed for hate crimes and transphobia.

Better regulations around data scraping, better enforcement of "right to be forgotten", forums forced to archive/delete posts older than 5 years away from the public domain would be a good place to start.

Universities not running forensic counter terrorist research for other countries would be a nice second.

Yes, but Reddit just has your boring old exploitation and abuse of women.

Reddit purged and expelled their terrible terfs so is no good for investigating the actual important hate crimes.

But did they data scrape from the terf forums before they were deleted and are they comparing the posts from there to here?

Yes exactly! MN isn't abusive at all. Yet it's our data they come after.

@BonzoGates do you think this would have been subject to ethics approval??

I would have thought that at face value it wouldn’t.

It is dealing with publicly available “anonymised” data (personally I would disagree on this point and say it is pseudonymised- there is a whole technical debate on this point, but plenty of people would view this as anonymised)

This would be an interesting question for the VC… “did the researchers seek ethics approval and if so which committee gave it?”

I could very easily see this not going to ethics on the basis of my points above.

However, quite apart from whether there are any breaches of GDPR (which would be huge) , it could be argued that this is special category data in a hugely controversial area in the public discourse, likely to get a lot of publicity and therefore ethics approval should have been sought.

Note that we have users feeling like we have been 'come after'.

As in singled out and targetted. Harassed. Victimised. Vilified. Treated like criminals. Told we are transphobic as the default.

At NO point is respect given for consent, whether there is an alternative explanation or reason to motivate users (despite it being said over and over and over thousands of times that it has always been about upholding and maintaining women and childrens lawful rights which have been undermined in multiple ways), the effect of representing MN as 'transphobic', the effect on womens free speech, why MN exists in the first place and why women use it rather than other forums on the internet.

These are ALL relevant considerations if you are actually doing something academic rather than a hacket job to satisfy your own prejudices.

All this 'poor student, lets leave the student out of this' stuff isn't ok either.

This student has their own prejudices that they wanted to push and explore and dress up as academic. This ISN'T an undergraduate either. This is a PhD student, who should be way past that.

I think I’ve answered my own question

https://www.aston.ac.uk/research/integrity-ethics/ethics

”Ethics review and approval process

If you are a staff member or postgraduate research student, and your research involves any of the following, you must apply for research ethics approval (this approval must be received before your research commences):

• Human participants: (including all types of interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, records relating to humans, use of online datasets or other secondary data, observations, etc.)
• Human tissue or cells gathered prospectively from participants. Please see our Human tissue in Research page if you are purchasing or transferring samples to Aston University.
• Risk to members of the research team such as:
• lone working during data collection
• travel to areas where researchers may be at risk: (any request for research requiring international travel should be accompanied by a University travel risk assessment form)
• risk of emotional distress
• other: please outline
• Any risk to the environment
• Any conflict of interest
• Research that could be considered controversial or be of reputational risk to Aston University
• Social media data and/or data from internet sources that could be regarded as private
• Any other ethical considerations: (any substantial ethical considerations you are aware of)

If you have answered YES to any of the above, you need to take the following steps in applying to your College Research Ethics Committee (CREC) to seek approval to commence your research.”

Scraping a huge number of women's posts over 20 years is not the same thing as "anonymous posts being publicly available". MN are the data controllers and they say the researchers broke the MN terms of service by scraping users' posts like this, so it is clearly unethical, whether or not the university's ethics body deems it so.

Cross post, thanks for that, it seems to be very clear. Will be interested to know how such dubious research was approved.

You forgot to underline

risk of emotional distress
Think these threads have pretty much demonstrated that one

Any conflict of interest
If you are an activist trying to PROVE that MN is transphobic then you might well have a conflict of interest because you aren't exactly being a neutral and you have a fairly big wacking agenda.

Any other ethical considerations: (any substantial ethical considerations you are aware of)
Hmm trying to damage the commercial interests / reputation of MN would probably be fairly 'not ok'.

Reddit data sale to Google for training AI bots:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus?reply=134741086&

I don't think I have anything to add about my opinion on the student above what I said on the other thread, so I'll take the point but respectfully disagree.

Any conflict of interest
If you are an activist trying to PROVE that MN is transphobic then you might well have a conflict of interest because you aren't exactly being a neutral and you have a fairly big wacking agenda.

I'm more than a little interested to learn if Police Scotland would be keen consumers of linguistic tools that claimed to identify transphobia and authors. What with the increased volume of work they're experiencing post the introduction of the HCA.

That and if FoLD perceive a use for this tool to automate the work of the Global Disinformation Index and such in discerning adversarial narratives.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5051761-worth-watching-unherd-investigation-inside-the-disinformation-industry-kathleen-stock-specifically-mentioned?

"You forgot to underline

risk of emotional distress
Think these threads have pretty much demonstrated that one

Any conflict of interest
If you are an activist trying to PROVE that MN is transphobic then you might well have a conflict of interest because you aren't exactly being a neutral and you have a fairly big wacking agenda.

Any other ethical considerations: (any substantial ethical considerations you are aware of)
Hmm trying to damage the commercial interests / reputation of MN would probably be fairly 'not ok'."

Yes, I agree @RedToothBrush

I think in this list emotional distress refers specifically to the researchers.
I checked the policy document which say emotional distress to either researchers or participants but we are not participants.

Yes you could well be right on conflict of interest and if the researchers themselves have posted on social media about their personal feelings on this, it would be evidence.

I think damage to the mumsnet business is also interesting as this would be reputational risk (e.g. getting involved in court cases) and financial risk (e.g. being sued)

I don't think I have anything to add about my opinion on the student above what I said on the other thread, so I'll take the point but respectfully disagree.

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to feel sorry for her either. She's no different to any blinkered, empathy free transactivist shouting TWAW at women at events. They're often "young students" too. Women are not here to coddle everyone's feelings. So I'll respectfully disagree back.

I really hope the VC has the integrity to admit they messed up.

I can't honestly say that I understand half of what has been happening here. But from what I've read, it seems incredible and arrogant in the extreme.

I'm so glad that there are so many knowledgable, qualified and determined MNers who are standing up for the rest of us.

Thank you.

Talking of ethics committees, the other studies of the MN data by Aston included looking at discussions around infertility and therefore may need Research Ethics Committee not just an in house one.

https://www.hra-decisiontools.org.uk/ethics/

Not that it should even get that far as it is a breach of the right to privary under ECHR and the HRA.

think in this list emotional distress refers specifically to the researchers.
I checked the policy document which say emotional distress to either researchers or participants but we are not participants.

If your research is likely to cause the data subjects emotional distress or cause harm you may not necessarily be able to fall back on section 33 of GDPR for research without needing to gain consent from the individual data subjects to process their data for research purposes.