Corpus 2

[TokyoBouncyBall]

A summary would be good and I might do one later but Aston, data scraping, astonishing lack of contrition…

Has Aston stated that no quotes from mumsnet are going in the PhD? It’s going to be difficult to not put any quotes in.

Is Aston aware that as soon as you put that quote in google, mumsnet and the poster will likely appear? Thereby the only way to not ‘out’ anyone is to not use quotes.

Obviously quotes will go in that are Aston-defined as transphobic as per the pre-defined PhD title. Is there a precedent for harassment of that poster, as accusing someone of a crime they didn’t commit is the crime of harassment is it not? Since they know this PhD will be scrutinised, the constant exposure is repetitive.

Relationships board, where women seek advice on leaving violent and abusive husbands.

Aston: By scraping and using this data, you intrude on women in the most vulnerable and difficult life situations. You risk putting women off from posting in one place where they can get support, advice, information that might help keep them safe.

You are unspeakable fuckers, Aston.

Can someone please explain (because I don't understand this) why one set of MN data has to be deleted & the other doesn't? What's the difference between them?

Aren't they!

FWR fair enough. I'm not happy but it goes with the territory.

Women going through hell with their husband's or parents dealing with young confused children, it's like what's the most amount of damage we can do with one PhD? How many people can we upset in one hit?

How many lives are they happy to put at risk so that someone can get their Fucking PhD?

I would donate to a fund for legal advice.

The first 'set' was the entire fucking site, if I've understood correctly, that Aston had stored offline and were using as a 'sandbox' for testing things out, including I assume their 'can we dox people across platforms' software.

The second set was what the PhD student had copied/downloaded for her own study.

I think that's what they mean, anyway. It's not been terribly well explained.

I've just added a summary to one of DNK's threads. Sorry couldn't find a Sarah P one and need to do other stuff now. But I do think named posters should be warned about the defamatory PhD.

I also want to comment that MN is now breaking the terms in place when we signed up. We signed up thinking that this would not be allowed - no data scraping and that we retain copyright of our words. So any legal advice should cover that aspect too.

@JustineMumsnet
Many thanks for this.
I understand from a response I received this morning to a post of mine I reported that MN did not give permission for the creation of the dataset, and it breaches your T&Cs.

Therefore as I understand it, at this point, Aston is happy to continue to explicitly breach your terms and conditions, by using a dataset scraped without your permission, and as a response to your representations on this matter, is now saying that they will not use your name and logo in the final PhD, thus removing any way of a reader knowing or being able to find out that this data is from a website where the terms and conditions expressly prohibit the collection of the data and the data has been collected without permission.

I mean, I get that this may be one way of addressing privacy and reputation concerns, but actually, if MN is not named in the final publication, this protects Aston from the reputational damage which data scraping without permission would do and which is easy to establish if you know which website has been used.

That said, it would not take a rocket scientist to work out which website is meant, and it would also make any discussion of existing academic literature on MN (of which there is a reasonable amount, also referenced in the ethics form) in the literature review of the PhD a bit oddly placed.

So is this talk now going to be called ‘Changes in Linguistic Transphobia over time 2008-2023’
on June 26th?

Mumsnet still gets a namecheck, I suppose this isn't the final publication so that's perfectly f-i-i-i-ne!

Day of the presentation

So I've got this information from a site I've been banned from naming and I'll be assuming loads of things about the posters then discarding threads that don't fit my end goal then I'll be making it all so unidentifiable that no one can identify anything from a string of more than three words, even though my university can't be trusted with personal data of its own students

Questions?

Yes I know it said mumsnet on the original timetable, but I'm now banned from saying mumsnet so i can't tell you where i got this totally unidentifiable data from.

Surely this is going to be even worse for Eden and Aston without them being able to name mumsnet. It's just going to be so ridiculous. "Yes it's a very scientific totally ethical paper. But we are banned from saying where we stole the data from".

Who is going to have faith in something that uses a data source that no one can check as you've been forced to hide the source of the data as you pissed off the site owners when you stole all their data.

Sorry, my question was unclear. I meant in the eyes of MN &/or of Aston, why does one data scrape have to be deleted but the other does not? If the 'sandbox' has to go, why doesn't the PhD one also have to go?

I suspect they'd rinsed the original dataset of all its usefulness by the point they agreed to delete it in the hope that would satisfy the powers that be at mumsnet. Seems to have worked for them though.

Did they agree to delete all the studies and findings they generated from that original dataset as well? I can't remember. If they didn't then not having by now very old information want going to harm them at all. After all they can just scrape it again anytime they want it seems.

The fact that they deleted the first one actually swings more in it being right that they should also bin Edens data sets. They set the precedent by deleting the first one.

The irony of Chatham House Rules to inspire confidence and let women talk openly at Aston.

No, they cannot delete all the studies using the original dataset as some of these are published. The findings (including those published) will have helped with developing further work and funding which Aston has benefited from.

The argument is about precedent, it seems to me, precisely the point at the end of your second paragraph. If they can use a small section of the boards for this PhD and are not legally challenged, they (and others like them) can do similar in the future for other work.

They are trying to retrospectively get permission by offering concessions on the way the data is published in the final thesis, but as far as I understand it, this is not agreed by MN. It’s what Aston are saying they will do.

I'm going to guess money from Aston to MN is in the offing. Let's face it our words are very valuable.

Whilst I'm not going to flounce, I am dfe and name and email changing. I will stay on fwr, but post much less. I dont mind them making money, it's a business after all, I do mind that they aren't telling the whole site. So that people can make up their minds on what to post, knowing it's going to be in a phd.

People in Relationships need to know. Women need to know their words, at possibly the worst point in their life, will be scraped and used elsewhere with no control over that - they can get MN to delete it later but presumably none of these deletions will carry over. Some abusive men will spend years stalking and trying to find their victims to kill them, the idea that this might not be dangerous is ludicrous.

How is calling it transphobia not defamatory? I've never seen transphobia on here. Just sex realist views.

Eden could be one of our ploppers who comes in with outrageous words trying to provoke a response and is then deleted. Given the lack of ethics across the whole process, this sort of behaviour definitely isn't outside the bounds of possibility

These people really think they're above the law. The data protection laws, copyright, defamation and all the many, many court cases showing that sex realist or GC views are WORIADS. They're dangerous. And somehow MN are rolling over. Not in the spirit at all.

I am astounded @JustineMumsnet that you accepted Aston’s ‘conditions’ allowing Eden to keep and use the scraping of our data.

And telling us that our only recourse is to publically out ourselves to Aston, that hotbed of feminist thought, or complain to the ICO when Eden broke MNs terms and conditions is really rather shocking. So it’s our problem now?

In essence, this is allowing our voices to be misrepresented and misinterpreted. We know that Eden believes sex realists/pro women / gender critical voices are transphobic (a hate crime in Scotland) because Eden says so right in the title of Eden’s talk. Leaving no right of reply, no response, no correction of Eden’s absolute bias in reading comments. Free to indulge in full confirmation bias whilst cherry picking the quotes that justify Eden’s thesis.

They are also adamant that this data set has been anonymised. I also hope that as someone running a platform you immediately told them that is a bullshit claim as you both know that no online data can be anonymised.

Re getting legal advice, I think that the first step might be to get in touch with Legal Feminist, as Audrey Ludwig, who I am pretty sure is one of their members, retweeted the original thread in a tone of some surprise at what was going on. They might have advice as to the best way of approaching this.

Also, some questions.

Firstly, as @Astontacious has shown, Eden's work is clearly closely associated with MN already, so how do you unlink that? And what guarantees have Aston provided around quotes, anonymity etc?

Secondly, this whole "If you have any concerns about your data" stuff. For this to have any meaning, everyone who has ever posted on the Relationships board needs to be told that their data is being used, and that if they have a problem with it, to contact Aston. Or, as I think someone suggested a while back, we need to set up a class action which people can join in without compromising their own anonymity in public. But it can't be reliant on people just finding out.

Third option (I am thinking slowly here). We find a lawyer (hello again, Legal Feminist) who sends a letter to Aston, to Nicci and to Eden, making it clear that we will be reading the final PhD and if it contains any identifiable quotes or personal data, we will be getting legal on their ass. So that they know that it is not just MN that they have to be dealing with.

I agree. I was thinking that MN women ought to be told more clearly that absolutely anyone researchers actively scrape data off MN and use it to twist into whatever theses they want to in the very worst of confirmation bias.

MN may well point out that journalists troll these threads for stories all the time, but this ‘research’ and I use the word with a great deal of caution, is another ominous and intrusive level altogether.

It is a bloody shame because academics are, in effect, silencing women’s concerns. Better than any TRAs efforts going.

In a f2f encounter or exchange of comments online there’s the opportunity to challenge and correct other’s interpretations of what you’re saying. Here, Eden gets the last authoritative word and to present this at a conference and publish in a journal despite the many many methodological problems pointed out here.

Like others, I will rename myself though I’ve kept the same user name since starting and rethink my degree of posting. Breaks my heart really at the thought of women in their most vulnerable and troubled times not having a place to turn to, but what else can be done?

Everyone will just ‘know’ wink wink that it’s the nasty wimmin from MN that are transphobic and need to learn their place and to stfu.