Corpus 2

[TokyoBouncyBall]

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

Hi,
I tried the search cold and it brings up a post from March 2018 from MN with the nationalities of the adopting couple same as you have.
The author’s correspondence email is Aston, so of course it is MN. It’s no doubt from the main dataset and probably submitted before the dataset was deleted.
i cannot find the longer marked up quote either, but the paper references another paper by Newsome-Chandler and Tim Grant (2023) which describes the parenting forum as containing a ‘Talk’ section, a collection of paid moderators identifiable by their usernames; that content is freely accessible but an email is required to register to post, it has ‘lurkers’ … sounds very familiar.

https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/LLLD/article/view/12841
see page 4-5
(the link in the Lucia Busso paper upthread is wrong in the citation for this paper, it takes you to vol 9 of Language and Law but the paper by Newsome Chandler and Grant using MN is in vol 10, no 1).

The paper I have linked to includes an analysis of individual users on a thread and the language they use (so personal experience, claims of authority etc). As far as I can work out, it is not possible to identify the users from what has been given in the paper, but I am guessing none of those users would be aware their discussion on the adoption forum has been dissected in this way.

Aston University Linguistics Department is staffed by Wankers and trains new, additional Wankers in both undergrad and postgraduate programs.

They are free to quote this post in one of their future papers, authored by Wankers.

Eden Palmer won’t be using it beyond their PhD and related publications or presentations and have also committed to ensuring no third parties break the terms of our agreement.

Completely agree with@YellowAsteroid that this gives Eden an open hand for as long as they like. This ‘won’t be using it beyond’ agreement is utterly insulting. The equivalent of patting the collective heads of FWR and saying ’there, there, don’t worry your little terf heads about serious linguistic concerns’. One can’t help but arrive at an impression that these are deeply unpleasant and arrogant people IMO.

An academic’s whole life is centred around publications and conference presentations. Eden will spend the next ten years of Eden’s life speaking with authority on the transphobes of a well known British parenting forum (wink wink). Garnering accolades and approbation as Eden misrepresents the views and concerns of FWR women ad nauseaum. Reinforcing a convenient narrative that MN is full of horrible women seeking to deny the existence of TW.

But it doesn’t sound as though Aston will budge despite the apparently shocking and cursory wave at ‘ethics’. Other universities would seem to be much much more robust at scrutinising ethic applications.

I have more faith in the Grimbut gerbils writing a PhD in ethical T-shirt production than in Aston University being ethical in any way shape or form! This whole debacle has shown Aston University up as a bunch of amoral shysters.

I don't see why MN have agreed to Aston using any data at all in any case. Why do.you not simply deny them the use altogether? They've already shown that they are unethical and abusive, with preconceived conclusions on the subject.

Thanks for the posts re searching terms on that paper.

They're still using MN? Still publishing work referring to the site, using women's words, about personal and intimate subjects like adoption, and lumping it in with criminal and shady websites.

Aston's reputation should be in fucking tatters.

They might be able to weasel round the legalities but the ethics of it fucking stink. Shame on them.

Oh, look, a paper on 'ethical practise'. Talks a lot about 'informed.consent'.

Does it talk about illegally scraping data including personal and sensitive data, and then using it to try and identify anonymous users talking about their personal histories of adoption, dv, and abuse? Or using the testimony of rape victims without seeking their explicit consent?

Gold star for irony.

https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/publications/ethical-practice-in-participant-centred-linguistic-research

I think MNHQ need better lawyers. How can MNHQ fight this, when they are potentially being advised by a legal team that is linked to the Good Law Project who knowingly are anti-women?

I know we'd get banned if we say what we think but this is a disgrace, an utter disgrace.

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.

Ah, was Jai McKenzie the academic who started studying MN threads and then realised her approach wasn't ethical and then revised it?

I'm shit with names, but that researcher did an exemplary job of reflexive and thoughtful practise. So if that was her then apologies and I take back what I said about irony.

However overall I still find.it hypocritical for work produced under the banner of Aston to talk about ethical practise.

It's be a shame if good work got tainted by Aston's sloppy and underhand actions.

Just to be clear I explicitly do not consent to any of the words I have written on MN to be used or quoted in any academic research. I consider any such use to be a breach of GDPR because of the potential for identification, which as PP have shown above is virtually impossible to avoid if you use quotes.

I also do not think it's ethical for academics to impose labels on anonymous (or not, several people on this site aren't anonymous e.g. Glinner) internet users without their knowledge or consent.

The irony is that these are people who claim they believe in self-identification, then they label people against their consent or knowledge which is about as far from self ID as it's possible to get.

I imagine lots of tears and cries but think of the poor doctoral student (similar to how they thought about the ethics of using/misrepresenting views posted on FWR).

Borrowing @Dumbledoreslemonsherbets
Just to be clear I explicitly do not consent to any of the words I have written on MN to be used or quoted in any academic research. I consider any such use to be a breach of GDPR because of the potential for identification, which as PP have shown above is virtually impossible to avoid if you use quotes.

Has anyone considered taking their own legal advice over this?

My feeling is a complaint as an individual to ICO might be the best way to go for anyone who doesn't have vast wealth to pay for lawyers.

Aston - I do not give permission for any of my postings, under any of my usernames, to be used or published by your researchers either. I don’t even know how many usernames I have had over the years so please can you tell me what quotes you are going to use with the username so I can look back and tell if it’s me.

I really don’t think anything I have written will be in your greatest hits but I don’t know what your parameters are. How do I know you wouldn’t use part of a sentence out of context? That’s not fair without a right of reply.

You will know I have said the above before but I think it needs repeating after the latest feedback.

You are going ahead with this so you should tell mumsnet hq which quotes you are going to use and their usernames so that those posters can be notified before anything publishable goes online. Ethically, if you are effectively publicly ‘convicting’ someone of something hateful, you should tell the accused what’s going on before sentencing. It now feels intimidating as your replies back to mumsnet seem repeatedly unrelenting.

For example, if you were to link my usernames there is a chance my family and I could be identified in real life. We fall under certain vulnerable categories and I am feeling stressed by your monitoring and collection of my social media. You will tell I am stressed writing this. I am writing and rewriting my words trying to be really careful as I am not an expert in any of this, especially the legalities. Ironically I don’t even think I have said anything wrong in the first place!

The context is worrying. When this came to light on mumsnet around April last year, it has been shown that your professor deleted the word ‘feminist’ from her bio and replaced a picture of a ‘Votes for Women’ march to a banner saying ‘Trans Rights are Human Rights’ which still stands on her social media. Of course every human should have human rights but in this context the timing of the replacement was intimidating particularly as there are screenshots to show the researcher wrote she was going to be researching ‘hate crimes on mumsnet’, then she deleted her LinkedIn.

Is the research not on hates crimes now?

You are aware you hold a huge amount of power over mums who were/are worried about their vulnerable children and used mumsnet for support to navigate parenthood. You must clearly be aware the lengths any type of activist will go to investigate perceived wrongs against their ideology on the web. Especially if those ‘wrongs’ are seemingly endorsed by a university.

Can you tell us is this legal? From googling about this level of involvement, I would have thought it would only be legal if preventing or detecting a crime? Presumably it is for the latter. This fits with the researcher’s quote above which surely implies, at the beginning of the PhD, she believes ‘hate crimes’ are already there to study?

Regarding your quotes that will be published: are you exposing the quoted people just to the public, or are you submitting these to the police too and if not, could you be accused of withholding evidence? If anyone reads your research in the future and feels you should have gone to the police, don’t you need to hold on to the research ‘evidence’ indefinitely? Otherwise could you be accused of destroying evidence? Therefore there can never be a permanent deletion that MumsnetHQ requested.

To alleviate further distress, misinformation and damage why don’t you do an AMA on mumsnet? We have a lot of questions.

p.s. I have a lot of love for Mumsnet. Women are silenced a lot but Mumsnet have helped so many women and families by enabling women to communicate with one another. Please consider the wider moral implications of what you are doing.

@Astontacious I think Aston have shown they have zero moral qualms about harming women.

The problem with the ICO complaint is that it would help if we actually have the quotes Aston are using. However I might put in a complaint highlighting that since they've stolen my sensitive data (under GDPR) and haven't said what bits they'll be using, I can't know if it will definitely make me identifiable and subject to real life harm, but it's possible.

I think this might be the way to go.

Because I'm pretty sure under GDPR they shouldn't be doing this. I think they are breaking the law.

I doubt GDPR will cover things you've written in an open forum.

The problem isn't that they are making posts public- they're already public. It's the framing of them as 'phobic' and 'hate crimes'.

MN can challenge it as a T&C breech and damage to their reputation becase they are explicitly named (or near enough named, when described as a parenting forum and confirmable by a quick google) . Individual posters would probably have to go the libel route. Much harder to prove you've been personally identified unless your username is your actual name.

It does if it makes people identifiable, which if you're cross referencing posts can be done - and Aston in fact do this as part of their research. Any data by which people can be identified is covered.

Thankyou @Dumbledoreslemonsherbets

I can’t get my head round a British university funding a researcher to seek out self-determined ‘hate criminals’ on mumsnet, finding out ways to identify them and putting their quotes out on the internet.
There are people out there that are very vengeful (just look at the child abuse images that mumsnet was bombarded with in a cyber attack last night). Those people don’t need more incitement.

Too late for an edit. My last comment probably isn’t phrased very well - I meant that the researcher determines whether the poster’s post is hateful.

The ICO were very helpful when I contacted them before.

The first thing you're supposed to do is complain directly - however if you feel you can't (because you don't want to compromise anonymity, for example) - there is scope to complain directly to the ICO.

W

Maybe the new "pay or consent" wall will interfere with scrapers?

(It won't. The point is that Mumsnet are no longer your allies when it comes to "consent" about your data being hoovered up by third parties. And I say that as a long-time Premium subscriber.)