Trans identified Mumsnet member AidaP is scraping Mumsnet

[BambooLampshade]

Hi Mumsnet, though you should know that a trans identified man - who often posts on Mumsnet as @aidap - is scraping the feminimism board, in order to create some sort of grading system.

It's basically electronic stalking.

What is this?

Oh yes, I have downloaded most of mumsnet and we will be doing embeddings of the content to try to understand how does the rot and hate builds and spreads.

I never had so much hate and delusion on my hard drive before 😅

https://bsky.app/profile/aidap.bsky.social/post/3mkklbtpgbs2s

I don't think men can change sex, I think there's unfortunately a minority of men posing as trans who are sexual predators.

And minorities can be pretty big, up to 49.9%.

So what you saying?

As usual, there's an expectation being voiced that women, who have had to learn to be deeply suspicious of men forcing their way into single sex services and spaces, who have only hung on to their legal rights by long and expensive battles in court and constant letter writing, campaigning, who have been unable to access refuges, rape access services, toilets in their work place, to have a same sex hcp and all the rest of it....

must not be nasty or joke about it or in any way show exasperation, frustration, rudeness or lack of respect to these men.

Even when many of the posters who come to poke the women for jollies on FWR are openly extremely nasty, disrespectful, rude and don't believe in women's rights or equalities at all. And usually end up getting banned because they repeatedly broke the posting guidelines, and HQ will give the benefit of the doubt and excuse it as 'debate' for as long as possible before having to ban, because it's their 'balance'. The poster in question openly and gleefully fantasised about murder-raping a woman who spoke in ways he disagreed with, and you'll see from another thread here, was vile on threads for weeks before he was banned.

Why must women be nice about this? Why must they never use pattern recognition or be in any way rude or disrespectful? Why must they not criticise appearance - for example the tutor at Oxford teaching with a beard and enormous fake breasts? Is it because these men are their betters? Because that's certainly what this man and many other activists openly believe. It's sheer misogyny.

Men casually threaten women murder and it's not really an issue. Women dare to fail to use their 'voice was ever soft and low, an excellent thing in woman' sufficient girliness towards men, and the gender activists hate it. Because the whole movement is based on extreme sexism and misogyny.

Well AStonedRose it sure feels like women are being held to a different standard.

Men who spout death and rape threats get your nod of disapproval, sure. And then multiple pages of posts about the meanie women for worrying their boundaries are being breached.

I'm absolutely not a regular, these things keep popping up in my active threads. Maybe it would be better if they were hidden, if you would prefer to avoid dissenting voices?

As stated upthread, i called out posts that I thought were offensive, and reported them. I wasn't aware it was possible to report whole threads, but others have now explained this is possible.

Not clear how I've shrugged my shoulders?

I didn’t see the threads. If I had, I would have reported them, if they were as you describe.

be aware though, that you’re not allowed to say you’ve reported a thread as that counts as troll hunting, so you won’t know whether regulars have or have not reported a thread.

You saw an objectionable thread and you didn’t report it. You complained that it was up for too long. “That house was burning down and nobody called the fire brigade! Nobody called the fire brigade for ages!”

Sometimes I see threads and posts I don’t agree with.

Sometimes I see posts on Mumsnet that “go too far”.

Sometimes I am personally offended by what people write.

I remind myself that in an open society nobody has the right not to be offended or upset by what other people write.

Beautifully put 👏

So why didn’t you report them at the time instead of avidly reading each post?

What a bizarre, irrelevant reply

You keep sticking up for transphobia.

"confidently assert there's no transphobia on Mumsnet."

There is also a difference between transphobic content being posted and then deleted on Mumsnet, in which case the moderation team will remove it and accusations that then rely on that content being made to make a generalised negative statement about a forum or a board on a forum. Or indeed a group of posters that you disagree with.

Does content that then gets deleted get posted on MN for many reasons, including transphobia? yes. Of course it does. Has anyone denied that it will sometimes get posted?

Does that make MN a place where transphobia is generally posted? Not really. Very few posts on MN are deleted in general, and even fewer for being transphobic, I would estimate. It is therefore a negative generalisation that is relying on a catastrophisation, a cognitive distortion to make sound credible.

When the claim is then made by someone who perhaps has made judgements based on their personal very low standard for hateful posting behaviour that may not be considered reasonable by the wider population, there is a great deal of room to doubt negative generalised statements about a group of people that the accuser clearly has an issue with.

Sticking up for the rights of women and girls is not transphobic.

"avidly reading" 😂
Great use of language there to try and paint a picture of someone just.... reading MN threads like people tend to do. 😕

But targeting and mocking individual private trans people, who are just going about their lives, is.

The only point I've tried to make is that this practice is toxic and drags PPs down to the level of some of the trans rights types.

But I've been repeatedly told it doesn't happen.

As far as Aida goes, a lot of places and people scrape data from all manner of websites. It's usually against ToCs but it's done anyway. I think it is worth reminding everyone that any social media, MN and everywhere else, is effectively a public arena. Anyone can view or scrape anything publicly posted.
I think it's a strange, obsessive little project for him but ultimately, I suppose will keep him occupied.
If he genuinely wanted to understand MN, then posting here and talking to posters in good faith would be the best place to start but as we've seen from his actual posts, good faith is nowhere to be found.
I imagine his project will have exactly the same blindspots.

Well no, if I see. Thread that horrible I’d report and not read on. You appear to have read every post to the extent of recognising the user names. Shame on you.

Are you seriously suggesting it's 'shameful' to read and try to understand viewpoints we disagree with?

IIRC, one of the objections raised at the time of the Aston data scrapes (more than one), was that the stated objective was to analyse linguistics. The fear was that they could build a model that would characterise individual users posting styles and track them across name changes. Indeed track them across the whole of MN. This could then be misused to dox individual posters, even if they have shared snippets of their life across different boards and different usernames.

It sounds very much like this is what AidaP is doing. It’s a valid fear because we know that plenty of women have faced discrimination, harassment, bullying and even losing their jobs, simply for expressing the basic fact that human beings cannot change sex. We watch the resulting tribunals, we know.

If a male person is using female single sex provisions, that is not someone just going about with their lives. If a male person is also then participating in sports, organisations, events and programmes that have been designated as being for female people, that is not someone just going about with their lives either.

If a male person also posts content on publicly accessible sites that describe them doing the above or behaving in intimidating ways to enforce acceptance of him doing the above, that is also not just going about their lives either.

Those male people's behaviour and actions are open to discussion because they are acting in ways that cause potential harm to female people.

I’m sticking up for people’s ability to voice opinions that you don’t like.

you can label things how you like, but I’ll also stick up for your ability to say that “I’m sticking up for transphobia”. And anything else you want to say.

Some people would benefit from thicker skins.

Fine, we can agree on that.

And I'm sticking up for the rights of private trans people to go about their everyday lives without fear of harassment.

Can we agree on that?

I'd not give this person any headspace.

If a thread is so hateful that it’s delayed deletion is an issue, how can it also be worth reading to try to understand what we don’t agree with?

Some people would benefit from thicker skins

Giving big "It's only banter, what, can't you take a joke love?" energy there.
The pp has been referencing the sports runner that was torn apart for "being trans" and her looks when she wasn't at all.
Should she have had a "thicker skin?"

I don’t think threads on Mumsnet prevent people from going about their everyday lives without fear of harassment.

"And I'm sticking up for the rights of private trans people to go about their everyday lives without fear of harassment."

Would you like to clarify what 'go about their everyday lives' means?

Does this mean that they only ever use an alternative solution and not the female single sex provision, if they are male and reject using a male single sex provision? Including sport and any event, role etc.

Do this mean that they are not posting content or leading any discussion about how they should be treated as being female when sex matters?

Because having to have that very carefully clarified is necessary because there is a considerable difference in terminology and language and expectations here.