The MNHQ Moderation team

[BarrackerBarmer]

Dear MNHQ

I'm very grateful for the commitment to free speech you've publicly taken, and for Justine's courage this week.

A former disgruntled employee of MN is writing on Twitter about the 'transphobia' of MN staff, and calling you TERFs. She is showing a great deal of bias and intolerance towards women with feminist views, this may well be her honest opinion, which is no big deal I suppose, since she is no longer an employee.

At least, it isn't an issue until she calls a shout out to her
'friends who still work at MN' to report and take down posts by 'transphobic scum', by which she appears to be referring to any poster objecting to being called TERF by her friend.

Regardless of the personal views of the MNHQ staff, who should be as free to hold their own views as I am mine, I am disturbed that there may be a small contingent of employees who are invested in unfair moderation and will not be applying fair-handed principles, at least if the claims of this ex-employee are credible.

Can you please give posters some reassurance that the difficult job of fair-handed moderation isn't being abused by the 'friends' of ex-employees who are 'reporting it all' and taking down posts because any gender criticism means the poster is 'transphobic scum'?

Thank you.

There's a TRA on there now trying to reframe what she did as legitimate journalism, protected by law.

I didn’t suggest I had or that others should do so, FloraFox. I do suggest MNHQ does so at an appropriate time. Unless they are worried about what they might hear. So far there’s been a lot of minimising (she made a ‘mistake’) and untruth (that her Twitter has been deleted) and not much else.

Saucery I was responding to your two comments complaining that MNHQ have not yet informed the ICO. It's too early for that.

I've got all her screenshots Sauc. Took them last night.

If MNHQ does not block access to gmail.com or other email services from their work intranet then that is very lax.

She didn't "mistakenly" take multiple screenshots, then "mistakenly" publish them alongside thinly veiled threats of outing people to cause them harm

Well quite.
And as these are not hidden posts there is no whistle blowing here.
If it was a mistake then it also cannot constitute journalism.

So which line does she go with.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if anything legal comes after Emma then her TRA friends will scatter apart from a feeble attempt at raising £3.67.

Saucery I was responding to your two comments complaining that MNHQ have not yet informed the ICO. It's too early for that.

I understood from the form (I linked a few pages back) that you had to inform the minute you were aware of the data breach.

I agree with the crowdfunding idea. I think it has to be pursued in court.

I'd missed that safeguarding post on the LGBTLD twitter account, it's bang on the money. I used to work with kids and I've had safeguarding training. The one thing you never do is promise confidentiality. You never do this. You don't know what a child will disclose to you, they could talk to you about sexual abuse, witnessing domestic abuse in the home, literally anything. If you've promised confidentiality and then break it then what will the impact be on the child? The child has opened up to you, they trust you and then you violate their trust because you've had to break a promise you should never have made in the first place.

*This Form is in two sections. Section 1 covers the initial information which must be notified to this Office in respect of a data security breach, and Section 2 requests more detailed further information.

A first notification must be made to this Office on this form no later than 24 hours after the first detection of the data breach.*

If MNHQ does not block access to gmail.com or other email services from their work intranet then that is very lax.

It's also extremely common. MN posters are I suspect disproportionately likely to work for public sector or large corporate, where such policies are common. Outside those environments, they are extremely unusual. I'd be surprised if more than one in ten dot.com start up companies have such policies; certainly, I go into a lot of them and I rarely see such policies.

And if you're worried about people screen-shotting confidential images from devices logged in to internal systems, can I just say "BYOD" and then run and hide while the fight breaks out?

Congratulations on making yourself unemployable!

I'm torn.

The idea that somebody could work at Mumsnet for 6 months and be under the impression that it's fine to post IP addresses doesn't pass the smell test.

On the other hand, if she thought she was a whistle blower, what did she think she was revealing - all unmoderated posts are available on the website - it's like going undercover to report on somebody's public Facebook page.

Mumsnet, maybe you need to think about attracting a better standard of intern? Are you paying them?

It's possible MN have records of every single screen shot taken on every single device on the premises or connected via VPN over the past nine months. But it's highly unlikely. It's even more unlikely that they have records of what the screen shots contained.

This.

The trouble is, the harder you lock down an environment, the harder it is for people to do their jobs (speaking as someone who was once asked to remote desktop, via a VPN, to computers half way around the world in order to do my job, where any cutting and pasting was logged, where internet access was cut off, and emails monitored for any amount of source code).

The hilarious (!?) thing being, it would actually have been easier for me to steal code by photographing it, than do the job they were paying me to do.

You often have to have an element of trust in your employees, and the trouble is that employees can make poor, and illegal choices - like this one.

The unhappy lot of handmaidens everywhere - they end up in the shit.

I have no sympathy for her. Planned in advance. Some people just don't have functioning brains, and are unable to risk-assess.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

You called?

(all unmoderated posts, as in the ones that haven't been removed - does that make them moderated or unmoderated?)

This is like the 'Moldies' Xmas.

The children are running feral and having sandwiches and hula hoops for tea, while I refresh ... refresh ... refresh

'Moddies', maybe.

Just what Justine wanted, not.

You called?

Emma Healey says on her blog that from March she will be working "in campaigns for a national lobbying organisation

We know where that is, and I sincerely hope no-one does inform them from here because that would be a pretty nasty thing to do. She is already in the shit, and I see no need to make it personal and instigate a pile on of her either personally or professionally.

oh Emma you silky, silly person. Breaching a nda is no small matter. Hope MN throw the book at her. Not to mention the timing. With GDPR coming in imminently theyll have to be seen to vigorously plug this leak. Silly, silly thing to do. That nice linkedin profile will be worthless after this.