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.

I do however expect the mods to um... moderate and not sit there for 6 months pilfering through the user info sending it home to themselves to pass to very militant pressure groups.

This

Hang on, so the individual who posted a message, criticising us and detailing members IP addresses, and did so USING HER REAL NAME, is now accusing us of doxing her?

Bless her cotton socks, she's not presenting as much of a thinker.

Well. So what's to stop another TRA taking data home from work for their own purposes? I have no idea how this can have happened. It shouldn't be possible if proper processes are in place. Data protection is not a matter of simply trusting people not to do this. It looks like she was simply able to email herself or use a data stick?

@Goldenbug can you link to posts/threads which have done this? Specifically.

Goldenbug - I don't see how, people are just discussing opinions on mumsnet.

People say far worse - genuinely violent, hateful things - on all sorts of platform like twitter, Facebook etc about all types of groups of people, and I'be never heard of a tribunal for moderating it?

I worked somewhere where a previous employee used the company mailing list to contact clients after she left. She was prosecuted, I believe.

What about the friends she is claiming to have on the inside?

Indeed. They may be scrambling to collect as much information as they can at this very moment

Allegedly.

Or something.

Is she really accusing MNers of doxxing her?
She published this under her real name, her other accounts are public and in her real name.
MN removed the posts not because she was doxxed but because we aren’t going to sink the same level. Not that we can, we as it stands are in a puddle, she is at the bottom of the ocean.

Where is she claiming to have been doxxed? On her private twitter?

@Goldenbug it's is just my understanding that the majority of folk using the feminist boards have got a handle of "trans" meaning an umbrella term which included people with gender dysmorphia and separately gender dysphoria, who are different again to cross dressers and people who cross dress for fetish reasons, AGP, and so on, so on.

So the transgender mod hopefully would understand that people are not talking about trans as a homogeneous blob.

Fuck.

We need to know exactly what info she had access to.

Goldenbug, as far as any regular poster knows, trans people are already employed by MN, and trans people post regularly on trans threads. Subjects like fetishes are discussed, hopefully respectfully, because they are relevant to the topic. Every post has a report button. You should certainly notify MN of anything that you think breaches talk guidelines.

If I was an employer and someone did this I'd be speaking to my lawyer.

It's the response that's worrying me - MNHQ should be bloody all over this and trying to find out what data's been accessed... and at least telling us they're doing that would be better than the "there there she's gone and she was only here doing this between these dates" that we got now like a toddler would get if they thought there was a nasty monster under the bed.

This. There are a large number of highly vulnerable users on here. I actually feel for Emma in that I think she's been extremely stupid and naive and will face serious consequences as a result. But this needs taking extremely seriously for users to have trust in MN. You do not mess around with peoples' data when a previous MNer has had a SWAT team turn up at their address.

What can you do with someone's IP address?

You can tell roughly where they are. And it’s ‘potentially identifiable information’. Under the new GDPR rules that come in in May, this is a no no because in conjunction with other info it can be potentially identifing.

So for example:
I need you to find Jane Smith

Maybe you get a list of hundreds. Damn.

Ok so now one more piece of info. She has a corgi: thousands of corgi owners, that in itself isn’t identifying but now were are looking for Jane Smith, corgi owner. Bit easier.

Now add one more thing, say she is a customer of VetsRUs in Dunfermline.

Bingo, we can identify Jane, even though not a single piece of the info we were given is identifying in and of itself.

What’s more worrying is access to email addresses and user details. If as an admin she’s had that, mined it and fled, that’s a biggie.

I’m a regular in here but I’ve set up a new account with a different email in the wake of this.

She wasn't doxxed. Her information was publicly available and it took only a quick google to find. I saved it all last night, along with the screenshots I took of the tweets.

Tweeting user screenshots from a moderation screen reserved for MN Admin/Mods, with IP data is quite another issue. It IS breech of data laws. As well as theft, I would imagine, and other legal 'oopsadaisies'.

It might well not be Marquis of Queensberry to post her publicly available data, but meh, how many fucks did she give when she screenshotted and saved fuck only knows how much data illegally

But yeh, those fucking TERFs

From Mumsnets privacy policy .....

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical and electronic procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.

Seems the procedures aren't quite up to snuff to say the least.

There is literally no way she has any defence under the journalism exemption, or as a whistleblower.

This is a straight up data protection issue. I work with sensitive data every day and would be immediately escorted from the building (and of course fired) if I’d done this. It’s shocking.

My concern now is not what Emma herself will do (she’ll have had the fright of her life over this), but who her friends on the mod team are, whether they are involved, and who outside of MN Emma may have passed information to.

For all we know she (or others on the mod team) could have made lists of user names and email addresses and passed them on to TRAs. Many of these activist groups seem to be young, reckless and dangerously ill-informed about data protection (particularly the GDPR).

This must be investigated.

Section 55(1) DPA unlawful obtaining etc of personal data.

It is an offence to knowingly or recklessly obtain, disclose or procure the disclosure of personal information without the consent of the data controller.

This offence can of course be committed in many different ways, such as “hacking” or “blagging”. An employee of a data controller can access an information database and obtain an individuals name, address and telephone number, for example. There have been cases in which an employee has obtained such information and disclosed it to a third party for their own purposes.

Criminal offence.

What about the friends she is claiming to have on the inside?

They'll be at risk of losing their jobs I'd imagine, as well as anyone else caught up. The thing is, they'll likely need to comb over everyone's digital footprint to find out who else is involved & there will be some poor sod having done the something completely unrelated or some other misdemeanours that'll be scooped up in the fall out.

I suspect she's not really thought this through.

What's threadreader.app? There are a whole lot of screenshots in there. Maybe a copy of what was originally posted by EH?