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.

That’s fair comment @MargeH

Red's DH here:

All aside Mumsnet should be monitoring for data loss. That means either unusual access from personal computers (the team that this person was on should only have access from internal machines, access from home machines should have been flagged). If these screenshots were saved to Mumsnet computers then they would have had to be removed.

Mumsnet should contact the police because they cannot guarantee what data has been stolen or copied elsewhere and how.

The business procedure for data loss is to assume worse case scenario until it can be proven otherwise.

If it were my responsibility for the data I'd be checking laptops (including a request to her new employer to ensure she's not posted this from their equipment), phones, cameras, thumb drives. All of which will have to be securely wiped - this is easiest done by destruction. There's also the case of the person in question opening up all their personal accounts to investigation to ensure that personal data that Mumsnet held hasn't been proliferated.

@JustineMumsnet saying she trusts the person in question not to do any more damage isn't good enough, and a step below what Mumsnet users can rightfully expect.

The author is certainly in breach of the computer misuse act, the private data leaked holds no benefit to being public as an act of whistleblowing.

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1990/18/section/1
Unauthorised access to computer material.
(1)
A person is guilty of an offence if—
(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer [, or to enable any such access to be secured] ;
(b) the access he intends to secure [, or to enable to be secured,] is unauthorised; and
(c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
(2) The intent a person has to have to commit an offence under this section need not be directed at—
(a) any particular program or data;
(b) a program or data of any particular kind; or
(c) a program or data held in any particular computer.
(3)
A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable—
(a) on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;
(b) on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;
(c) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or to a fine or to both.]

Yes Rufus I'm actually quite worried for her...

I think that she genuinely thinks she is a heroine for this and will be inundated with offers of work.

Even if they supported her viewpoint on trans issues surely any employer would also think 'cannot be trusted and shows very poor judgement'.

I looked up my IP address, and was given a list of different IP-looker-uppers, and was quite surprised to see that one identified the suburb I live in.

She's not trustworthy and quite vindictive. Now unemployable which is a shame because up until today her CV was amazing.

@Juells

Red's DH still.

Usually the IP range refers to the nearest telephone exchange (or however cable works) to make routing easier.

Yeah we have dealt with way worse than this before and Justine is an old hand at dealing with on line terrorism. All Emma Healy is doing is ensuring long term unemployability - total own goal.

HQ - if that non disclosure agreement is not in staff contracts yet then you surprise me...

@MNHQ @JustineMumsnet and I'll report my post for good measure...

That TA/Mermaid idiot Helen (@Mimmymum) is tweeting the threadreader and blog post to all the "Mumsnet Rated" advertisers. She is retweeting the LGBT and LimDems account who is in turn retweeting the original post by Emma Healey.

Seriously, you need to call the police. Now.

Oh FFS, now India Willoughby has stuck her shouty OAR in... publicly having a go at Mummybear!! And the whole section 28 thing. Oh dear, this is all being taken so far out of context that it is laughable.

Some people may be members of MumsNet and CAMRA. They have a perfect right to contact CAMRA and insist that they don't want Healey anywhere near their information.

mummybear's post was clearly sarcastic, how was this person ever given the responsibility of moderating when lacking basic skills.

It seems on Twitter some TRAs are vilifying her for working for MN as much as others are vilifying her for sharing data.

I imagine she has a very sweaty arse right now. I hope she has good friends and family around her, she's going to be needing them.

Some of the people crowing about this should be causing red flags with their employers and affiliates.

Some of them strike me as unemployable, hence the constant begging tweets linking to Patreon accounts and so on. Others appear to make a living from consultancy on trans issues.

Re problems with the education system - yes, agree. Is it the effect of growing up with social media?

Another one feeling for Mummybear - this is ridiculous. Can no one read out there

I would suggest anyone on twitter report any tweets with the threadreader data as it contains identifiable personal information.

Can no one read out there

What does the weight of evidence suggest?

Does mummybear know about all of this? She must be so upset, I know I would be!

Well done INDIA et al, for throwing out the baby with the bath water!

You really do not read these threads at all do you? You just see deliberatly out of context snippets on twitter and assume Transphobia instantly. Ridiculous.

I'm blocked from mimmymum and india

can someone dm me screenshots?

Ha ha, will be fun watching them try to take on Justine

"Mumsnet is Finished", my hairy fanny!

catgirl

ExltEveDallas, you beat me to it, mimmymum and Giuliana are frothing at this, they are absolutely giddy with excitement.

Hi all,
There are an awful lot of questions on this thread so I think it's best to address the substantive risks first. It's worth you knowing that Emma has apologised wholeheartedly to a member of our team for her actions and confirmed that the publishing of IPs was accidental and, though she did have access to user data for a time, I don't think there's any significant risk of a further breach.

Nonetheless we are naturally making it crystal clear that any data she might hold needs to be deleted immediately and any further breach would lead to legal action on our part.

We are not planning on reporting the IP leak to the ICO because as we understand it IP addresses do not count as personal data.

We have taken a number of steps to reduce staff access to user data during the last 6 months and to make sure we hold the minimum we need to run the business, in response to forthcoming gdpr legislation and we are very confident we will be compliant. However we will absolutely be reviewing our procedures to see what we can do better as a result of what's happened today - for instance we'll be removing ip addresses from admin views of Talk posts in the next few days.

I absolutely do not believe any current members of staff are "part of an inside job" to harvest data or cause any harm to users. I think Emma's tweets about how she was going to (to paraphrase) get mods to delete stuff on her behalf were poorly expressed and slight aggrandising.

We do have some members of our team who have occasionally expressed some concern that Mumsnet could be perceived to be sympathetic to people who are transphobic, which is a concern I think we can all share, while standing firmly behind our commitment to freedom to debate the issues. Tbh we welcome this feedback and are keen to make sure all the team here are able to raise their concerns about any aspect of working at Mumsnet.

I'm really sorry this happened and for any concern it's understandably caused but, in short, I really don't believe it's going to put any users or their data at risk.

they are absolutely giddy with excitement

Is potentially having broken the law considered some sort of exciting success?

Thanks Lady

This is just insane.

I haven't seen a s28 thread. I assume it didn't exist or if it did got taken down immediately (and if it existed was put up by TRAs trying to paint MN as bigoted)