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.

Thanks for the update, Justine.

You also need to have a look round staff for Emma's friends that she boasts about, who are feeding her information from the inside about your users, she says.

It's a great pity that this has happened in the week that you have stood up for the users here, it really is. Good luck dealing with it, it's not pleasant, and won't be easy.

Ooh, I miss injunctions.

I imagine her pc, devices and data storage will be seized very shortly.

she will find it difficult to keep her existing job, or get another , don't you think?

Seems she just shat away her entire future

Sadly, it is Mumsnet who will have to bear the swinging fine I suspect

Hang on, hang on MN. Her Twitter account is not deactivated it's locked down. Added to that her friends are retweeting the unwrap with all the details still visible. Sorry, this is not good enough.

The fact that this individual had screenshot stuff and taken it with her suggests there was always an intention to do something with it. Or it has already been used elsewhere / forwarded to other people. This isn't a spur of the moment thing.

I am also concerned about the "friends" at HQ and what information might still be being shared

All of this. @JustineMumsnet will you be talking to her friends here about this? This seems like at the least the interns could do with better training around data protection. At worst you may have other people here that cannot be trusted.

Some of Emma's mates are tweeting the unrolled thread which still has the user names & ip addresses

And this is the massive problem. And a potential data protection breach of quite a large scale.

Really Justine? Surely, if she is of sound character as you suggest she wouldn't have taken those screen shots in the first place?
This is a very valid point. The posting of screenshots with private information may have been a mistake, but taking screenshots as a moderator, hanging onto them for months and then tweeting them does go beyond what could be reasonably construed as an 'accident'.

I think it's somewhat naive to think you can know someone who has been with your company for a short period of time well enough to be confident of their future actions.

Re tweet about justine and no platforming, I bet thats twisting it. I was taught on my media degree to beware of censorship because its always down to who makes the decisions. Justine could easily have been making the point that no platforming decisions come back to who is making decisions and you should always be mindful of that if you believe in free speech.

As for IP addresses, many are dynamic. If you switch off your router and switch it back on again your computer gets allocated a new IP. (BT works like this) You are often allocated new IPs on a regular basis, so your IP two months ago might not be the one you are currently on anyway. This isn't always the case but its certainly true for many providers.

The users whose IP addresses were screenshotted are on those type of IPs. They can not be traced by that alone. Anyone trying to dox would have to have additional information.

It remains to be seen what other information has been removed from the site and saved and for whom, which isn't on twitter though. I personally have given MNHQ my address in good faith before. Forum privileges usually have different security levels. MNHQ will have access to PMs (you can report PMs so its definitely possible) but this might not be open to every admin. I would advise people to be wary of what they send in PMs especially to users you are unfamiliar with.

I am not impressed at this.

Bloody hell!
What a week, eh, Justine

she's now deleted her Twitter account

She hasn't. It's gone protected, which means all her friends can still see all the postings she has made, while outsiders cannot see what has and has not been removed.

She has had this information a while. Is there more? What has she been doing with it meantime?

In her Website she says she's moved on to a lobbying org. That immediately rang alarm bells, but the fact that it is just The Campaign for Real Ales is reassuring... I think. That's why I linked.

Given what she's said on Twitter about this being a mistake and that she's now deleted her Twitter account

A "mistake" is putting sugar in my tea instead of OH's.

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

Cat's out of the bag love, you can't go deleting your Twitter now, your friends are keeping your flame alive anyway. You've learnt a hard but well deserved lesson the hard but well deserved way.

As far as I can see she hasn’t deleted her Twitter account. She’s merely protected her tweets.

What she has done is a serious breach of data protection. I don’t care how strong someone’s beliefs are or how beyond the pale some posts on here are, it’s never an excuse for such horrifically unprofessional behaviour. I hope her current employers have been made aware of how unsuited this person is to have any access to personal data.

I take it she won't be asking MN for a reference.

For a group who are allegedly on the side of light and good, when there's a chance to do something objectively shitty and nasty, they leap straight in to it. Funny that.

@ScrambledSmegs

As far as I can see she hasn’t deleted her Twitter account. She’s merely protected her tweets.

Sorry you're right Scrambled - my mistake