The MNHQ Moderation Team: Thread 2

[BarrackerBarmer]

Follow on thread regarding the data breach situation:
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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.

@beyond in answer to your questions, those things specifically I'm not sure about. I know deleted posts on threads and name changes could be seen. And others are asking if there is any data protection or ethics training - no, not to my knowledge. I didn't receive any.

Someone probably should make a thread clarifying that this isn't Emma Healey the author or else I can see a lot of people hassling her on twitter.

This thread is moving so fast that I haven't time to read anything. So further to my post at about 7.30 this morning (I am going to bold it).

The kinds of men who annihilate their families or kill their partners for leaving them as a pattern of abuse and total control are extremely obsessive and the only time their ex-family is truly safe from them is when they are locked up behind bars or dead.

These men are willing to play the long game. They would be very interested in eroding laws that prevent them working for a DV charity and getting access to information on where DV shelters are located. They would be very supportive of TRAs forcing DV services to accept male volunteers and employees.

These men would quite happily do volunteer work or become part of an LGBT scene to 'befriend' young traitors to women with more energy than sense like Emma Healey

They would happily encourage her to intern for MN, to get insider info on user name changes and ip addresses or whatever else. If they got the ip / appoximate whereabouts of a user they presume to be their former partner - they would quite happily wait at the school gates every morning until they see their ex and kids and are able to follow them home.

A young 20 something like Emma Healey with openly antifeminist views is not suitable to intern where she has access to info about women fleeing DV. All staff should have training in protecting families as though they are working in a refuge.

Please say you will make this a top priority @JustineMumsnet* because this is more important than any other security concern in my opinion.*

Thanks

Trumpdump politics apparently and according to her FB page she owns a fuckload of books though personally I'm not sure she's bright enough to read any of them.

Hope we get a proper legal response from MN today - Justine's responses last night were dreadful, I appreciate she's had a rubbish week, is under a lot of pressure and was trying to reassure people but I think she's made the situation worse with the comments she's made. The police and ICO HAVE to be informed because they are the only ones with the authority to trawl through EH's computer/phone/SM and see what information she holds on any of us. My worry is that if MN only changed their protocols last month the horse had already bolted and maybe she has all our emails - does anyone know if you can use emails to search for a FB profile?

And this isn't just about the trans issue. She's a Labour fanatic, has she handed email details to Momentum?

Of course it was all deliberate, why else would there be a veiled threat about having friends still working at MN.

Anyway I'm not going anywhere, MNers have given me so much help and support over the years (thank you especially to those on the sec ed board who helped all of us with allocation nightmares - you stopped me going insane that horrible night).

If part of the issue here is that Emma has some sort of personal connection to a staff member and was hired for that reason that's a pretty good illustration of why nepotism in the workplace is a bad thing and should be discouraged, imo.

Oh another question, to the people here who know about data protection law - if mn accept Emma's apology and decide no further action is required at their end (as things are being changed because of the GDPR anyway) so don't report to the ICO, but then a person whose data was leaked suffers some sort of negative consequence, are mn then liable? If I had to hazard a guess, I'd guess they were, which makes me confused as to why a business would do the absolute minimum here rather than go potentially a little OTT but protect themselves?

Oh and yes it's a completely different Emma Healey. I feel really sorry for the author she must be wondering why the hell her name is getting so many hits. On the upside, I quite like the sound of her books and might get one so perhaps she'll get some benefit?

With email and IP addresses, you can often track people down.

When I was a moderator, we had to actively click a link for the IP address - it wasn't automatically posted on screen. Same with email - you had to go look or it. We used to use them to decide if the person was a likely spammer.

@RefuseToDenounceBiology Excellent post.

“On the upside, I quite like the sound of her books and might get one so perhaps she'll get some benefit?”

Mmm! They do look good
Looks like the other Emma has promoted a stranger’s career while simultaneously trashing her own.

Could someone with knowledge of GDPR tell me whether a poster could demand MN delete their entire posting history and still be refused, as per powerofattorney's post upthread?

Yes. Oh the irony......

This has been a real eye opener for me and made me realise I need to take much more responsibility for protecting my own data.

I set up my Mumsnet account using my email address which contains my name. It's the same email address I use for Facebook and pretty much everything else.

Today I've learnt that MN staff, who have access to all my posts on here, some concerning highly personal information about my experience of DV and abortion, don't appear to receive any training on data protection.

@Johnnyfinland are you able to tell us if all moderators and PR employees have access to all of our email addresses, etc?

powerofattorney's post is one of the most disturbing things in this thread. Why was she refused? For what purpose? PP who said that it's not hard to do were right, it's really not, so either MN has the most incompetent tech dept of all time or refusing is policy for some unknown reason.

@violet, moderators yes I would assume had all those privileges. PR staff, I don't know. I wasn't a moderator or on the PR team and I could see the data. As I said, there may well have been a clause in the employment contract about confidentiality and I would assume there was as it's standard for most employment contracts, but I didn't read it through thoroughly

So utterly pissed off that this woman thinks she has the right to doxx people who don't agree with her. Data protection is very complicated in legal terms but surely what's been done by her is a criminal offence? No sympathy from me either, I hope she really struggles to get a job, what an idiot! I haven't read the other thread, what have Mumsnet hq said they are going to do about it?

It seems there have been quite varied experiences. I had a problem with my exH a couple of years ago. MNHQ were really helpful working out with me what posts/threads needed to be deleted. I found them very reassuring at the time. lt felt like they cared, or at least cared about doing their job well.
I'm not disagreeing with pp, sounds like it hasn't been consistent.

A lot of people work in organisations where they don't agree with all policies but they manage not to leak information and endanger others.

This!

I once consulted on an IT project where the client management positively insisted that access restrictions be as loose as humanly possible without being in breach of legislation. Despite me counselling them against it repeatedly and us forcing them to sign various acknowledgements that they were insisting on us going with this design against our best professional judgment, they went ahead. They've never had a breach in the 5 years that the system in question has been running and have only very recently and grudgingly agreed to tighter restrictions due to changed in legislation. And while I still disagree with their stance, I can see why:

A case like this is not primarily about IT security but about deliberate misuse of data that the person in question had access to as part of her job. Yes, it is technically feasible to implement extremely tight IT security. Organisations such as banks, transportation infrastructure operators and security services resort to them. But it hampers employees' ability to work as efficiently as possible. Therefore, restrictive IT security measures are always a trade off.

My ex client never had a breach because their staff never decided to maliciously use the data that, IMO, they shouldn't have had access to. MN has had one because this person did.

We're not talking unauthorised access here but abuse of authorised access.

A place mark for updates.