The MNHQ Moderation Team: Thread 2

[BarrackerBarmer]

Follow on thread regarding the data breach situation:
___

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.

At the very least MN needs to contact all users by email whose IP addresses have already been published and in some cases shared through Emma's actions.

@Mn & Justine, will you be able to do this?

Nothing more to add this morning except:

I'm going nowhere.
I'm deleting nothing.
I stand behind everything that I've said here.
I'm not afraid.

So nanny nanny boo boos, Friends of Emma. You don't scare me.

(am not minimising the fears of anyone who thinks differently, by the way. They are very real for some people, as JeanHatchet so eloquently illustrated on the last thread, and my heart goes out to you in a worrying time).

My concern now is Emma has stated she has friends with similar beliefs still in MNHQ... this leaking of data might not be the end of it

Also Emma will probably find herself without employment and she and her TRA friends will use this as 'evidence' of us 'terfs' bullying a person out of their job.

Christ on a bike this is a fucking mess

Justine's response is farcical and she is massively downplaying this.

However, I'm not sure how MNHQ could moderate of things like IP addresses, copy and pasting, and name changes etc were hidden or disabled.

Can anyone shed some light?

If things*

Anyone know if this is malicious? Looks like a Russian website has Mumsnet totally mirrored except changed the name mumsnet to Healthius?
kumdo.spb.ru/Talk/womens_rights

Please don’t minimise what EH has done. Don’t write it off as being a silly little girl. She was very deliberate in her attacks and was obviously referring to a dossier of data she had gathered.

I’ve just had a quick look on Twitter and the IP addresses are all over. Lib Dems LGBT and Giuliana among those tweeting them, the usual woman-hating suspects.

That's strange, the Lib Dems as party have a huge following here, their LGBT Twitter is definitely not helping that.

She wasn’t a moderator.

I know she wasn't but there are people freaking out about the personal data that MNHQ moderators have access to.

I don't feel sorry for Emma, because nobody held a gun to her head and made her do this. That being said, there's an interesting dynamic here where women are being conned into doing men's dirty work for them, and this isn't the first time we've seen it.

First they came for the...etc. What about when they come for you, female "allies"? Do you really want to have burned all your bridges with the women who you've been persuaded to betray? Be smart and stop letting yourselves be used as sticks to beat other women with.

You know what, Emma's extremist transactivist views were all over the internet before Mumsnet employed her. If they did a modicum of research, they would have known that she is attached to transactivist lunatics.

For years, feminists on the FWR boards have been telling everyone how very unethical, violent, etc. transactivists are.

Part of me feels absolute rage, that once again, women who were warning about women being seriously harmed by these awful people, were completely ignored when Mumsnet made an employment decision about staff who would have immediate access to the data of disobedient women.

We told you what these people are like. Why didn't you listen? Why are women so quick to dismiss other women's testimony? So much for #IBelieveHer. Why weren't you more cautious about giving access to our data, to someone who stands with violent men who hate us?

I feel really let down. We made Mumsnet, the women who post on here, who chat and joke and organise and buy your advertisers' products, we make your site what it is. We are the reason you are invited onto Women's Hour and Question Time and all the other media outlets you are building your careers and product on and you take no notice of us. Posters had to do long, long Spartacus threads for you to sit up and take notice that we were not going to allow male supremacists to bully us into pretending we believe men with penises are women just like us.

Why have you got so little respect for us, that you would employ someone who hangs out with male supremacists who hate us? I'm just more and more incredulous about this. If you welcome transactivists onto your staff, you really don't have the right to be surprised that they behave the way transactivists have always behaved. We've been telling you long enough.

Oh FGS Justine when something like this happens a jolly ‘she’s a very nice person and I’m sure she won’t do anything mean with the data she has, she’s just a silly billy airhead like us’ doesn’t cut it.

Report yourselves to the ICO and do whatever needs to be done to ensure users data is safe.

Mistakes happen but anything other than an honest and transparent reflective response is not acceptable. WHY is it so hard for so many organisations to understand this?

"I think it may be important to note that there are TRA's on social media right now scoffing about how funny it is that MN feminists are turning on Justine/HQ because of this."

Of course they are. But they would equally be happy to see mumsnet 'literally' up in flames. They are ghouls and liars and abusers. Don't let their opinion influence you. This is what they want.

They want to intimidate women, these Princes amongst men and the handmaidens doing their wetwork

We are adult women (mostly), educated, articulate and assertive. We have worked through issues in the past and we will do it again.

Ther have been numerous situations over the years where the users and Mumsnet/Justine went head to head over an important issue.

That's why Mumsnet is awesome and why it has lasted so long.

Because we the users and the HQ believe in robust free speech and accountability.

'A bracing exchange of views' as Battleax put it.

Free speech and accountability is still what this is all about.

The 'TRAs scoff and scorn these values. Shine the light of accountability on them and they scuffle off to their holes like coakroaches

"You know what, Emma's extremist transactivist views were all over the internet before Mumsnet employed her. If they did a modicum of research, they would have known that she is attached to transactivist lunatics.

For years, feminists on the FWR boards have been telling everyone how very unethical, violent, etc. transactivists are.

Part of me feels absolute rage, that once again, women who were warning about women being seriously harmed by these awful people, were completely ignored when Mumsnet made an employment decision about staff who would have immediate access to the data of disobedient women.

We told you what these people are like. Why didn't you listen? Why are women so quick to dismiss other women's testimony? So much for #IBelieveHer. Why weren't you more cautious about giving access to our data, to someone who stands with violent men who hate us?

I feel really let down. We made Mumsnet, the women who post on here, who chat and joke and organise and buy your advertisers' products, we make your site what it is. We are the reason you are invited onto Women's Hour and Question Time and all the other media outlets you are building your careers and product on and you take no notice of us. Posters had to do long, long Spartacus threads for you to sit up and take notice that we were not going to allow male supremacists to bully us into pretending we believe men with penises are women just like us.

Why have you got so little respect for us, that you would employ someone who hangs out with male supremacists who hate us? I'm just more and more incredulous about this. If you welcome transactivists onto your staff, you really don't have the right to be surprised that they behave the way transactivists have always behaved. We've been telling you long enough."

Yes, all of this. "I believe her", eh? Unless believing her might make me look not entirely PC, then she's a hysterical lying bigot.

Where MN went wrong is employing someone who seems to be a committed activist and giving them access to people's personal details.

All the security in the world doesn't stop someone using a pen and paper to write down details of someone's address or name.

The only thing preventing that is

a) Not giving them access to the details
b) Not hiring someone who is an activist on a site which has a reputation for talking about trans issues openly
c) Making people aware of the ramifications if they break that breach of trust and following up on that if they do that.

I think it was a genuine mistake that the posts had IP addresses on them

How can it be? If she just wanted to share the posts she could have screenshotted them at home (like any of us could) - or even just linked to the threads. She deliberately took records from when she was working within the company and considers herself to be a 'whistleblower' who has used her position to expose something she disagrees with.

The only non-publicly-available information that we know she has sneaked out is information to identify individual women. As someone who is on Twitter and obviously very involved in the transactivist debate, she surely can't have failed to see all the threats of violence, rape and murder made against women on this issue - and she has been gathering and sharing information to make these women identifiable.

She shouldn't have had those screenshots but I really don't think jobs and lives are at risk and we need to be level headed.

AFAIK, there's already one woman who has been threatened as a result of this. There's another woman who has posted in one of the threads that she and her children are in hiding from an abusive ex and identifying information could put them all at risk.

Those screenshots are unlikely to be all she has got - It seems she had full access to everything at MN including names, email addresses and IP addresses - and we don't know what information she is sharing with her little gang of followers.

That's strange, the Lib Dems as party have a huge following here, their LGBT Twitter is definitely not helping that.

Am snowed under not wanting to be dramatic but if anyone could suggest what to write in a letter to Lib den head office to explain why I will be quitting as a paying member, i would be most grateful. I want to link to the TA Lib twitter thread and say that it is unacceptable to throw women under the bus in this way. It's a cult. It may affect how women mumsnetters vote in the upcoming local election . I will think twice now.

Justine, I am sorry you are going through a horrendous time right now. It is so dismaying that your support of free speech has caused such trouble for MNHQ and MNetters.

I think you are doing a fantastic job under the circumstances.

I strongly suspect Justine’s lawyers will advice her to report this data breach.
MNHQ has no idea how much personal info Emma stole. If they do nothing other than accept an “apology”, they could be in serious trouble legally.

I am going to go against the grain here, but I do believe that Emma Healey's screenshotting on IP addresses was inadvertent. The rest of her actions were deliberately provocative, yes. But I think this is a case of stupidity mixed with maliciousness, not just malice.

"Lib Dems LGBT and Giuliana among those tweeting them, the usual woman-hating suspects."

I wonder if Liberal Democrat HQ are aware that their LGBT social media team are breaking the law?