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.

I would presume IT or law.

Soft-option humanities, "politics" or something. Essentially, SJW plus an essay per term.

I didn’t read Justines comments to mean they were just letting her off with a slap on the wrists, more that she wasn’t going to leak anymore.

Going slightly off topic here but all this “kerb stomp a TERF”, “fuck up a TERF” etc. talk from TRAs, which is being essentially ignored by the authorities/organisations, reminds me of the situation we hear all too often of an individual female being ignored by the police when reporting harassment by a stalker or ex partner, for them only to stand up and take notice when the woman has been brutally attacked or killed

^^ This! The TRA are using textbook abusive tactics, i think that’s why so many young women are drawn in.

Wow. That's Emma's future career in tatters

Maybe somewhere like Cambridge Analytica will want her...

Part of me feels absolute rage, that once again, women who were warning about women being seriously harmed by these awful people

This x infinity - not just on MN but everywhere. Women are ignored.

When someone has a solution for discharging the rage - let me know - it's seems bottomless……no wonder Inanna destroyed parts of the world when she came back from the underworld as an integrated woman - she could see all the corruption and that it needed to go

I agree with Melamin: only those four posts - all publicly available - have been posted. Whatever her claims, I suspect Emma actually doesn’t have anything else because, as an intern, she didn’t have as much access set up on her account as a moderator would have done.

That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be investigated thoroughly, though.

As for employing a woman sympathing with Trans Activists, well doesn’t that just blow out the claims that MN is a seething pit of transphobes?
MN evidently employs people with a wide range of personal views. That’s not a problem for open debate.
The problem is that this silly woman has been unable to separate personal opinion from work responsibilities.

I’m more than happy for TRAs to advertise the fact that people with Trans rights sympathies have been employed by MN. It proves their claims are a pack of lies.

I felt the comments yesterday from Justine were along the lines of hold tight till we take a proper look at this...I have faith that the right things are happening behind the scenes right now. Until I hear otherwise 😂

I think the female allies know very well how dangerous male TRAs can be

Oh, the irony! (And yes, what cognitive dissonance must be required).

We live in frightening times. Misogyny is running free in the Labour Party - Antifa beardy guys are writing songs about smashing women's teeth in with bricks - and that's all ok because they use the word 'terf'.

And our personal data is leaked - leaked to people who sing about smashing our teeth in with bricks.

But I won't stop posting on mumsnet.

We have absolutely no idea what she has shared privately.
"That's Emma's future career in tatters". I hope so as she can't be trusted with any kind of sensitive data. Or understand employment contracts.

'So, set up an email address on Gmail that has no identifying detail and use a fake first name. '

Tbh while it's not that helpful now but for future reference I would advise anyone to do this. I've never used my real name or email address for chat forums. Tech stuff can go wrong even without someone leaking personal data.

Hey ho. I'm off to my exercise class now - hopefully nobody will kerb-stomp me on the way, you know, just for my opinion on the need to preserve women's rights.

Laters.

Christ on a bike. This is terrible.

MN HQ can ask questions at interview designed to weed out male supremacists (or whoever else is antithetical to the interests of the site’s users) but that’s all they can do at interview. You could never stop a determined infiltrator. It would also be illegal to probe that much into personal politics. If my employers started asking me if I was gender critical I would tell them to MYOB.

MN definitely ARE a target specifically for TRAs, though, and should be looking st open social media profiles of applicants. (Which they may have done- who knows)

all organisations need to take universal precautions, eg :
data protection training for everyone on staff, minimal staff exposure to personal data/need to know access, legal agreements between worker and organisation about data use and abuse, and clear actions to follow after a breach including reporting to all of the relevant authorities.

I have a few more questions...

A former employer stated upthread that sign up info is available to any mn admin. I don't have a problem with that necessarily, but just wanted to check - if I have changed from the info I signed up with to something less outing (say "Jane smith" and "[email protected]" to "Jane" and "[email protected]"), are both visible to you, or can you only see the updated one?

And with PMs, a few people have sent real names or addresses to one another. After Jeffery we were advised to delete anything like that in case of a breach, but can MNHQ see deleted PMs?

Then last one... I'm a product tester with the insight team. Assuming (hopefully!) the answer to the above two posts is that admin can't see my old/deleted data, are they able to access the insight team data?

I'm actually "out" in my real name so the TRA comeback isn't a massive concern in my case, but there is a lot of sensitive info on my mn posts over the past nine years that I'd rather not have linked to my real (quite uncommon) name.

Creative Writing AFAICR. Mumsnet heavily promoted her book

There is an Emma Healey who is a novelist and she very definitely isn't the one we are talking about. The novelist is a mature 33yr old.

Careful - some seem to be assuming that this Emma Healey is the author of Elizabeth is Missing . I think they're two completely different people, aren't they? Can't find it now, but saw a reference to the author being in her 30s.

Xpost!

Slagging off her previous employer publically, whom presumably she might have expected to give her a reference, was particularly stupid, imo.

Maybe she's looking for notoriety to advance her career ...but she would do well to read up on Toby Young and others, and how their misguided youthful comments came back to haunt them.

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. If MNHQ staffers have access to IP addresses it doesn't really help whatever fake email accounts we use.

okMaybeIAmATERF Xpost! Doesn't hurt to say it more than once!

I deleted my account as a result of this - something I am completely regretting now as I've lost my history. I started a new one (obviously) but I clearly found this debacle worrying enough. Now I'm just furious about TRA tactics.