TRA attack plans for mumsnet

[Whatevszz]

twitter.com/OnlyIndieRadio/status/1035220970053816320?s=20

Isn't the advertising host the platform on which the advertisers get to advertise. So in this case, for instance Birdseyes' advertising host is Mumsnet.

Perhaps they are talking about mumsnet's advertising host. I.e. when mumsnet advertise?

Where do they advertise?

Because, in a stupendously ironic twist, the biggest advert for mumsnet it is the transactivists. They bring women here in droves. Tens of thousands of them through the feminist boards.

Are they going after themselves?

I saw a similar tweet to this a while back and it's possible the tweeter in the OP is confusing advertisers with server hosting companies. If MN don't own their own servers they will use a company to host the data.

I'm not massively techie but I think this might be what is being alluded to.The tweet from a TRA I saw before suggested that after the GRA consultation period was over they were going to focus their collective efforts on getting the hosting company to shut MN down (assuming MN has a hosting company).

I think advertising host means the organisation which syndicates the advertising - they gather the adverts and serve them as appropriate across whichever websites. Only my guess though

I'll just c and p the same post I wrote before when TRAs tried to pressure advertisers.

Mumsnet to advertisers:

Yeah, so you know we have 12 million (largely) women on here? And last June we had an extra 15,000 visitors via FWR alone? Well a year later, month-on-month, it's increased twelvefold to 177,000. On FWR. By itself.

Advertisers: Wow, that's brilliant. Here, have some more business.
What do you think is the reason?

Mumsnet: Not sure, but the dominating topic is transgenderism and women's rights.

Advertisers: Ah ok. Got it.

Mumsnet: Yes, there are dozens of targeted campaigns to get the entire issue outlawed, and the board shutdown.

Advertisers: WHAT!!!!

Because when you believe you have a good argument you say #nodebate & attack the ad host
They got nothing but a dwindling 18%

Place marking so I can explode at this tomorrow.

Yeah, right.

The TRAS have some money backing their lobbying, sure. But the buying power of the actual TRAs? Don't make me laugh.

Most of them are teenage boys / young adults in their bedrooms, high on the power twitter intimidation campaigns seem to give them.

We're grown adults with money to spend. There's loads of women on this site with pretty decent salaries, thank you very much. But, even those of us who are skint are prioritising spending on children's stuff, so we're predictable to advertisers, which makes it easy to sell shit to us (e.g. back to school next week).

Nothing to worry about until the MN demographic means that it's worth advertising size 11+ high heals and silicone boobs.

I do not think you should underestimate the power of middle aged white males and the porn money focused on supporting transgender advocates efforts to repeal safeguarding protections.

Fair enough - but in turn they shouldn't underestimate the power of the women of many ethnicities and sociological backgrounds to fight back.

Haha yes I agree transactivists are the best advertisers for mumsnet. Never would have come here if not for them telling me not to come here (am not a mum and didn't realise there were active feminist boards here that are amazing!)

Here's the lowdown on Hailey Heartless

twitter.com/BiologicalWMN/status/1033283291678429189?s=19

And now...
HandsAcrosstheAisle
@BiologicalWMN tweets

Now
@MeghanEMurphy
has been suspended for explaining what other counter-organizing he’s been up to, like trying to defund Canada’s longest standing rape crisis center. It’s hard to imagine what
@TwitterSupport
could have found to object to in this entirely factual tweet.

Meghan did some great tweets yesterday following the inital bragging (cited in first post of this thread) and is now suspended!

HandsAcrosstheAisle
@BiologicalWMN
·
19m
All Murphy did was report on events, without making any call to action regarding Kreut. Meanwhile, Kreut’s suggestions about targeting the advertisers of a discussion forum for mothers for harassment, because of thoughtcrime, is fine. Will women be banned for talking about that?

Twitter is a misogynist dream. Megan Murphy is amazing. Hands across the Aisle - is that Kaeley Triller Haver?

Given that so many TRAs have their GoFundMe begging bowls out so often, I think it's clear to advertisers where the purchasing power lies between women and TRAs

Feminist Current did lose its advertising platform as a result of behind-the-scenes lobbying by TRAs. The site now relies solely on donations from readers. Meghan Murphy has stated that this hasn't affected revenue much as FC made little from ads in the first place, but the fact that Sadist Hailey and mates managed to get BlogHer to blacklist Canada's most popular feminist website is chilling nevertheless. They did this, as the Sadist notes, not by swamping BlogHer with complaints on Twitter, but by 'talking to them quietly over tea'.

This stealth lobbying (along with money) is how TRAs have managed to change policy and language at the highest levels across government, academia and medicine, so I really don't think it's wise to be cavalier about their determination to take down Mumsnet, one of the only places on the net where women are actually allowed to discuss trans politics. That fact alone should alert you to what they can do, what they have already done. Look at where we already are: virtually every mainstream website - and certainly every 'progressive' one - heavily censors discussion on trans issues. It's not unreasonable to fear that in the next 5 to 10 years, discussion might be censored EVERYWHERE, especially given the overrepresentation of TRAs in IT.

If the last five years have shown us anything, it's they we should never, ever underestimate the power and reach of this movement, nor the ruthlessness of its tactics.

Sorry about the delay, I needed to stop for sleep and then go to work. The following is presented with the caveat that website hosting isn't my field of expertise within IT.

Big websites like Mumsnet are often hosted on clusters of load-balanced servers. These servers may be spread across the world for performance and resilience. A webpage isn't usually made up of content from just one server cluster, there will be pictures and scripts pulled in from many server clusters operated by different organisations. We can examine the page to find out where these scripts and pictures come from. It is commonplace for adverts to be pulled in from an advertising server cluster, as PPs have touched on, and it is the advertising servers' operator that Hailey wishes to target.

I can use the Inspector tab of Firefox's Developer pane to examine the adverts on the page and see what they are made up of. The adverts consist of content loaded into three iframes. (An iframe is a mini-webpage embedded within a larger main page.) These iframes provide the adverts that keep changing: one at the top and two on the right of the page. The iframes contain a lot of scripts that are responsible for rotating the content and have been written for speed rather than legibility. Fortunately, Firefox enables me to see the effects of these scripts by using the NoScript extension.

I open up a thread's page within Firefox and tell NoScript to "temporarily allow all on this page", even scripts from domains that I would normally consider untrusted. I also enable cross site scripting and check that adverts are showing on the page. I then tell NoScript that I distrust each domain in turn, one at a time.

Distrusting googlesyndication.com stopped the iframe content from appearing at all and stopped the ads from being displayed. So I infer from this that Mumsnet are using Google Adsense for advertising. I can't foresee Hailey sitting down with Google over a cup of tea.

Google Adsense has policy on what content is acceptable on the websites that they serve content to:
"Incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization."
But the examples they give are very specific:
"Content promoting, glorifying, or condoning violence against others on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization"
We've condemned such violence on at least one thread and haven't advocated violence against anyone.
"Content that encourages others to believe that a person or group is inhuman, inferior, or worthy of being hated on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization"
We haven't done that either. What we have done is said that trans rights shouldn't come at the expense of safeguarding or women's rights and have provided evidence to support our concerns.

BTW Google, the protected characteristic you are looking for is "sex", not "gender".

The thing that sticks out on that tweet is "where the public can't intervene". That is a startling admission that Hailey knows that the public don't support the silencing of women.

haXXor - I'm reading through a mass of cyber security related material at present.

Completely off-topic, but if you have a reading list you can recommend to somebody who knows little about this area, might I implore you for it?

It's not unreasonable to fear that in the next 5 to 10 years, discussion might be censored EVERYWHERE, especially given the overrepresentation of TRAs in IT.

Dammit, I wish I'd seen your post before I sent mine. That's a very good point.

Something to remember is that if you aren't paying for it, you are the product. Whether Google would have the nerve to deny Mumsnet's advertisers access to our eyeballs is a good question, because I suspect that the advertisers would kick up a stink.

Something to remember is that if you aren't paying for it, you are the product. Whether Google would have the nerve to deny Mumsnet's advertisers access to our eyeballs is a good question

Strongly agree.

I defer to Lanier at this point: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

As Lanier argues, if we're not paying to use the likes of Facebook and Google then we're toiling for them as data ants.

Google has a relatively large proportion of trans employees and appears to be one of the most trans friendly employers around. So a quiet cup of tea and a complaint about nasty Terfy bigots might be better received there than other companies

Me: I can't foresee Hailey sitting down with Google over a cup of tea.

DonkeySkin: Why not? As I said before, [redacted term we aren't allowed to use any more] are vastly overrepresented in IT, including at the big tech giants.

Yes, I had disregarded that aspect because of their decision to dismiss James Damore after that memo he foolishly chose to publish at work* in which he described his female colleagues as more likely to be "neurotic" and used other gender stereotypes to explain why women are rare in tech. I concluded that Google were opposed to gender stereotyping on the basis of that HR decision. On reflection, we should not disregard that aspect.

The stage was set for this in the 80s when women were deliberately driven out of tech, because it means we have little if any voice within the industry. Those women who have gone high in tech have done so by not challenging the attitudes of the men.

arran: I'm reading through a mass of cyber security related material at present.

What is your desired outcome? I did a primer-level resource list for anyone wanting to make their online accounts more secure a little while ago after someone's Twitter was broken into by a TRA.

The problem is that "computer/cyber/information security material" can mean everything from user-targetted advice on creating a good password to academic journal articles about the technical details of the Heartbleed attack.

• The irony that an anti-feminist got fired for a memo criticising the same corporate "woke" groupthink that we feminists are now worrying about is not lost on me.

The problem is that "computer/cyber/information security material" can mean everything from user-targetted advice on creating a good password to academic journal articles about the technical details of the Heartbleed attack.

That is effectively what happened. It's as ludicrous as: "You probably need to know something about scripts and command line Linux. Oh, and GDPR plus ISO 27001. You might want to read up about systems networking. Overall, the basics someone would need to know for ethical hacking certification and penetration testing". (Offhand, I'm sure there were more "suggestions" without any actual recommended texts or what depth of practical knowledge was deemed necessary.)