Mumsnet is breaching section 26 of the Equality Act 2010 (harassment) by hosting feminist forums that discuss gender-critical issues - legal case?

[MsJeminaPuddleduck]

Lady Justice 👩‍⚖️ (@RadFemLawyer)
09/11/2018, 08:16
Have just seen this. Argument is Mumsnet is breaching section 26 of the Equality Act 2010 (harassment) by hosting feminist forums that discuss gender-critical issues. pic.twitter.com/WVkBMxZeqv

What's 'black bot' Eresh?

I think I have a gap in my understanding here.

skeptools.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/block-bot-twitter-report-abuse-ool0n-atheism-plus/

Sorry x post

"So who posted pictures of the children? The person themselves on their account? "

I'm not sure exactly what he's referring to there. There's a wordpress account going around on Twitter with details of Mr. Billingham's sockpuppeting. On that wordpress it references links between sprout and Billingham. However the children's faces (as well as Mr Billingham's wife) are covered.

Mr. Billingham's other Twitter twitter.com/jd_billingham does include photos of his daughters. And he apparently posted many more photos of them on his @oolon account but these may have been deleted by him since he opened his privacy from 1000+ carefully vetted followers to the world at large.

There were also public photos of them on his Facebook (as in privacy set to public), however he has tightened this a bit it seems.

However I am not aware of anyone posting any pictures of his kids.

I would note that he recently doxed Lily Maynard, a doxin which was liked by 'Helen' @mimmymum who complained to Mumsnet and got her name redacted.

So basically these people (Helen, James, TRAs in general) are constantly doxing people and then screaming like stuck pigs when their own identities are disclosed.

People in glass houses, etc.

The trouble with this issue is the the definition of trans has now become meaningless.
People with gender dysphoria need rights and protection.
For men with a fetish, aggressively trying to enter female spaces.......not so much. But without an agreed definition how does anyone know anymore.

I don’t like the anti science stance the guardian is taking. Newspapers should question everything and try and be scientific in their analysis.

Isn’t doxing an offence though - it’s always done to intimidate and bully.

Right. Well I’m not Ok with pics of anyone’s kids being published, regardless of what a git the parent is. Even with faces covered tbh, it doesn’t sit right with me.

That’s not quite the situation though say if Bob has three identities (bob1,2 and 3) and Bob 1 has an open account innocently having family photos then bobs2 and 3 are wreaking havoc and someone says ‘these are all the same person’

YY Babel, I agree with both your points there.

The context of block bot is that Mr. Billingham created 'block bot'. This had 'levels', where it was determined someone was a level 1, level 2, or level 3, in terms of their degree of nastiness. So more people were blocked in level 1 than level 2 than level 3.

Anyway, this quickly ran into shit as people were squabbling about who should be blocked.

Mr. Billingham, then posting as @oolon, or @ool0n, got some serious legal heat for the bot

www.breitbart.com/europe/2015/03/20/bbc-featured-block-bot-runs-into-legal-trouble/

The Kilgore Sprout account was created presumably to be more anonymous while doing Social Justice Warrioring.

This account seems to date from January 2016, possibly earlier

twitter.com/adam_maher14/status/693263468565270528

At some point mid-2018 I think, this account got banned from Twitter as it was basically dedicated to doxing & harassing feminists.

He set up various replacements with similar names despite being banned from Twitter. He is quite keen on banning feminists for the same 'ban evasion', strangely enough.

He (as Sprout) is the official author of the @unblock_list, which runs off a very low-powered computer, a Raspberry Pi, twitter.com/unblock_list/status/1036985976193785856 Mr. Billingham is a performance engineer who is (or was? seems to have been removed from his employers' experts' list) paid to enhance the efficiency of software, so running a database off a very low-power, low-cost device is the sort of thing you'd expect.

The unblock_list is related to Billingham's original 'block bot' in that it tracks people blocked on Twitter, however it links to 'blocktogether', which is a third party tool.

Bob's children are not responsible for the fact that Bob is a raging arsehole and should not be punished for the sins of their father. People are however allowed to point out that Bob is a giant festering pustule of a human being.

"Isn’t doxing an offence though - it’s always done to intimidate and bully."

Not as such. Also many platforms, e.g., Wordpress don't consider names to be private information (unless they relate to transgender people in which case they do).

"Right. Well I’m not Ok with pics of anyone’s kids being published, regardless of what a git the parent is. Even with faces covered tbh, it doesn’t sit right with me. "

The media I think tend to black out photos of children they take from Facebook when they are publishing articles about criminals/dodgy people etc. However they tend not to black out photos of adult friends/relations.

However it is usually made clear that they do have children, and their ages.

In this case I don't know who made the Wordpress and they may or may not be a feminist. Anyway.

Sprout appears to be talking to himself on Twitter.

I have to say that I was a bit uneasy about the photo of his daughter even though the face was blacked out.

Photos of my kids taken from FB with their faces blacked out have been published. My FB is tight so I think all that was found was the odd upload.

I guess it is context. This photo was to prove who Sprout is. In my case this man was publishing loads of photos just to boast he had been looking at them and that it was a ‘huge problem’. The photos in question were ones of my DD14 that my ex uploaded without checking his settings so stalker laid into my ex. I still don’t know how he got hold of my ex’s name, I’m very circumspect about it.

So I guess frministd have to be careful not to stoop to the same tactics. Knowing that a violent-minded pervert has been digging up photos of my children is very disturbing and upsetting.

"So I guess frministd have to be careful not to stoop to the same tactics. "

We don't know who made the dox on him tbh. He is disliked by a whole spectrum of people.

Oh & Femfrag didn’t even bother covering the faces of my kids. I think my stalker just stole their photos. It was the ones of my ex & 14 year old which really got to me. He also pointed people to information about what schools they go to.

He has fwiw Tweeted the names, ages and schools of his children on his public (@oolon) Twitter within the last couple of weeks.

The two articles linked above which discuss the 'blackbot' identify all of the issues and implications with the mass 'terf block bots'.

Also how it was challenged etc.

I wonder if the people involved then in challenging the 'blackbot' are aware of its reincarnation and how this has been used and abused?

It’s fine to use evidence to ascertain that x is running abusive/illegal sock puppets.

But kids’ schools (even if he did tweet them under his ‘innocent’ account) ought to be out of bounds.

Since this happened I am not even liking tweets from my kids’ schools.

There's a bit from here which is quite grim, about 'trolling', illegal images of children, racial slurs, etc.

archive.is/OqXWP

"But kids’ schools (even if he did tweet them under his ‘innocent’ account) ought to be out of bounds. "

Nobody mentioned his kids' schools. Only him. I'm just pointing out the sort of content he puts online.

Ok, fair enough! I think it’s about context. Posie & I are open about who we are so the digging up of our family photos is wholly unnecessary.

Unmasking a serial abuser is another matter, but I’d just be cautious about the kids who are innocent parties.

Yes I think there is a difference between 'here's a picture of this stupid woman's kids', and 'X is Y because X says his daughter does taekwondo, and here's a picture of Y's daughter doing taekwondo with her face blurred out, X said he was on holiday in Naples, here's a picture of Y & family on holiday in Naples', and so on.

Yes. Basically saying ‘bob1 is the same person as bob2’ is fine.

ACTIVELY posting anything at all with identifying family details - not on. I’m always uneasy with those newspaper pics of person X out with family and just the faces covered.

Contents of Bob1’s account are Bob1’s responsibility and cannot be used as a shield against people pointing out that bob1/2 are the same person. Otherwise you’d have a situation where it was illegal to unmask anyone if they had anything at all with a pic of their kids online under different names.

And as noted above, plenty of people seem to dislike the small brassica - there’s no evidence this was a feminist.

I have to admit that I laughed at "Kiwi Farms would never do anything like that". Is he new to the internet?