A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet

[IwantToRetire]

By Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics

It has been suggested that the forum-style parenting website Mumsnet is a hub for ‘gender-critical’ feminism, which directly opposes transgender rights, to be practised with little moderation (Livingston, 2018). This presentation reports on the initial stages of a project aiming to investigate that the potential intensification of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet may lead to further marginalisation of transgender people offline (Powys Maurice, 2021). Though studies of non-linguistic transphobic rhetoric on Mumsnet (e.g., Pedersen, 2022; Mackenzie, 2019), and discourse analyses of other radical online communities (e.g., Krendel, 2020) have both occurred, this project is the first to analyse linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet. It also contributes to existing literature surrounding UK-based ‘gender-critical’ feminism; linguistic transphobia; and radical online community discourses.

The presentation explores the rise of potentially ‘gender-critical’ linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet over time through the corpus linguistic (CL) analysis of the ‘Feminism: Sex & Gender Discussions’ board, using three corpora comprising a fifteen-year timeframe: 2008-2013; 2013-2018; and 2018-2023. As the project is still ongoing, preliminary findings will be presented, namely a comparative overview of trends yielded in frequency analyses. Overall, this presentation provides insights into the growing commonality of potentially ‘gender-critical’ feminist rhetoric on Mumsnet and its effect on increasing transphobic discourse on the site.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-corpus-assisted-discourse-analysis-of-linguistic-transphobia-on-mumsnet-tickets-880795271367?aff=ebdssbdestsearch

(I had just finished my favourite tea time treat of catching up on FWR and was going to get back to the grindstone when this popped up on my feed. So have come back as it is too good not to be shared. Enjoy!)

Someone probably needs to report Aston Uni to the ICO. That someone is probably MNHQ under the circumstances due to this being done illegally and MN still technically retaining the responsibility to their users and their users a) may not know this has happened b) will have multiple user names (some of which they may not remember) c) deliberately and actively kept those usernames unlinked d) may have long since left MN.

But no, this really isn't ok of Aston Uni.

Where would things stand in terms of data protection for MN posters who had asked for their accounts to be deleted unaware that the data had already been scraped? MN presumably would not have the means to contact them now. And what about data from MN users who have died?
(cross-posted with @RedToothBrush )

This is the problem with picking words and phrases and assigning an attribute to them.

‘Against’ my name on the Sex and Gender board will be ‘single sex toilets’. I talk about them a lot.

If you have already determined (as it applies they are by the PhD title) that posters/or the board are transphobic, then it would follow that I am obsessed with single sex toilets because of transphobia.

However, if you looked at my posts, I want single sex toilets because of the design making them much, much safer (in fact potentially life saving) for medically vulnerable people - all people of both sexes. As a teacher and a women, I am also concerned of the impact ‘gender-neutral’ mixed sex toilets are having in schools, with at least one child raped inside UK school premises per day. But because of gender ideology, many schools and businesses are increasing enclosed private toilet spaces. Even the government are promoting enclosed toilet cubicles.

The safest toilets are single sex with gaps top and bottom to access the cubicle quickly and a degree of visibility for safeguarding.

This is good example of a mum who posts because she has the personal and work experience of why gender ideology has impacted on rights of all, particularly women and girls and especially the most medically vulnerable.

To the university - I could go on and tell you so many more reasons why single sex toilets are the best for everyone but you’ve already got them. But you may especially be paying full attention to all the words in this thread. So I thought I would repeat the ‘highlights’ so you may get the nuance.

I've just finished reading it, (and now I would be even more interested to see what Eden plans on doing with the FWR threads!). The authors are right about this bit:

"Our analysis also demonstrated that, although Mumsnet might be considered combative on the surface, particularly to newcomers or casual observers, this interactional strategy can actually be a mark of affiliation and support.

Acculturated AIBU users are very likely to have recalibrated their benchmarks for impoliteness assessments to account for the fact these many forms of conflict are an expected and even a welcomed and valued community norm."

Quite. According to the ICO social media companies still retain responsibility to protect users. So yeah, over to you MNHQ...

Users have an expectation of the retention of their anonmity and some may not be able to ask for a data deletion for any number of reasons.

I feel an itch coming on to throw Aston Uni under the bus by any means necessary on this one.

I realise it's a different team and university. They refer to their MSE corpus.

Given the size of the corpus, and comparable prominence as UK social media forums, I'm interested in whether MSE has given permission for this given the sensitive nature of the topics (specifically the Debt Free Wannabe forum and the Mortgage Free Wannabe one). I'd be interested in reading their consent because the authors quote from identified user names.

This exchange is taken from a thread entitled “Lois_E begins a long MFW journey” and it illustrates how users refer to each other by username, congratulating other users on their progress, thanking them for their compliments and encouragement, or simply saying hello.

• (18)Aww bless you Lois.. You are always so thoughtful.

Well done on your progress, you are such an inspiration

Froggy :cool:

• - - - - - - - - - -
• Bravo Lois!
• Hmmnn, must do better.- - - - - - - - - -Great progress
• Lois :T- - - - - - - - - -Why thank you, Froggy, Alchemilla and GG. (Hello also to Calfuray and teapot :wave:)
• [mfw]

I'm also intrigued by this discussion that mentions Mumsnet in that paper (referring to work by different researchers).

Concerning these informal services, several studies have used qualitative investigations to uncover the discourses that form the basis of debt forums. For example, Stanley et al. (2015) draw on qualitative thematic analyses to examine discussions on three online forums, revealing that people turn to anecdotal information to understand debt-related issues (see also Montgomerie et al., 2015, who explore how groups use digital platforms to educate people about debt and coordinate action related to indebtedness). Focusing on selections of data from MSE, Consumer Action Group, and Mumsnet forums, they identify two main themes, including the idea of troubleshooting (or debtors’ responses to debt and money management queries) and journeying (or how posters navigate the challenge of living with indebtedness and their pursuit of a ‘debt free’ reality).

I'm posting accessible pdfs of the papers rather than links to the journals.

Stanley, L.M. orcid.org/0000-0003-3882-8682, Deville, J. and Montgomerie, J. (2016) Digital Debt Management The Everyday Life of Austerity. New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics, 87. pp. 64-82. ISSN 0950-2378

Rather than analyse a subforum of Mumsnet, we instead sampled a single, long thread. ‘The Debt Thread’ is a place ‘for those who feel they are drowning and want a way out’, to quote the thread title. It is used by many posters in a way not dissimilar from a (debt) diary, with posters regularly sharing news of the latest methods they have found for ‘cutting back’ – for example, by collecting and using coupons in a newspaper, or forgoing an activity now considered too luxurious.

https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF.87.4.2016https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/99917/4/DigitalDebtManagement_2016.pdf

Montgomerie, J., Deville, J., Packman, C. et al. (1 more author) (2015) Digital Technologies of Debt Resilience: Final Report (2014b). Working Papers of the Communities & Culture Network+, 5. ISSN 2052-7268 )

Mumsnet: This debt forum lies at the other end of the spectrum. The value-added for users is not necessarily tacit and technical knowledge of the finance industry, but centred more upon strategies for thrift and emotional support. A particular characteristic of the forum is that a small amount of users provide a large amount of the content.
…
For Mumsnet, in lieu of different sub-forums we sampled the latest Debt thread that contained 850 individual posts, and a total of around 65,000 words. The resulting data was coded in line with the research questions and aims of the project using NVivo ‒ a qualitative analysis research tool. We took a grounded theory approach to data analysis. We started by capturing the sample as PDFs via NCapture for NVivo ensuring that emoticons were retained this is important as members use these as an important way of expressing relief, frustration, anger, fear and sarcasm. Once the data corpus had been constructed, the entirety was read through in order to build some provisional themes.

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/114790/1/Digital-Technologies-of-Debt-Resilience_Final-Report.pdf

I say bollocks and fuck a lot. I also do this in real life.

Its a sweary northern thing for me. Got fuck all to do with MN.

I can't be arsed with the being overly polite thing. I've been on far trollyier places on the internet mind. Where the expectation isn't that you should be polite.

Is there a cultural bias that expects MN to be politer than other places? Why?

The Talking-About-Vaccines study created their own dataset with MNHQ permission, they happily worked with anonymised data, as it was the type of discussion taking place that interested them, not who was having that discussion.
It looks the Lancaster Uni vaccine-chat researchers created their data set in June 2021?

The total scrape of MN wasn’t uploaded to the FoLD repository until September of the same year, and as you supposedly have to
go into an airlocked room and look at the data on FoLD’s extra special Brummie computer, it seems like that would be highly inconvenient for academics situated a lot further up north who were able to get enough data just by going online like any normal person?

(link is for the archived version of the FoLD page screenshotted below): https://archive.ph/5TF9p

Vaccines Study seems like a perfectly reasonable use of MN data (with proper permissions and ethics considerations) whereas ‘Author Attribution’ (aka doxing) and accusing Feminists of Transphobic Hate Crime (aka ‘being a bit sweary while defending their own boundaries and the appropriate safeguarding boundaries for children’) seems like a very unreasonable use.

Aston University, YABVVVU.

Aston Uni has done some useful work by the sound of it. (They definitely identify as working for Justice, which has a similar ring to the Right Side of History).

This debacle has revealed serious flaws in their ethics, practises and approach, though. If they have any genuine reflective ability they will use the experience to check their own prejudices and bias, and reconsider their practises and procedures.

Given the knee jerk response of Dr Nicci Macleod posting a trans flag on her Twitter yesterday, I'll be interested to see if they have the capacity.

Tbf if there was one word that sums it all up then bollocks is up there.

The recently deceased chap (not one of the 2 Auto Doxy Dudes) who was involved in the creation of FoLD used to study at Lancaster.

Can anyone see any obvious connections/co authors or is it just a coincidence that both institutions were collecting data from Mumsnet in 2021?

Vaccines Study seems like a perfectly reasonable use of MN data (with proper permissions and ethics considerations) whereas ‘Author Attribution’ (aka doxing) and accusing Feminists of Transphobic Hate Crime (aka ‘being a bit sweary while defending their own boundaries and the appropriate safeguarding boundaries for children’) seems like a very unreasonable use.

If they had permission, the vaccination study is interesting and may well have value for policy-making.

I searched for the words 'consent,' 'permission,' and 'Mumsnet' to see if I could find the permission but couldn't. I may well have missed it.

However, this isn't a pick and mix scenario because I approve of one use and not another. Either MNHQ granted permission or they didn't. Or this is fruit of the poisonous tree and part of the scraped corpus.

I readily confess to being interested in the debt and finance papers that discuss MSE and Mumsnet among others. But, I want to know if MSE and Martin Lewis consented.

I searched this link for ‘ethics’ and found this bit:

I knew there'd be an obvious search term I missed, and "ethics" it was. TY Kellie

Vaccine study = pretty interesting and I hope that it's useful to policy-makers in the future.

I can’t find a similar paragraph via a quick key word search on the MSE/Debt paper (perhaps just because the terms I’m searching, eg ethics, collection et al are repeatedly used in the main topic text, perhaps because my eyes have gone a
bit wine squiffy? Need to have a look at when universities started to recognise that something being in the public domain didn’t make it automatically fair game for research, possibly not until after 2016 when that one was published? Feels like ages ago and also 5 minutes ago, all at once!)

This may be the nearest thing to anything regarding consent or permission on the 2016 MSE paper.

I just checked and GDPR was voted through in 2016 but not implemented until 2018, so I suspect ethical standards were on the cusp of change in 2016 but it was still a bit of a free for all re: using online discussions and social media posts for research?

Yes, I don’t think there is anything on ethics in the debt papers linked here.
The methodology is about how the dataset was created and coded. There is nothing about any ethical considerations of using the material, anonymity etc.

Well ... after reading through the many interesting and informed posts added today, it just adds to the feeling I began having about light heartedly starting the thread as being something to enjoy.

Its not just that I posted in a hurry but many of the issues PP have raised are way outside of my area of knowledge.

So is this another example of how some thought the internet would be the ultimate achievement of giving users an equal public voice, or another example that those of us who are maybe not as cynical as we thought we are should always be aware that someone who will twist, distort and try to exploit.

Or that basically, just like how everyone goes on about how children need to be aware of the potential danger of the internet, that we should all be made aware of how those who are not open about what they are doing could end up being a threat.

My other thought, and I think I said something like this many posts ago, that I do not think the student concerned should be the focus of criticisms, but that those at fault are her immediate supervisors and the course itself.

And along with criticising the University for its complete ethical failure, they are also guilty of putting someone in a position of ridicule by not properly advising her in the way she has outlined her intentions.

She isn't the one who should be made fun off, but those who have totally failed in their duty of care, or worse thought they could use someone they have responsibility for to become a foot soldier for their personal beliefs.

It almost makes me think some of us should email her and say you do realised your tutor / supervisor or whoever has totally failed you. And worse may have deliberately put you in the firing line, so that they can write a puff piece about the nasty terfs who pick on young innocent students.

That seems to be about their own consent and permission in re: having a copy of their paper rather than the data.

This is the pdf (accessible) of an otherwise paywalled paper. I approve of the final 2 sentences here. I hugely prefer their approach to what is publicly available from Aston (so far).

The terms and conditions of Mumsnet stipulate that Talk is a public space and users are made aware that anyone can view their posts. People use pseudonyms to post messages and their identity is protected. There is a great deal of discussion about ethical issues related to the use of contents from public discussion forums. Some argue that informed consent from the participants should be obtained in any case, whereas others claim that by posting anonymously participants automatically give their consent (Roberts 2015). No agreement has been yet reached. Following procedures adopted in previous research using posts from Mumsnet (e.g. Pedersen 2016), consent was not sought from the participants because the material used was not directly elicited from them and only obtained after it was spontaneously generated. Yet, the terms and conditions of Mumsnet state that all contents published on its site are the sole property of Mumsnet and reproduction of any parts without approval is prohibited. Consent was therefore sought from Musmnet to use the Talk data for the purpose of this research and approval was granted. The approval stated that usernames or any other potentially identifying details must be removed to protect posters’ anonymity and this procedure was adopted throughout.

https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/73846/1/PND_Paper_Special%20Issue_DCM_Centaur.pdf

Sylvia Jaworska,
‘Bad’ mums tell the ‘untellable’: Narrative practices and agency in online stories about postnatal depression on Mumsnet,
Discourse, Context & Media,
Volume 25,
2018,
Pages 25-33,
ISSN 2211-6958,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2017.11.002.

I think that copyright notice is about the texts (articles) in the white rose repository (which is across three universities as far as I can tell).

Original usernames or any identifying information has also been remove

Identifying data is not limited to user names. Think how many posts have been deleted because the OP realised it has become identifiable. Identifiable data doesn’t just mean identifiable to anyone, it also means identifiable to those who know the situation too.

I'm sure it's been linked before, but here's how to complain to the Information Commissioner, who has some quite serious powers: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/

And are single posts or threads deleted by MNHQ on request left in a form that can still be scraped, even though they are not visible to the public forum?

*I do not think the student concerned should be the focus of criticisms, but that those at fault are her immediate supervisors and the course itself.

And along with criticising the University for its complete ethical failure, they are also guilty of putting someone in a position of ridicule by not properly advising her in the way she has outlined her intentions.

She isn't the one who should be made fun off, but those who have totally failed in their duty of care, or worse thought they could use someone they have responsibility for to become a foot soldier for their personal beliefs.*

IwantToRetire I agree.

I feel sorry for the student.

Lmfao I guess if you can't do anything in life you end up as an 'academic' writing this kind of lunacy.