I'm a long-standing, quite senior Aston academic (very different discipline though) & I've been following this with genuine embarrassment. I've created this shiny new MN account just to post on this thread, but have been around a long time.
I agree with much of what's been said already, including that this should never have got research ethics clearance (assuming of course that it did...), so I won't repeat that.
I just wanted to add some insider perspective, which I hope might be interesting/useful.
Apologies for the next paragraph sounding a bit like Aston PR. It's context. I will move on to something a bit more critical!
On the whole, Aston is generally very liberal. I'm GC (actively), & have never felt the need to hide my views at work. It's a very diverse community - lots of our students have difficult circumstances, & most academic staff work really hard to support students through issues like racism, financial difficulty & poor mental health. I've worked across HE, but I've now been at Aston a very long time, & nowhere else has been this apolitical. Everyone's just too busy dealing with shit, frankly, & there's a lot of it (some of which I'll come to)
Many courses have a compulsory placement year, and all have a technical/applied focus (even disciplines like History). This is because one of the things Aston likes to sell itself on is "usefulness" (in both teaching and research). I first came across the forensic linguistics work at Aston when I was at another university, & at that time, it was very much in this tradition - developing tools to keep children safe in online spaces, for eg. It strikes me that this particular PhD is an odd fit at Aston, for lots of reasons. However, i do work in a very different area, so maybe there's a whole ton of this type of thing going on & I'm just not aware of it.
Bits of the university are deeply, deeply sexist (HE is in general, IME, but Aston has a special brand of it). I can easily believe that it didn't occur to anyone involved (including female academics) that women posting here are also people. The misogyny at Aston is a whole other thread, but I absolutely think it's been a factor here, in the initial scrape and the uses to which the data has been put. We don't (generally) have issues with gender ideology harming women. We just have good old fashioned women-hating. It's like a little time machine (& has got worse since the VC came in a couple of years ago)
The VC himself is ruthlessly ambitious for himself and the institution. Having seen him in action, my guess would be that he's putting significant effort into protecting the university (I assume he's taken expensive legal advice). At the same time, I'm pretty confident those involved will be having a very hard time, even if that's being kept quiet. I doubt very much he's just waiting for it all to die down, but I also doubt he'll say much in public.
He wants people to talk about our graduate salaries, social mobility, contribution to the regional economy. He absolutely won't want people talking about an unethical study with significant methodological flaws!
I'm really proud of some aspects of what Aston does, & I work with some incredible people (genuinely the kind of people you would want your kids to be supported by if they were at university). I guess any big -ish institution will have its share of arseholes, & we definitely do. No one from Aston has covered themselves in glory here.