Thread 3: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of linguistic transphobia on Mumsnet

[VitoCorleoneOfMNMafia]

In which we continue to discuss the Aston scrapists.

• The Site Stuff thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/sitestuff/5057903-mumsnet-corpus
• FWR thread #1: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5057460-a-corpus-assisted-discourse-analysis-of-linguistic-transphobia-on-mumsnet
• FWR thread #2: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womensrights/5060410-thread-2-a-corpus-assisted-discourse-analysis-of-linguistic-transphobia-on-mumsnet

I didn't realise that either.

I'm curious why Aston don't seem to care about their reputation.

Do they not grasp that mothers have children, and those children are their future potential students?

I'd be interested to hear why they don't seem to grasp how damaging this whole episode has likely been to their brand.

Most people I work with care very much about the university's reputation, but they're probably totally oblivious to this. I can't imagine anyone associated with AIFL is keen to draw attention to it, & I bet the majority of Aston staff have never even heard of AIFL (or if they have, they'll only have a vague idea of what it does, & won't know anything about specific projects). I'm only aware of this because I read Mumsnet. No one at work has mentioned it.

As ive said before, I do think the VC cares about the university's reputation, but since I've never actually spoken to him, anything I said about why he's approached the situation in the way he has would just be guesswork. It's not what I would have done in his position, but since the vast majority of VCs are men, it's unlikely I will ever be in his position.

I don’t know the VC chap but when I started using his name as a MN username (making it clear I wasn’t the actual VC of Aston University) MN sent me a nice, chatty email saying they understood why I’d chosen it but could I please pick another username while the lawyers are duelling.

Personally I imagine that he’s simply gotten on a big high horse of ‘Rules for commercial enterprises don’t apply to universities’ but I’d imagine that’s a silly assumption to make now that universities are essentially run like businesses and work hand in hand with massive corporations.

And the Chinese, it seems. Their money seems to keep the whole show on the road.

When they'd be able to flog 'we have the technology to be able to dox criminals and dissidents across the internet, wherever they may be and whatever they may post - look at how we identified these horrid, old women from talking about their rapes, sexual assaults, fertility issues, providing support for domestic violence, their political leanings, their children's schools, the weather and the abortions they've had'?

Governments will pay a fuckton of money for that technology. Apart from the outright political interest, there will also be a 'moral values' interest - just think how useful it would be in some countries to be able to identify the gay and trans people living there from using the Aston University DoxxGPT.

Aston university has the eyes on the prize - a bunch of grumpy women is nothing compared to the income and renown for providing the technology for a State to be able to eliminate all those pesky LGBTQIA++ people, to ensure that a political system is never, ever challenged, that their questions, opinions and thoughts are spotted and linked so that they can be arrested before they've corrupted the minds of the population.

They're facilitating the creation of systems that will become instrumental in ensuring that the Edens of other countries are found and hunted down before they ever get to university.

I’d add that pretty much every British uni is captured. The drive to win EDI awards and allowing small groups of self interested people drive the inclusion agenda means preferred pronouns in email signatures and gender neutral toilets are rife.

So as an institution, Aston may well believe they’re the ‘good guys’ in this discussion and MN / MNFWR are the baddies needing to be outed just like all the other bad guys AIFL seek to out.

I can’t recall whether the student presented at conference or not, but they/them definitely seems to be avoiding doing anything with online tickets available!

Eden did indeed go ahead and presented as no one tells AIFL what to do (!) but we’re not allowed to know what they said. You know, that principle of research of not sharing your method/findings/conclusions with your data sources.

😶

Perhaps Eden Palmer’s next pronouns will be Road to Hell/Good Intentions?

Eden did indeed go ahead and presented as no one tells AIFL what to do (!) but we’re not allowed to know what they said. You know, that principle of research of not sharing your method/findings/conclusions with your data sources.

Well as we know from many TRA campaigns they have always been allowed to do this, and believed and requoted.

But you would like to think a university might have other standards.

Can you imagine if a female student had presented unveriviable "data" to support her thesis that TRAs are anti woman.

We would never here the end of accusations about twisted terfism mascarading as research. Added to which the untold personal damage to the most persecuted people in the world.

I have serious concerns about politicians and cops misusing their access to information and power over others to continue to abuse, or cover abuse

this misuse of MN data similarly concerns me

we know that abusers can and do exchange images, information, locations and money to facilitate others also abusing already groomed and abused children

given the numbers of women on MN likely to be already vulnerable due to past or current abuse including those who may have had to leave jobs, change rl names, relocate etc trying to escape abusers

this data scrape, continued opacity as to who had access to it and the potential for it to be used to identify and locate women who have posted on MN is fucking terrifying

I swear every damn ‘joke’ or piece of fiction ever is slowly coming true:

t-shirts with ‘lesbian trapped in a man’s body’, monty pythons ‘struggle against reality’ simpsons pres trump plus all the sci-fi films keanu, will smith etc etc

do I need to climb onto the roof & strip to my boxers?

or diy a faraday cage?

I hoped for flying skateboards and holodecks not this dystopian dumpster fire…

I got a similar email when I tried to name myself after a highly-involved Aston academic.

Wouldn't it be so very convenient for the State of Texas to be able to identify women who discuss in forums how they might access abortion? Or Saudi Arabia to identify gay, lesbian, and bisexual people?

There is far too little attention paid in IT generally (and computer-assisted corpus linguistics is just an aspect of machine learning, which in turn is a vertical within information technology) to human rights and the impact that these technologies have on people.

When they'd be able to flog 'we have the technology to be able to dox criminals and dissidents across the internet, wherever they may be and whatever they may post - look at how we identified these horrid, old women from talking about their rapes, sexual assaults, fertility issues, providing support for domestic violence, their political leanings, their children's schools, the weather and the abortions they've had'?

The thought occurs that Aston in the little old UK probably isn't the only place people are working on this kind of technology. Not that that makes it any better, obviously.

Eden needs so TRA friends to remind they/them that ACAB.

Eden is practically a cop in transactivist terms. Proper fashy!

Or Primrose Path/Everlasting Bonfire?

I have noted before that Aston is close enough to GCHQ for staff to be able to move between the two easily (I know anyone can work remotely anywhere, but physical proximity is also useful). I have never had any doubt that this all about building the technology for state surveillance. And know that the UK is a major exporter of all sorts of weapons. Presumably the academic and students know that too. Is there active debate within the discipline about the ethics of what they are doing?

ha!

have we seen this before?

https://x.com/dorrego/status/1846910743083466804

(man who lost his job when Aston closed his department protesting at his image being used on a poster without his permission)

Thank tou for the summary and glad that there is a legal case going on here. Thank you Justine. We did not consent to ‘be the product’ for anybody else, aside from Mumsnet. Awful that random small and big interests can use posting history to frighten and deter women from seeking help even anonymously on a parenting site.

What is the practical advice to site users to protect themselves against website data scraping for use by large language models? (I don’t even know if I am naming this problem correctly?) the more I think about this it’s a very expanding set of problems. What is the ICO and government doing about this?

I'm sure I read that the posts where a poster included a little bit of on-topic content and then a recipe made up the most of the content were worthless to scrapers (especially when the thread contained many posts like that from many different posters).

However, I'm not sure that MN would be happy if we all included recipes in each of our posts!

You could write a post and then run it through Grammarly (or a similar AI check for spelling/grammar/style) to remove your personal 'quirks' before posting.

Clearly they don't think 'ethics' apply to them.

If this research continues unchecked, and with no oversight, I wonder how long it will be before safeguarding | cybersecurity software blocks access to MN and other sites because of the labelling of 'hate,' 'far right' etc.

They're facilitating the creation of systems that will become instrumental in ensuring that the Edens of other countries are found and hunted down before they ever get to university.

That's some watertight (and horrific) argument, Neverdropyourmooncup.

I was reading something else today, an interview with a US-based writer whose recent work is very much in response, and connection, to the upcoming election. It made my mind take a stride to where it muses on this thread and topic. With thanks to Pam Houston, author of Without Exception, whose interview I am quoting:

"(The particular cruelty...) reveal(s) these laws for what they are, an attempt to keep women down, to keep them poor and overburdened, to eliminate all possibility they might have time to organize, to run for office, to help make a world where everyone can thrive."

We know that abusers can and do exchange images, information, locations and money to facilitate others also abusing already groomed and abused children

Given the numbers of women on MN likely to be already vulnerable due to past or current abuse including those who may have had to leave jobs, change rl names, relocate etc trying to escape abusers this data scrape, continued opacity as to who had access to it and the potential for it to be used to identify and locate women who have posted on MN is fucking terrifying

absofuckinlutely, DaisyChain. And now apply that to those who are fostered, or adopted, as minors, perhaps removed from birth families, who would actually be rather easy, either to track and identify, or to just misidentify, but eh - close enough? I do have skin in this game but not personally, so have a small appreciation of how incredibly careful the relationships among birth and adoptive families have to be handled, for years, and how it can still go frighteningly wrong.

You can't argue that you are interrogating language use to build a picture of a person, but none of the content is really a key thing about that process.

Imagine if a researcher from elsewhere was concerned about an area of Aston University's conduct. I mean, its ethics panel decisions and processes might be a reasonable and hypothetical example. Outside research team had the ability to hack/scrape all the university's emails and communications in order to be able to home in on that particular element, but researcher outreach, thesis supervisor recruitment, early career stage marketing, applicants' personal statements (successful and unsuccessful), and the Equal Opps questionnaires that they provided, were really the game changers that were very much informing the core 'ethics panels corpus.' Would Aston as a 'collective' give that a thumbs up?

Aston obvs don’t have robust systems for the sensitive data they hold, otherwise they wouldn’t have released Eden Palmer’s personal phone number via an FOI.