They scraped Mumsnet again.

[ArabellaSaurus]

archive.ph/e0u3Z

https://bulletin.appliedtransstudies.org/article/4/1-3/7/

Another data scrape. I'd say it's also defamatory against Mumsnet.

I've archived.

Article is a load of tedious wank, as you'd expect.

'In this study, however, we excavate what it means to write like a GC by analyzing how GC forum users rely on reactionary language and deploy storytelling practices in ways that calcify their anti-trans ideologies as personal and natural while rendering transgender people as anti-feminist, dangerous, and monstrous. To identify how GC groups perform political mythmaking and construct extremist identities, we undertook a computationally assisted discursive analysis of two popular GC forums: Ovarit and Mumsnet’s “Feminism: Sex & Gender” board (abbreviated to “FSG”). Through comparative platform discourse analysis, we analyzed over 80k posts and comments scraped from Ovarit and over 60k posts and comments scraped from Mumsnet (Burgess and Matamoros-Fernández 2016; Lewis and Marwick 2017)'

The only mildly amusing thing about it is the name of the Journal.

BATS.

Utter garbage from start to end.

This nails it really.

Mad fantasy from the very seriously addled.

@SlackJawedDisbeliefXY - The anonymization seems to be limited to blacking out the poster's user name whilst showing the full text of the post. I have not tried but I am guessing it would be pretty easy to just search on post text to find the original message. Does not seem a very effective way of anonymizing a poster's identity.

I did just that experiment on a MN post which had been 'anonymised' in another study (not based on FWR but on a different topic, IIRC). All that had been done was the removal of an irrelevant piece of information in the post. The remainder was so unusual that all I had to do was google it to go straight to the original post & hence to the username & everything else she'd posted.

I think anyone posting on FWR needs to be conscious of the risk of doxxing.

I don't especially want to out myself because a small number of Genderist believers are a toxic mix of closed minded, self righteous and vindictive.

However, I have never said anything on FWR I wouldn't stand behind IRL.

So while I don't run into social events giving an uninvited Gender Critical perspective because that is being unnessessarily antagonistic, if someone forced the issue by bringing something I've said on FWR into my work or social life I would own it, because there is nothing unreasonable or bigotted about a feminist standing up for female people.

Agree with this. Though I'd also add that for many people in this debate, it's not even about standing up for female people, it's standing up for scientific fact versus anti-scientific lunacy. Calling people "right-wing" because they believe the earth is round or they know that astrology is nonsense is irrelevant. So what? You can be right-wing and have a sound understanding of scientific reality. The term "right-wing" is deployed as if it's an actual argument - "these people are right-wing, therefore they are bad" - when in reality it's simply a pointless insult.

Anyone who posts anything anywhere on the internet needs to be conscious of the risk of doxxing.

There are some very strange characters out there. I have seen well-intentioned people fall foul of this on messageboards, sometimes because they made themselves identifiable by variously - describing their job in too much detail; describing a charity they were involved in; describing a niche hobby group they were hosting in their home; identifying a sport that they were involved in; posting a picture of the view out their window. Not all of those ended up with the cops being called in, but some of them did.

That's very irregular, I believe you may have queered that verb rather than conjugated it.
Conjugation is a challenge when you can't figure out your sex.

@DeanElderberry

Agreed. And sadly women (of the traditional be-cunted type) also have to be aware of both the sexual nutter risk and the misogynist rage risk.

I cannot help but hear your post being said by the late great Tom Lehrer as an intro to a lost, lighthearted and painfully witty song in which a trans activist bemoans the trials of negotiating the rules of grammar in an anything-goes self id world.

Isn't self awareness a marvelous thing.

Also note that some people post on here under their real names. So by defaming them, the authors are playing a risky game.

Eh?

Could it just be possible that there are lots of people (some of whom are on here) who don't mind if men want to wear dresses or change their names, but DO mind if we are told that this makes them women, with all the risks this statement brings for women.

Could you entertain that as possible? Without the hyperbole?

Men can change their names and wear dresses all they want. I hope it brings them happiness, It does not make them into women, or give them legal access to single-sex spaces or activities.

Nothing gives men (or women) a license to act in an erotic sexualised way in public spaces.

This is a public website. Anyone in the world can read it and copy and paste what you have written somewhere else. Why are you acting like your privacy is being violated? And if you think copy and pasting what someone wrote is defaming them then they shouldn't have written it.

Sigh.

It's not clear if you're replying to the OP or a specific other post.
Scraping data is against MN's terms and conditions.

If you're replying to the anonymisation posts, it's because people can build up records of one person's posts and try to work out their identity in order to publicise it. You are right that anyone can do this but this would provide motivation and means for someone to do so who might not otherwise have come across the posts.

Ah, you have failed to understand. There are three separate concerns here.

.1. Programmatically scraping data from MN without permission is against MN's user T&C. This is pretty standard for websites including sites that feature user-contributed content. So regardless of who "can" copy and paste it, legally the IP and the copyright still belong to MN not the original posters or "anyone in the world".

.2. These "researchers" appear to have started with a predetermined opinion (aka "bias") and only applied their "research" within that framework, cherry picking examples and getting basic facts wrong. This appears very likely to misrepresent both MN itself and the posters who participate in FWR.

.3. MN is an anonymous site for very good reason. Online, women are more at risk of abuse and threats, especially sexual, and offline there are well evidenced occurrences of trans activists targeting the families, friends, professional relationships or employers of gender critical people in an attempt to silence them, get them sacked or cut off their income. So while our words may be publicly available, many women's identities, for very good reasons, not just in FWR but in Relationships, AIBU and many other areas of the site that can provoke male anger or overreach by the politically righteous, are not.

Hopefully this clarifies things for you.

That’s a good post @FlirtsWithRhinos but our scolders are completely unconcerned with women’s loss of rights, happy to take comments out of context, and to wilfully misunderstand and misrepresent legimate fears.

Re this paper and as long as MN did not give permission last year to their scrapings, they are illegally offering the very same data to others: The authors are willing to provide the data used to conduct this study to other researchers upon reasonable request.

Not an impressive showing by these university ethics departments if their researchers are using data taken without consent.

I don't have a problem with researchers analysing content on public social media. It absolutely needs to be available to scrutiny and analysis. It's usual to use software to do a faster job of gathering and cataloguing information that researchers would do 'by hand' anyway but take much longer to do.

The researchers should store gathered data only as long as needed and restrict access to it. It should be stored and published in a way that individuals could not be identified (i.e. further layers of anonymising on top of anonymous posting).

Consent by public social media users is not required if they can't have a reasonable expectation of privacy, it's usually not possible to trace users in time and space to consent anyway. Some researchers would disagree with this position in that they don't want to treat social media as automatically published but I think ethics committees would normally approve. You don't need to be a site user to take data off it.

The cited study is one of thousands of such low-quality studies published over recent decades in which a limited, politicised question is artificially tested in a small field of culture, the researcher having already decided on what can be found. 'Discourse analysis' is a particularly unsound method because it makes claims to be a more objective way of analysing language than lit-based interpretation, but isn't.

The real problem with such studies is the lack of incentives / funding to produce studies re-examining the same questions, or disputing the 'findings'. Who will be incentivised to do that as part of their job? Almost all postgrads and academics whose job is to produce research won't want to do it and academic publishers in this field wouldn't want it. Journals in this field may be peer-reviewed, but that can be by people with the same belief biases and lack of critical challenge. They are intensely inward-looking and political subject-areas Much analysis like this remains entirely unchallenged from a wider vantage point, is published and then put on course reading lists for the next lot to draw on as 'knowledge'.

On the bright side, I think this kind of 'research' will be sidelined more and more in the academic mainstream.

Programmatically scraping data from MN without permission is against MN's user T&C

Scrapers aren't MN users and therefore have not agreed to the Ts & C's like we did when we signed up. Scraping publicly available information is not illegal. Anyone can see what is written here just using Google or visiting the site as a non-user. It only becomes illegal if they try to sell it.

The anonymity of the posters is not compromised by their post appearing in the research than it is by it appearing on MN. Anyone who pays premium can do an advanced sear h and look at everything you've ever posted whether they found your post in the paper or on Google. If your identity is given away by your MN posts then you have been to lax in giving away identifying information.

The T&Cs apply to all visitors not just registered users, and it is any purpose not just selling.

https://www.mumsnet.com/i/terms-of-use

c. No part of the Website may be distributed, scraped or copied for any purpose without express approval and a licence to do so from us or our licensors. If you are interested in copying, licensing or using Mumsnet content for any purpose, then contact us at [email protected].
d. If you print off, copy, download, use, share or repost any part of our Website in breach of these terms, your right to use our Website will cease immediately and you must, at our option, return or destroy any copies of the materials you have made (except that you are permitted to print off a copy of these terms).
e. You shall not conduct, facilitate, authorise or permit any text or data mining or web scraping in relation to our Website for any purpose, including the development, training, fine-tuning or validation of AI systems or models. This includes using (or permitting, authorising or attempting the use of):

• i. Any "robot", "bot", "spider", "scraper" or other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, code, process or methodology to access, obtain, copy, monitor or republish any portion of our Website or any data, content, information or services accessed via the same.
• ii. Any automated analytical technique aimed at analysing text and data in digital form to generate information or develop, train, fine-tune or validate AI systems or models which includes but is not limited to patterns, trends and correlations.

As to anonymity, I am explaining to you why women are talking about it because you seemed to be confused about the topics.

Have now caught up with this thread, although did whizz through about 3 pages as the usual derailing suspect was getting far too much attention. Sadly.

But will need to, if i can be bothered, re-read the actual "report" which is clearly biased as all criticisms of FWR (why is it FSG) are just saying we the writers believe X, Y & Z and posters on FWR dont and are therefore evil.

Although in all truth when I saw someone mention that many had been thanked for helping twiddle dee and twiddle dum, including pets, I had a comlete moment of shock.

Can we be sure no pets were harmed in the making of this South Sea Bubble of "research"?

Do we need to alert a pet rescue team?

I don't think Mumsnet's T&Cs are aimed at academic research, which is normally treated as having an overriding public interest and fair comment concern to gather data. Journalism has a similar claim.

Most of the detailed references seem to relate to commercial data-scraping and content lifting which MN would of course want to protect its interests against.

I don't think these T&Cs, despite the 'for any purpose' wording could be enforced in the case of legitimate academic research using the public-facing data, i.e. forum posts, and I don't think the use of data-gathering and cataloguing software makes a difference to that - the way they were used and the content gathered would be logged and transparent. Any published research would have to abide by generally-accepted limits on reproducing content extracts.

Academic researchers gather internet content all the time and preventing that in the case of public-facing content would repress important public discussion. This academic article may be annoying but it can also be publicly criticised - although it will in all likelihood have a very small readership.

The anonymity thing is absolutely a debate, and universities continue to develop protocols to avoid identifying users, including 'jigsaw' identification via multiple sources.

I don't think Mumsnet's T&Cs are aimed at academic research

I actually can't tell if this is a joke...?!
Are you aware of the Aston University case?

I don't think you can decide that general Ts and Cs don't apply in your specific case for 'reasons'.

That's not how it works.