Synthesis, Circularity and Citogenesis

Fabricating the founders of LGB Alliance, and GPAHE plagiarises Wikipedia.

In February 2024, Edinburgh University announced the uncontested election of Simon Fanshawe as rector. Fanshawe is one of the original founders of Stonewall, and now a diversity and inclusion consultant, but also quite critical of Stonewall’s direction and approach to issues of sex and gender. Notably, he attended LGB Alliance’s launch event in 2019, and has twice spoken at their annual conference.

Naturally, this meant his appointment was greeted with howls of condemnation, and many tired old attacks on LGB Alliance were wheeled out as a sort of guilt-by-association attack on Fanshawe.

Much of this centred on a long-time misconception that Fanshawe was a founder of LGB Alliance - he wasn’t, as he spent quite a lot of time explaining in the midst of this maelstrom:

Here Simon clearly states it was founded by two lesbians, one of whom (Bev Jackson) replies with more details.

A few days later, the Edinburgh Staff Pride Network released a statement objecting to the appointment, based on:

His close ties to the LGB Alliance (an organisation founded to spread anti-trans propaganda, categorized by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism as an “anti-transgender” hate group)

This provides two citations to support the idea that LGB Alliance are a terrible organisation who Fanshawe should be condemned for his “close ties” to. Irrespective of the merits of those close ties, or indeed the many hyperbolic misrepresentations and smears contained therein, I want to look at one specific misrepresentation contained in both of these sources, and how it was plagiarised from Wikipedia, which is: who founded LGB Alliance?

Founders

For background, LGB Alliance was founded in 2019 by Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. They tweeted about this at the time, and a more comprehensive account of the founding can be found here.

LGB Alliance was founded at Conway Hall on 22 October 2019 by two lesbians -- Kate Harris and Bev Jackson. Kate is a lifelong feminist and lesbian activist and was a volunteer fundraiser for Stonewall while working as an executive at American Express. Bev was a founding member of the UK Gay Liberation Front and has a long history of activism for progressive causes, including refugee rights. She is a translator and writer.

Should you doubt the veracity of this, they have both given evidence in court as part of the challenge to their charitable status which corroborates all of this.

Bev and Kate met in the spring of 2019.

…

Bev and Kate decided to contact around 70 other LGB people with similar concerns, to hold a meeting and to launch a new organisation. They spent months preparing like underground resistance workers, keeping their meeting secret, because of the hostile climate for their ideas.

After the cancellation of a meeting planned for October 2019 at the LSE about the Gay Liberation Front (of which Bev was a founding member), Kate and Bev planned an alternative meeting for the same date, with a view to launching a new LGB organisation to fill the void they felt Stonewall had left. From Kate Harris’ witness statement in their 2022 tribunal defending their charitable status:

Ms Jackson had been asked to sit on the panel of a GLF anniversary meeting at LSE in October which she references in her witness statement. That meeting was cancelled, but on 18 July 2019 Ms Jackson called me to say that she would be travelling to London in any case and that she thought we should call our own meeting on the date that the meeting had been planned for - 22 October 2019. I said to her “That is the best news I have heard all year!”. This was the day when we both realised that we could finally move forward in setting up a group specifically aimed at fulfilling what became our charitable objects

They spent the intervening months sounding out potential allies, inviting people in strict secrecy, one of whom was Simon Fanshawe, who spoke on the day. Of those attendees, some immediately joined:

Kate and Bev – and the rapidly-assembled little team including Allison Bailey and Malcolm Clark -- also received a barrage of abuse – before a single public statement had been made.

I don’t believe there is any serious dispute that Kate and Bev instigated the meeting and invited the attendees, and whether or not people joined them immediately or came on board soon after, or were later appointed directors doesn’t really change the wide recognition of all involved that Kate Harris and Bev Jackson are the two co-founders.

However, the sources relied upon by Edinburgh Staff Pride Network say something different:

The group was founded by Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark and Ann Sinnott

So where does this come from?

Wikipedia Synthesis

If you Google LGB Alliance, you see a nice, helpful, authoritative-looking information box populated from Wikipedia, which displays this different set of founders:

Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopaedia assembled from what reliable sources say. There are rules against original research and synthesis, which mean that you aren’t supposed to combine multiple sources to make novel claims that no one source makes on its own. Those rules seem to have been disregarded in 2021 when a handful of editors started piecing together a list of names from passing references and adding them together to decide who LGB Alliance’s founders really are. After much back and forth and source juggling, Ann Sinnott was added in August 2021 based on a Pink News story about her resignation, and Allison Bailey and Malcolm Clark were added in September 2021 from similar isolated mentions. Taking multiple independent passing references like this and concatenating the names together is not how sourcing is supposed to work on Wikipedia. This specific list of founders as it now appears (Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark, and Ann Sinnott) appears nowhere else prior to its invention by these few editors on Wikipedia.

To illustrate how dubious this is, retaining one of those names - Malcolm Clark - was justified with a January 2020 Pink News story describing him as a “founder”, and attacking and misrepresenting one of his Facebook comments. In response to the piece, Malcolm said the following:

In fact, some months later, he reiterated the point in a back and forth with Ryan Butcher, then Pink News’ head of news.

Note that Ryan Butcher here seems to concede the point, yet Pink News have never corrected the record.

It seems not to matter that, according to standard Wikipedia rules on self published sources about an organisation, it is absolutely fine to simply take what their website states as true. It seems not to matter that more reliable sources say that Kate and Bev are the two founders, and that any earlier misreporting can be chalked up to a small, fledgling organisation getting mixed press coverage - again, something Wikipedia’s rules on favouring more recent sources is supposed to correct for. It doesn’t even seem to matter that there is absolutely no dispute about any of this from anyone involved and multiple court documents and journalistic sources verifying exactly what they plainly state on their website. The problem with all these rules about what is a reliable source and what is improper synthesis is that editors decide when and how to apply them, and this is a process that - in niche and highly contentious areas like this - isn’t exactly bulletproof, to put it mildly.

Frankly, it has gone on so long that unless a decent journalistic source outright states that this Wikipedia article is stuffed full of nonsense, I can’t see it ever getting addressed.

Edinburgh Staff Pride Network

Which brings us back to the Edinburgh Staff Pride Network statement, and its two citations, one a Pink News piece, and one a report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), both of which can’t even get the organisation’s founders right.

Wikipedia says, in September 2021:

Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark, and Ann Sinnott

GPAHE later repeats this, in August 2022:

Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark, and Ann Sinnott

As does Pink News, in September 2022:

Bev Jackson, Kate Harris, Allison Bailey, Malcolm Clark and Ann Sinnott

The same five names, in the same specific order, and all three incorrect.

The probability of either source independently coming up with that non-alphabetic list of names, in that same order, by pure chance is less than one in a hundred.

Since its fabrication on Wikipedia, that list of “founders” has gone on to appear not only in these two sources, but multiple Pink News articles. The obvious conclusion is that both GPAHE and Pink News have merely copied it from Wikipedia, and in the case of Pink News, they are themselves at least in part the originating source, now regurgitating their own knowing misrepresentations as fact.

This is essentially circular, something editors on Wikipedia should be on the lookout for, but because the information is merely plagiarised (rather than actually cited) and no serious source is likely to write an expose of this GPAHE report and Pink News’ atrocious journalism, there seems no way of correcting this. It is surely only a matter of time before someone cites one of Pink News’ many subsequent articles listing those five founders as “proof” that that’s who the founders are, which will be a particularly intractable case of citogenesis.

XKCD webcomic which coined the term “citogenesis”

It might seem comparatively minor that Pink News is copying this information from Wikipedia, even if it is the roundabout source of these false claims. However, in the case of GPAHE, the plagiarism is far, far worse.

Global Project Against Hate and Extremism

The report which ESPN cites was published by GPAHE in August 2022, on far-right and extremist groups in Ireland. GPAHE give every impression of being a serious organisation monitoring rising hate and extremism across the world, and most of the groups listed are indeed far-right groups. However, the authors saw fit to include LGB Alliance Ireland in that list, a tiny (and now seemingly defunct) Irish group inspired by the launch of LGB Alliance in the UK.

It turns out on close inspection that not only has this report lifted the list of founders from Wikipedia, but in fact, virtually the entire passage was blatantly plagiarised from Wikipedia. Below is a series of sentences collected from the Wikipedia page as it was around the time this report was written, compared to the text of the report itself.

The sentences do not appear in the same order in the Wikipedia page, but apart from minor formatting changes and americanisms which I have excluded from this comparison (commas inside quotation marks, “behavior” instead of “behaviour” etc), virtually all of the GPAHE report is copied verbatim from Wikipedia. Additionally, most of the underlying citations are the same too, with referenced Pink News articles copied from Wikipedia to substantiate the same claims.

The differences are, on the whole, trivial, and this is as clear an example of plagiarism as one could expect to find.

As for the substance, it is worth noting that of the sentences, only the final three actually refer to LGB Alliance Ireland at all. The rest are entirely about LGB Alliance, the UK charity, of which some of those are smears and misrepresentations I have written about previously (for example, John Nicolson’s one-sided account of being piled on organically on social media after repeatedly attacking LGB Alliance and randomly arguing with Jonathan Ross). The GPAHE report not only cites Pink News, but is plagiarised from a Wikipedia article substantially based on Pink News stories. Indeed, most of the negative content on the Wikipedia page and a third of all the citations are from Pink News, who have mounted a sustained attack on LGB Alliance since it was formed. This report is now cited on that page itself, to substantiate an allegation that LGB Alliance Ireland is an extremist organisation. This is not just circular, but a feedback loop, taking the same claims on Wikipedia, and reframing them even more harshly, which then produces more stories exaggerating them further, and on and on in a spiral of hyperbole and condemnation.

GPAHE are an organisation based in Alabama, started up by two former Southern Poverty Law Center veterans. If a US-based organisation with no connection to the UK is classifying a registered UK charity as a “hate group” based on reading a Wikipedia article about them, and copying it almost verbatim into an authoritative looking report, this is not an organisation that anyone should be taking seriously. Yet these are people whose platform enables them to address the UN, and nobody is holding them to account.

Just this week they boasted of their expanded database of hate symbols which is to be used by:

tech companies, governments, law enforcement agencies, militaries, and civil society organizations

Their database lists the acronym “LGB” as a term of anti-trans extremism:

"LGB" is term that is deployed in order to disassociate equal rights for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals from those of trans people by removing the "T" from "LGBT." This version of the acronym was used prior to the 1980s, when the "T" was eventually added. The transnational organization LGB Alliance, headquartered in the UK, uses this acronym to signal their opposition to rights for trans people.

This sort of thing should worry anyone who thinks that LGB is a completely neutral term, if this is what GPAHE and organisations like them are training “law enforcement agencies” to be on the lookout for.

Conclusion

If there were any justice, there should be some sort of correction of the false information Pink News have been perpetuating for years, an admission they have been shamelessly cribbing a list of “founders” from Wikipedia, and most of all a retraction of the shoddy plagiarism in the GPAHE hatchet job. That of course will never happen, because smears like this last forever, are never corrected, and are simply recycled over and over as if no-one has ever challenged them, as this latest attack on Simon Fanshawe demonstrates.

Should someone accused in this fashion reject guilt by association, or is that an admission there is something wrong with the association in the first place? Should you mount a full-throated defence even though it is exhausting and pointless and, by rights, should not even be necessary?

Fanshawe’s situation really shows the impossibility of grappling with these accusations when you’re confronted with them. The protest against his appointment contains so much wrong it is impossible to know where to start. You can write an essay on just a couple of select points, as I have, and still barely scratch the surface of it. And even if you were to go through point by point, explaining at length why every single thing claimed is wrong or a misrepresentation, it will have no effect because this sort of thing will just pop up again.

If Pink News cannot even get something as basic as who founded LGB Alliance right - indeed, showing a flagrant disregard for it - why is anyone taking them seriously?

If GPAHE determine who is or is not a hate group by plagiarising wikipedia, why is anyone taking them seriously, and who is supposed to be holding them accountable?

If Edinburgh Staff Pride Network are relying on this quality of source to inform their opinion, what does that say about their judgement?

Once again, this highlights both the power of Wikipedia to shape social attitudes in these niche areas, and its vulnerability to groupthink, feedback loops and motivated activism, with inadequate oversight, no realistic means of correcting the record and profound real-world consequences.