Who is Kirk?

Let’s get to the point straight away. “Kirk,” the administrator of econjobrumors.com (EJMR), poliscirumors.com (PSR) and socjobrumors.com (SJMR), is David Llywelyn Griffith-Jones as reported by the OSINT researcher Jesse Nickles on Hucksters. David has an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics, is the owner of Econ-Jobs.com, and is the son of Stephany Griffith-Jones, a well-known development economist who is currently a board member of the Central Bank of Chile.

Please read Part 1 of my series to learn about EJMR. It is an online forum for economists filled with racist, homophobic, and misogynistic content. Many people call it “4chan for economists.” Here, I will describe how EJMR came to be, how David became “Kirk,” the breadcrumbs he left on the internet for OSINT researchers, and the possible existence of a co-conspirator who is a PhD economist working in the academic sector.

This research describes the UK citizen David Llywelyn Griffith-Jones and his associates using evidence that I found publicly available on the internet. If it were published in the UK, this article would fall under the journalism and public interest exemptions articulated in Articles 85(1) and 9(2)(g) of the UK GDPR.

Table of contents

1. Some background on David
2. The birth of EJMR
3. Tatonnement hands over EJMR to “Kirk”
4. David uses his friend’s phone number to register econjobrumors.com
5. David posts as “Kirk” from UK DFID
6. David’s birthday is “Kirk’s” birthday
7. David’s jobs are “Kirk’s” jobs
8. David promotes EJMR on his other websites and reuses code
9. David deletes mentions of his identity on EJMR
10. Are there two Kirks? Was David alone?
11. David’s mother will be disappointed
12. Getting in touch with David
13. A note to David

Some background on David

In order to understand the evidence I’m about to present, you need to know a little bit about David. You can’t find this information elsewhere because he scrubbed his online presence. This will be short: there are just a few important things.

David received his MSc from the LSE in 2007 as shown below in a screenshot from the LSE 06-07 Digest.

After completing his MSc in Economics at the LSE in 2007, David joined HM Treasury as a Fast Stream Assistant Economist. Fast Stream is a graduate program for the UK Civil Service. You can see his title in this 2008 article about A level economics that David co-authored.

In 2008, while David was employed at HM Treasury, he started Econ-Jobs.com and EconNet.co.uk, the latter of which was somewhat akin to EJMR. I will discuss these sites in more detail below.

In 2009, David joined the UK Department for International Development (DFID) as you can see from this participant list for a meeting on the World Bank between DFID and UK NGOs. David worked at DFID until mid-2011.

Between 2011 and 2013, David worked in earnest on his web projects that we will talk about later. In 2013, he incorporated Econ-Jobs.com after having run it as a sole trader since 2008.

In 2014, he started CleanCloud with his childhood friend John Buni. CleanCloud provides software for laundromats. David’s LinkedIn profile still lists him as the CTO and co-founder at CleanCloud. And, you can watch David discuss the business in this YouTube interview.

With that background, you’re ready to hear the story of how David became EJMR’s “Kirk.”

The birth of EJMR

In the beginning there was Tatonnement—the founder of EJMR. Tatonnement created EJMR in October 2006 on Blogspot at http://econrumors.blogspot.com. It is still online and worth reading. At its inception, EJMR was basically a blog: Tatonnement would post something about the job market for academic economists and people would comment on it. For example, here’s Tatonnement’s 2006 post “How many interviews did you convert into flyouts?”

On February 3rd, 2007, Tatonnement announces “we have moved” and discusses the pros and cons of moving to a message board format instead of blogspot.com.

I actually though about the form of this forum a good bit before I set it up. I have used different types of discussion groups for many years (all the way back to the old usenet days). However after looking at the message board there was really no way to make it work well for our purposes here.

In general the poster on the other thread was right, most of the benefits of the message board go away when you realize no one will want to register an account.

It’s the first allusion to the tradeoff between anonymity and accountability that will be a recurring theme in the history of EJMR.

Tatonnement moved EJMR to http://econjobrumors.proboards105.com/ where it persisted for about a year. Then, on October 1, 2008, Tatonnement moved EJMR to a BBPress site at http://www.econjobrumors.com where EJMR remains to this day.

Tatonnement hands over EJMR to “Kirk”

In July 2010—just shy of EJMR’s fourth birthday—Tatonnement opened a thread called “Selling the site” and wrote: “I have had about all I can take of moderating this site and I am considering selling it to someone else.”

Unfortunately, I can only give you a screenshot of that post and not a direct link because David recently took down the history of EJMR that was stored in the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine”. I’m guessing he was concerned about people reproducing the recent paper by Florian Ederer and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham because there was much discussion about that on EJMR. Fortunately, I downloaded most of the pages that were on Archive.org prior to their removal. I hope to get them published here soon. Stay tuned!

One month after Tatonnement said “I had about all I can take,” he started another thread called “Passing the torch” and solicited proposals from persons wishing to take over EJMR.

A few days later, in the “Selling the site” thread, Tatonnement was reminded to contact a user going by “Peter Hillworth” with a UK domain. This “Peter Hillworth” had presumably emailed Tatonnement with a proposal to take over EJMR but not yet received a reply.

Around that time, Tatonnement said that he received two excellent proposals.

Shortly thereafter, a user going by “Kirk” first appeared and introduced himself. At this time, the site was still administered by Tatonnement. This “Kirk” had the winning proposal to take over EJMR. As we will see, “Kirk” is David, though see below for evidence that David has a partner in the academic sector.

The formatting in that screenshot is different than the others because it comes from Archive.org’s capture of www.econjobsrumorsarchive.com. Tatonnement created econjobrumorsarchive.com because he was unwilling to give “Kirk” the database of EJMR posts but wanted to preserve the history of EJMR after the handoff.

David uses his friend’s phone number to register econjobrumors.com

On December 16th, 2010 the econjobrumors.com domain was transferred from Tatonnement’s US domain registrar to a UK domain registrar. Like Tatonnement, “Kirk” at first uses a “domain privacy” service to hide his name.

But, on June 21st, 2012, the domain settings changed and briefly revealed the name of the registrant for econjobrumors.com. I’m guessing that “Kirk” paid for six months of “domain privacy” and the service lapsed on June 16th. When “Kirk” realized this, he repurchased a domain privacy service on October 29th. Between June 21st and October 29th, the domain registration information was as shown below.

Notice that the registrant is our friend “Peter Hillworth” who had contacted Tatonnement about taking over EJMR. This is the first point we know that “Peter” is “Kirk.” Now I’m going to show you that “Peter” and “Kirk” are both David. First, I need to tell you about another domain that “Kirk” registered using the “Peter Hillworth” alias: EconQuestions.com. Here’s a screenshot of “Kirk” announcing EconQuestions.com on EJMR on April 25th, 2011.

Basically, “Kirk” wanted an anonymous site like EJMR and a non-anonymous site like Quora. So, he created EconQuestions.com. As I will discuss below, David created numerous websites related to economics and cross-promoted them, as “Kirk” is doing here.

OK. Let’s look at the domain registrations for EconQuestions.com and econjobrumors.com side-by-side. They both use the “Peter Hillworth” alias and are nearly identical.

Check out the phone numbers in the domain registrations. For EconQuestions.com it is 7515821141 and for econjobrumors.com it is 7515821149. The phone numbers differ only in the last digit: the first number ends in a 1 and the second number ends in a 9. Ignore the “+1” because there is no 751 area code in the US or Canada—both of these are actually UK numbers. But, the phone number ending in 1 is the real one: +44 (0) 7515821141.

Whose number is this? This was the phone number of Fleur Dawes as shown below.

Fleur Dawes is an animal rights activist who is, like David Griffith-Jones, originally from Brighton.

Fleur Dawes and David Griffith-Jones are friends on Facebook and in real life. You can see Fleur tagging David’s Facebook profile in the screenshot below from Facebook (or on archive.ph). Also, the one and only review that David Griffith-Jones has ever given on Facebook is for “In Defense of Animals,” the advocacy group at which Fleur Dawes is Director of Communications

David and Fleur were also physically together in London during the time when David took over EJMR as Kirk. Here is a photograph of Fleur that David shared on Reddit on Saturday, October 15, 2011 (archive) at the now-closed Starbucks across from St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

David used Fleur’s phone number to register econjobrumors.com and EconQuestions.com with the “Peter Hillworth” alias. I’m guessing that the Westbourne Terrace address was also Fleur’s, but I’m not able to confirm this. Maybe the address was another friend’s. I don’t think it was David’s.

David posts as “Kirk” from UK DFID

David was working at UK DFID in 2010 when he took over EJMR. As revealed by economist Jennifer Doleac (see also this pastebin), “Kirk” posted at least ten times from the DFID IP address 193.128.74.82 during his employment there. Sources confirm that this IP was at the old DFID office at 1 Palace Street in London where David worked.

“Kirk’s” other posts are also from London addresses. This is because David was living in London. I’m guessing one is home and the other is mobile or a friend’s house.

This pastebin makes clear that these IP addresses were determined using the method of Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jensen. Their recent paper showed that the IP addresses for many EJMR posts could be reverse-engineered due to how the usernames were assigned. Their method only works for usernames that had a “hash” and not for most of the named users like “Kirk.” But, as you can see by browsing the Internet Archive’s copy of EJMR (again, this is offline now, but I hope to get it up soon), the user “Kirk” had hashes just like other users at first: “Kirk owns the hash [sic] like other users, so his IP address can be found.” Apparently, David stopped using hashes for logged-in users some time in late 2011. So, I’m guessing these IP addresses here are the only ones that can be found for him.

Jennifer Doleac also shared a list of “Kirk’s” posts on EJMR. As you can see, David posted about a hundred times during his period of employment with DFID. I’m guessing EJMR quickly became David’s full time job which prompted him to quit DFID just six months after taking over EJMR. Soon, he would start placing Econ-Jobs.com ads on EJMR to capitalize on its large and growing userbase.

David’s birthday is “Kirk’s” birthday

On October 30, 2012, a user addresses “Kirk,” asking “do you ever get buyer’s remorse?” and “Kirk” responds “Only once. In the early days there was a heavy spam attack on my birthday” as you can see in this screenshot.

I looked back at all the EJMR posts discussing spam before that date and found two spam attacks, both of which “Kirk” posts about as being problematic. The first spam attack is on January 9th. The second spam attack is from January 31st to February 2nd.

Because WordPress threads are counted sequentially, I was also able to see the spam attacks in the data by looking at the number of threads deleted on any given day.

Here are a few posts from Kirk and others discussing the January 9th spam attack.

You can see that January 9th is David Griffith-Jones’ birthday from the UK regulatory filing for one of his companies.

When “Kirk” says “there was a heavy spam attack on my birthday,” that is David speaking about the first spam attack on January 9th, 2011. “Kirk” and David have the same birthday because they’re the same person. (Coincidentally, the second attack occurs on the birthday of the person I suspect was David’s early co-conspirator in academia.)

David’s jobs are “Kirk’s” jobs

On July 24th, 2013, “Kirk” created a “Employer and Salary Wiki,” which he describes as a “wiki for us to record our experience and salary offers at different employers” as you can see in the screenshot below.

Three days later, the Archive.org WayBackMachine captured its first snapshot of that page. Again, “Kirk” deleted the Archive.org data, but I managed to get a screenshot of it, thankfully. It appears below.

When that Archive.org snapshot was taken, three days after the employer wiki was created, there were just 9 jobs. Four of those jobs are David’s jobs: EJMR Admin, DFID Economist, DFID Economic Advisor, and HM Treasury Assistant Economist. He even describes the Fast Stream program. Basically, David created this page as “Kirk” and he was the first person to add jobs to it.

Archive.org captured the page again on August 9th, at which point there were 10 jobs, and September 9th, at which point there were 11 jobs. But, in the September 9th snapshot, David’s job descriptions have been edited as shown in this screenshot

I suspect that David returned one day in August, saw there was low engagement with the employer wiki, and then felt uncomfortable about having written such detailed descriptions of his employment. So, he decided to delete some of what he wrote. Notably, ordinary users could not edit the employers wiki after a making a submission: there was no mechanism to do so. You can still see his jobs there today, but you have to search for them (Control-F) because it’s now rather plagued with spam (archived).

David promotes EJMR on his other websites and reuses code

Before taking over EJMR in late 2010, David started several similar websites. To this day he continues to operate a network of websites related to the economics profession.

First, as we discussed above, David is the founder and owner of Econ-Jobs.com. David uses EJMR to drive traffic to Econ-Jobs.com. Econ-Jobs.com is the only advertiser on EJMR that is not from Google AdSense.

In the past, Econ-Jobs.com prominently advertised its link with EJMR (see screenshot below) and it attracted several high-profile job postings for economists. However, since economist Josh Gans highlighted the link between the two sites on Twitter about a month ago, Econ-Jobs.com has become barren and features no jobs.

Second, in December 2008 David started the now defunct site EconNet.co.uk which described itself as “the one-stop resource for Economists providing News, Discussion, Resources and Jobs.” Like Econ-Jobs.com, EconNet advertised that it “partnered with Economics Jobs from Econ-Jobs.com.” Otherwise EconNet is uninteresting, though it does show that David was quite prolific developing sites like EJMR.

Third, in late fall 2008, before he started EJMR, David created a Ning network for economists which was similar in spirit to EJMR. By early December 2008, this social network had 506 members and later grew to over 1,000 members.

You can see that David’s profile picture on Ning is Stringer Bell, a character from HBO’s The Wire. When David posted as “Kirk” on EJMR, he made at least 20 posts related to The Wire or Stringer Bell.

Shortly after taking over EJMR, you can see that David promoted EJMR on his Ning network for economists. David is the only user to ever mention EJMR on that Ning site.

Fourth, in early 2010 and before taking over EJMR, David started yet another site called EconChat.org which was essentially an imitation of EJMR at the time.

Now pay close attention. David started EconChat.org in his persona as David. David also started EconQuestions.com in his persona as “Kirk.” Here you can see “Kirk” announcing EconQuestions.com on EJMR.

Here’s what is funny: These two sites have the same underlying HTML source code. Take a look at the source of this EconChat.org page and this EconQuestions.com page. You’ll notice these bits.

<!-- Econchat.org source code (created by David) -->
<h2 id="beladtitle">Post a Topic</h2>
    <div id="explain">

<!-- EconQuestions.com source code (create by "Kirk") -->
<h2 id="beladtitle">Ask a Question</h2>
    <div id="explain">

and also these bits

<!-- Econchat.org source code (created by David) -->
<p id="aboutlad2">
    <a id="startbut2" href="javascript:toggleSlide('submit');">
        Post a New Discussion
    </a>
</p>

<!-- EconQuestions.com source code (created by "Kirk") -->
<p id="aboutlad2">
    <a id="startbut2" href="javascript:toggleSlide('submit');">
        Post a New Discussion
    </a>
</p>

What’s interesting about this are the id elements. Look at those weird choices like beladtitle and aboutlad2. It would be common to repeat such things if you were using some kind of CSS framework. But, as you can easily verify by searching GitHub, these are not part of any framework. Instead, they are weird choices by a single individual: David wrote econchat.org and then copied the code over to EconQuestions.com.

Here’s another funny thing on EconQuestions.com. Check out the HTML source code here and also here from Archive.org. Notice in the first link that the user ID of “Kirk” is #3. I’m showing you the relevant excerpt below, formatted for readbility.

<p id="storyinfo">
    <img class="prof"
        title="Signup to get a profile pic"
        src=" thimg/1303727637.jpg"
        alt="image" /> 
    By
    <a href="index.php?user=3"
        title="Click to see all posts by this user">
        Kirk
    </a>
    (101) | 7 months ago
</p>

Kirk is user ID #3. There are no users #1 or #2: I’m guessing #1 and #2 are internal users for the forum software he’s using. The first “real” user is “Kirk” with ID #3. Now, look at the second link. Who is the next user to register on “Kirk’s” new EconQuestions.com, the user immediately after “Kirk?” It’s David!

<p id="storyinfo">
    <img
        class="prof"
        title="Signup to get a profile pic"
        src=" thimg/1303731416.jpg"
        alt="image" />  
    By
    <a href="index.php?user=4"
        title="Click to see all posts by this user">
        David
    </a>
    (11) | 7 months ago
</p>

Basically, when David created EconQuestions.com, he first created his alias account “Kirk” and then immediately created his personal “David” account.

David deletes mentions of his identity on EJMR

As pointed out by Jesse Nickles on Hucksters, all EJMR posts that mention David Griffith-Jones, his mother Stephany Griffith-Jones and his father Robert Griffith-Jones, the CleanCloud laundromat business or even his mother’s maiden name Stepanka Novy Kafka are deleted within minutes, even if these references are obfuscated with extraneous letters or symbols.

This is in great contrast to the offensive, libelous, and defamatory content regarding other people on EJMR which is allowed to remain. As Jesse Nickles rightly observes, David is a “hypocrite” for this asymmetry. In fairness, David takes some offensive content about other people down upon request. But, his motivation seems to be liability rather than kindness. Plenty of horrible content targeting specific people persists in spite of pleas for removal.

Of course, maybe David will remove the “Griffith-Jones” deletion feature after this article is published.

Are there two Kirks? Was David alone?

There’s some evidence that suggests that, early on, David had a partner who is a PhD economist working in the academic sector. First, Tatonnement wrote “Grad students need not apply” in his solicitation.

Second, a few years later, Tatonnement and “Kirk” had a disagreement that resulted in an online exchange. Tatonnement described “Kirk” as a “recent Ph.D. in U.K.,” who was “good at web dev,” and that “google searches indicated he had the skills [to take over EJMR]”.

Third, in response to Tatonnement’s post, “Kirk” said “I’m just a youngish academic like everyone else.”

Fourth, in an email interview in December 2011 “Kirk” mentioned that “it could be damaging to my career to be named as the moderator of the site” and that “I stand alone [as an economist] in a society dominated by political scientists.”

Fifth, early posts by “Kirk” show two voices. One voice appears to be enamored with Apple products and the other not. David is a UK native, but “Kirk” sometimes writes like an immigrant to the UK: “In the UK currently, created a hotmail account ejrumors@hotmail.co.uk.”

Sixth, when trying to hand over the website Tatonnement wrote “I would love for a larger group like the Walras team or something like that to take this on.” And, in his first post, “Kirk” wrote “we have a talented web designer on board, be sure to take advantage of his skills.”

My suspicion is that Tatonnement gave EJMR to a team of two: one a junior faculty person at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the other David, the “talented web designer” who is “on board.” Why LSE? Because of Tatonnement’s description of “Kirk” as a “recent Ph.D.,” and “Kirk’s” description of himself as a “young-ish academic” who is “in the UK currently” and “in a society dominated by political scientists.” And, finally because of the large amount of LSE-related content after “Kirk” takes over, which is obvious if you read the posts on EJMR around that time.

But, I think the uni professor didn’t have the time or ability to run the site and so David took over. I have some information on this professor but I’m not certain. Maybe David will tell us. Check back soon!

Of course, it is possible that this is all just David and that he, for example, lied to Tatonnement about having a PhD. But, I’m leaning toward there being two people early on.

David’s mother will be disappointed

David comes from a family of academics. In the aforementioned CleanCloud YouTube interview (at 32:10) David mentions that “both of my parents are academics” and that “one is a professor and one ran a business school.”

His father, Robert Glyn Griffith-Jones, received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1980 and was an administrator at Brighton Business School. He seems to have been a very supportive educator. I found several acknowledgements for him in PhD theses at the LSE and at Brunel University.

David’s mom—Stephany Griffith-Jones—is an academic rockstar. Let me tell you how awesome she is.

Stephany is a development economist who is currently a board member of the Central Bank of Chile and an economic advisor to Chilean President Gabriel Boric. She was previously on the faculty of Columbia University and an economics professor at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She obtained her PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge in 1981.

She has written or edited over 25 books and numerous scholarly articles. Among those was Time for a Visible Hand, which Stephany co-edited with Jose Antonio Ocampo and Joseph Stiglitz in 2010. She has advised many international organisations, including the European Parliament, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, various UN agencies and several governments. You can watch a video of Stephany speaking on UK economic policy, read more about her accomplishments on her personal website (hosted on David’s Econ-jobs.com server), and find her on Twitter at @Stephanygj where she is quite active.

Stephany encouraged and supported her son’s career in economics. She co-authored an economics paper with David and his former LSE classmate Dagmar Hertova while David worked at HM Treasury. Stephany also collaborated extensively with David’s subsequent employer, authoring no fewer than seven papers that were prepared, commissioned, or funded by DFID.

Most importantly, Stephany has done much to advance the cause of women in economics. She is the recipient of the Distinguished Czech Woman of the World Award (2006), a strong advocate for female representation in economic governance, and a role model for Latin American women in economic policy.

It is perverse and ironic that David has done so much to enable sexism and misogyny in economics. What terrible damage David has done to women in the field of economics and what a contrast to the achievements of his mother!

Getting in touch with David

If you want to talk with David about his contributions to the field of economics, you can find him here:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Email
  • davidgriffithjones@gmail.com
  • davidlgj@yahoo.com
  • admin@poliscirumors.com
• Phone
  • +44.2033973224 (Econ-Jobs.com)
  • +1 415 212 5626 (CleanCloud)
  • +44 (0)20 8629 1097 (CleanCloud)
  • +52 55 8525 0335 (CleanCloud)
• Mail
  • CleanCloud Headquarters
    Unit 2,
    12 Hoxton Market,
    London, N1 6HW

If you choose to contact David, please be civil.

Please note that there is a designer named David Griffith-Jones who lives in Sweden and has a substantial online presence. There is also a David Griffith-Jones who is an attorney in the UK. These are both different persons with no connection to David Llywelyn Griffith-Jones, the owner of EJMR/PSR/SJMR. There are even a few others, but those two are the ones you might easily confuse with David Llywelyn Griffith-Jones.

A note to David

Countless persons in our profession, particularly women, have been attacked by the anonymous hordes of EJMR. These victims suffered without recourse or redress. Maybe reading this, David, and being powerless to censor speech about yourself on this website, you will understand some exceedingly small part of their experience. Though, those who faced rape threats and similar harms on EJMR will surely not see any equivalence. To them—to the female economists in particular—I have this to say. I am sorry for what you have endured. I hope I can help you find restitution.

Stay tuned for further updates in this series.