Part 2: MN misrepresentation in recommendations: a depressing blend of abject amateurism and outright greed

Hmm, so how are SWEARS BY products selected?

MNHQ claim the companies "never pay" for this, (except they actually do, in the form of commission...)

So what is the process?

MN: Find a product and go "oh hey GazeboKing, we fancy promoting you, will give us 10% of sales though our link?"
GK: sure thing!!!
MN: great... We'll find a random comment of the product, oh...wait not a single person has ever mentioned GazeboKing... let's find a similar product and put their comments in "I love this gazebo from Homebase it's so handy, light and brilliant".
MNer: ooooh... That's good, I've been after a gazebo, and looks like other MNers swear by it, they think it's great too... Soend spend spend....!

GK: oh wow MN, thanks!! We got a bazillion gazebos sold, here's your commission...

MN: mwhahahahhaah

Or is ir actually...
GazeboKing emails MN Swears By team, going heeeyyyyy, will you promote the GazeboMaster 9000? We'll give you 20% commission...
Which rather actually is a company paying for their place in Swears By (as is the other method...)

I can't see how any method is then not paying for a place I. swears by.

This is a good point. Not really lax and rushed then.

I appreciate the apology as far as it goes.

”We haven’t hidden the context” and “we linked to the original comment” doesn’t wash when you have altered the quotes and that’s not apparent from the landing page. Users will reasonably decide not to click through on the basis of what they see.

As for “I don’t believe there was ever a deliberate attempt to mislead” - well maybe not in the sense that Mumsnet did not intend to create Swears By articles that recommended classes of products that mumsnetters had no use for at all (“Mumsnet users recommend this concrete mixer!”).

There does however seem to have been an intention in many cases to link a generic recommendation, or a recommendation for a different brand, to a specific product that the OP hadn’t recommended. That is either knowingly false or it is reckless, not caring whether it was true or false (the test for misrepresentation or deceit).

I also note the failure fo address the allegation by many users that MN was suppressing the original thread on Active. I think we can reasonably infer from that, that it did happen. And I do not give MN the benefit of the doubt that they did so to prevent users from mistakenly purchasing electric blankets over the Bank Holiday on the basis of a false recommendation - if they had wanted that, they’d have let the thread stand so people knew not to use Swears By until it had been updated. They did it to protect the integrity of Swears By and stop people from realising what they’d been up to.

Posted the pics again for comparison. I haven't even been following the thread that closely, but this one shocked me. If MN seriously thinks this is okay, where's the line? You can effectively take my very post I'm writing now and change it to say whatever you like, and present your edited version so it looks like the original post - the same format and layout and everything. You're not just being creative with text quotes within an article. This is manipulated to look like a screenshot of a raw post. It's unacceptable.

Our intention has always been to offer genuine, helpful recommendations that we believe Mumsnet users will love. I don’t believe there was ever a deliberate intent to mislead - we’ve always linked user quotes to their original threads and haven’t hidden the context. But, having now reviewed this thoroughly, it’s clear that in some cases we’ve been both lax and rushed in how we've used quotes to support recommendations.

The screenshot in the quoted post seems to be a pretty deliberate attempt to mislead tbh. The MN-manipulated screenshot looks like it's an unedited post just screenshot straight in, but you can't just take out annoying words like 'cheapies' from a 'review' without intending to mislead the reader. You just can't.

They should actually be reporting these for this serious breach of the law..

I’d like to know

1. if this thread was shut down on actives
2. if mumsnet acknowledge this was illegal activity and they will report themselves?

I’m speechless tbh

Yes I would like confirmation of that too.

"...we’ve been both lax and rushed..."

Actually @JustineMumsnet , wouldn't you say it's the opposite? Searching the site for vaguely relevant quotes, searching back for years, then editing a quote to make it sound like something that it's not.... that actually sounds like a rather purposeful action, don't you think?

Justine's reply appears to indicate that she was previously unaware of these 'mistakes,' and therefore must have been as shocked as the rest of us.

'Lax and rushed' seems to have nevertheless produced an apparently consistent and - one assumes - profitable business model over the years

Well, that's the explanation we're getting, and its the one MNHQ thinks we deserve.

Trust has always been at the heart of Mumsnet

😐

Oh and also, can we have confirmation that the initial thread, in fact, WAS manipulated so as not to appear in Active conversations?

It's certainly an odd statement, one with inconsistent formatting and editing.

@JustineMumsnet Did you write that statement by yourself, or did someone else have input?

Also, would you please clarify if you've sought legal advice over this? And is that why you have taken so long to respond following your earlier statements?

And finally, Justine’s reply was written by AI.

The long dashes and overly measured cadence are a giveaway. I can only imagine the prompt: "Tell these proles it was an accident."

What’s most frustrating is the ongoing refusal to call this what it is: deception. Editing user quotes to sell products they never endorsed, then brushing it off as editorial sloppiness, is insulting to the community’s intelligence. This wasn’t a technical glitch or an ambiguous mistake - it was a systematic attempt to manufacture trust and profit from it. If a commercial brand had done this, it would be called out as fake reviews. That’s exactly what this is, and no amount of corporate language changes that.

The latest response sounds more like damage control than real accountability.
Calling it "rushed" or "lax" doesn’t explain why quotes were edited to change their meaning or used to promote unrelated products. That takes intent. When someone’s words about a £20 item are used to sell something completely different at triple the price, it’s not just a sloppy mistake.

The idea that quotes were "always linked to original threads" and not taken out of context doesn’t match what’s been uncovered. People have shown examples where the original post had nothing to do with the item being promoted, or was talking about a different brand entirely.

What’s also clear is that this wasn’t just one or two articles. The scale of editing that happened - quietly, over a weekend - suggests this was a routine way of doing things. That raises real questions about how long it’s been going on and how many users have had their posts misrepresented.

This goes beyond affiliate links. It’s about trust. If someone buys a car seat or baby monitor thinking it came highly recommended by other parents, only to find out it was based on a quote taken wildly out of context, that’s a serious breach of good faith.

If the goal is to fix things, there needs to be real transparency. Not just an audit behind closed doors, but a clear explanation of what changed, how many articles were affected, and what steps are being taken to prevent it happening again.

People aren’t asking for perfection. Just honesty. And so far, that still feels like it’s missing.

I do agree with this. No business is going to want to display their cock ups, so suggesting it goes in classics is just taking the piss.

Mumsnet has messed up, but some do seem to be relishing in it. The important thing is that it’s been pointed out, Mumsnet has now admitted they were wrong, apologised and are changing things doing forward. No, it shouldn’t have happened but we are where we are and imo we can’t really ask for more than what they have said in response, assuming they stick to what they have said.

Thinking about it, I think what has gone wrong is that probably when it started out, @JustineMumsnet spotted that certain products were widely recommended by mumsnetters, and generally praised on countless threads. At which point yes it makes sense to look for a way to monetise those recommendations

But then it's clearly become something where MN feel the need to fill a regular email with new recommendations, and generate income by finding companies happy to pay the commission.

The result, a scraping around for something, anything in a post anywhere, however tenuous and ancient to justify a claim that a product is recommended

I think for the "swears by" brand to work at all, MN need it to be an irregular feature, when there does seem to be at least some degree of genuine praise for a product in recent threads.

Otherwise to avoid misleading I would take out any even hint or implication that mumsnetters generally are endorsing the product and call the feature something like "MNHQ promotes" instead.

Don't be so ridiculous.

Makes me wonder why people still come here if they're so unhappy. There are a zillion forums out there.

Classics indeed.

I don’t believe there was ever a deliberate intent to mislead - we’ve always linked user quotes to their original threads and haven’t hidden the context. But, having now reviewed this thoroughly, it’s clear that in some cases we’ve been both lax and rushed in how we've used quotes to support recommendations

Given that there have been many examples given where MN have been shown to edit quotes so that they no longer refer to the original product (the Kindle fire being the first that springs to mind), do you really expect people to believe that there was no intention to deceive? It's not like saying that gazebos are nice in the summer, it referred to specific properties of an obsolete, discontinued product, that was then used as a review for a different one. Not even the latest version of the old one, a different product. Lax and rushed are not excuses for editing a quote to hide the fact that it was for something else.

Fair point.

I do!!!!

If you're genuinely upset by how all this has played out, why wouldn't you want to future proof or warn other users in the future.?

IF your apologies were genuine..... ????

It's good to have this update. And that does sound like progress

However, I think the whole "swears by" brand suggests or implies that lots of mumsnetters are raving about a product, not that some marketing person has trawled pages and pages of threads to find one comment that is vaguely in favour of the product

Who gets to decide if something is a classic? I would say this is more worthy than some!