Hi all
We thought we should come and address some of your recent points about our moderation, and particularly the worries you have about whether MNers have been taken in by a troll over the last few months, and how MNHQ has handled the issue.
Lots of you have probably missed our previous posts, so the plan is to bring everything together in one place and explain why we’ve been pretty firm about shutting down speculation on this case. We missed an opportunity to do so earlier and it’s led to lots of confusion - we’re very sorry about that, and we want to put it right now as far as we can.
So this is where we’re at: we don't have any evidence to suggest that a fraud has taken place, or that any MNers have been conned. As far as we can tell – and we have looked as carefully as we’ll ever be able to – the poster in question is the person he says he is: the father of a little boy whose mother has just died.
As we’ve said before, we can’t be 100% certain of anyone’s real life identity - it's simply not within our capabilities to know whether the person we’ve spoken to on the phone and via email and who’s been posting on the board is the same as the person of the same name and circumstances who exists elsewhere on the internet. What we do know is that we haven’t seen anything to suggest that money that kind Mumsnetters have donated has been misappropriated or misused - if we had, we would of course have involved the police.
Because MNers are understandably worried and upset, the idea has taken hold that wrongdoing has taken place. But, to be completely clear and to the best of our knowledge - it hasn’t. If you have evidence to the contrary, please get in touch with us immediately.
There have been deletions all over the shop on this - we know this must be incredibly frustrating and that loads of you still have questions and worries that you want to discuss. But we hope you’ll understand that we just can’t allow speculation or conjecture: the consequences if we do are too dreadful, for the family concerned on the one hand, but also for MNers, who are legally responsible for things they say on the boards which turn out to be unfounded.
Two posters have said on the board that they’ve received messages, off Mumsnet, which they felt were inappropriate and worrying - one of these posters reported this direct to MNHQ. We’ve been back to her, of course, but she's now told us definitively that she does not want to pursue it further and has de-regged. The conversation she describes did not take place on MN, and so there’s nowhere further that we can take that, unfortunately. We’ve of course been through the PMs on the account in question and there is nothing there that we’d characterise as harassment of any kind.
Despite all this, we suspended that individual’s account a few days ago, simply because we felt that his continued presence on MN was unlikely to do him, or MNers, any good.
We do see why the existence, for example, of a JustGiving board got people’s hackles up - but again, that’s quite a different thing from actual fraud of which we have zero evidence (and once again, please do bear in mind how serious an issue that would be, and that MNers are responsible for their own posts.)
What we really, really don’t want to do is to shut down discussion about the principles of the matter and our policies on this and other things - and when JustineMumsnet gets back from her break we’ll of course be debriefing her on the many points you’ve made (both on current and deleted threads, which we’ve been through with a fine tooth comb).
One thing that we’ve already done is to change our policy on links to crowdfunding/fundraising sites unless they benefit a registered charity - we agree that moving one of the threads in question to the Charities Noticeboard was a miss-step and that definitely won’t happen again.
We’re also looking really hard at what we say on the boards to reassure users who are worried about a potential troll - in retrospect, we shouldn’t have said that we’d gone above and beyond in checking this case out, because that implies that we can definitively validate any identity, and we can’t.
We really do want to hear what you think, and we listen hard to things that are pissing MNers off - recent examples are the changes underway on usernames1234 and the removal of the T-bar ad on mobile. We consistently turn down more ads than we take. We don’t and never ever will take money from tabloids for our content. We still put purpose before profit, and that’s not going to change - it's why a lot of the MN team have chosen to work at MN Towers. We do have to be sustainable - we’d all be out of a job otherwise - but it’s really worth having a look at the other place if you haven’t recently, to see what really chasing commercial gains looks like: it’s intrusive ads and a lot of sleb gossip.
We hope this helps to clarify our position a bit; do please do put your general thoughts here on this thread - we’ll be listening and we’ll try to help clarify anything that we haven’t covered here. Please do take on board what we’ve said about conjecture though - we’ll have to delete speculative posts if we see them here or if they’re reported on other threads.
Thanks
MNHQ