Is it not time now for Mumsnet to leave X/Twitter?

I post on XTwitter and Bluesky

Bluesky is full of virtue signalling and has a wide streak of intolerance

MrMenno getting his account limited for being 'anti LGBTQIA+' was a prime example

On some things Bluesky is quicker and more accurate
but even Heather Cox Richardson has gone back to referencing from XTwitter most days

Sensible organisations are on most platforms

What @RedToothBrush said. I like X. I think it is better in many ways since Musk bought it. He cleared out a lot of the porn, csa accounts and the mods who enabled them. He reinstated a lot of women and men who had been banned and gave free voice to gender critical views. There are a lot of people on X whose voices wouldn’t be heard otherwise. I hear that blue sky is owned and run by a lot of the old Twitter people and many things are banned/silenced just as they were on old Twitter. Choose your echo chamber as you will but don’t kid yourself you are on the side of the angels, or even on the right side of history.

I have found it very interesting to hear a lot of views I don’t necessarily agree with but have a much more useful understanding of why people hold them and don’t dismiss them with insults. Nelson Mandela said

‘If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner’

Is the aim from pp to be on BlueSky instead?

No thanks if so, it’s just another echo chamber

BIWI Just laughing because I wondered what else you had posted about and Mumsnet Advanced Search (not 100% reliable, I know) tells me that your very first post on Mumsnet on 11/09/2007 starts, "As a Guardian reader" 😂- on a thread titled "Why is the Daily Mail so hated on here?"

You go on to say,

"I hate the DM with a passion - and I do 'read' it fairly frequently as my business partner gets it. (Why I have no idea). Every time I read it I am still shocked by what purports to be 'reasonable' editorial views about women, single parents (usually mothers), immigrants (usually branded asylum seekers), those not blessed with employment, etc etc

But their financial and health pages are good - just a shame about the rest of it."

So I am going to ask you to consider exploring resources on X that you might have overlooked in your narrow focus on who owns the platform, hindered by your echo-chamber assumptions and "guilt by association" perspective on the political leanings of users.

Twitter and now X provides a platform that is invaluable for professional development and scientific collaboration across all subjects.

For example, is there anything like the Symplur Healthcare Hashtag Project on your preferred alternative platform?

Healthcare Hashtag Project
Healthcare Hashtag Project, a free open platform for patient advocates, caregivers, doctors and other providers that connects them to relevant conversations and communities.

https://www.symplur.com/healthcare-hashtags/

I also wonder, would you suggest to libraries, bookshops, schools, universities and colleges that they should stop stocking books from a particular publishing house because you disapprove of the politics of the owner?

Perhaps you would because that is close to the political pressure successfully exerted by activists on publishers, libraries, bookshops, schools, universities and colleges to cancel authors who dissent from their pet theories and positions.

Assuming that you are still a Guardian reader, you will no doubt be aware that intolerant staff, mostly based in the USA, have petitioned the Guardian to ditch respected UK journalists or have bullied them out of the their jobs.

Can't think why but I am reminded of this:

"The feminist origins of ‘political correctness’: PC terms in JSTOR"

Abstract

When ‘political correctness’ became a public concern in the USA in the early 1990s, it was almost immediately suggested that the term had long been something of a self-ironic slur in left-wing circles. While a number of people testified to this, the evidence advanced was almost entirely anecdotal, and to date no systematic attempt to gauge the reliability of these testimonies has been made. The present article seeks to rectify this. On the basis of a statistical account of politically correct (PC) terms – ‘politically correct’, ‘politically incorrect’, ‘political correctness’, ‘political incorrectness’ – in the Stockholm University version of the JSTOR database up to 1990, it challenges the received view that the term originated as a left-wing in-group marker which was used self-ironically. The evidence suggests, on the contrary, that the modern understanding of political correctness as a form of censorship first emerged in debates internal to the North American women's liberation movement. The article tables all uses of PC terms in JSTOR up to 1990. Before 1980, PC terms are used very sparingly and practically always non-ironically, with the possible exception of the one area in which the term gains ground in the 1970s: feminism. In JSTOR, prior to 1990, PC terms appear most frequently in feminist activist journal Off Our Backs (OOB). Usage in OOB makes evident that the notion of political correctness in the feminist context at the time was tied to a theoretical discussion concerning female sexuality. Climaxing at an academic conference arranged at Barnard College in 1982, this debate was pivotal for establishing the ironic understanding of political correctness we live with today, including the modern understanding of the concept as a means for the ‘closing of debate’. In sum, evidence suggests that the received view of the origins of the term ‘political correctness’ must be reconsidered.

Full article (no paywall):
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14647001241248752

Basically no due to needing the audience

the perils of aligning one's values with a platform rather than the other way around. The truth is, the platform any platform is merely a tool, a stage upon which society plays out its dramas. But it's the people / individuals, the decisions they make, that truly matter, not who owns it.

Yes well done @RedToothBrush

@RedToothBrush hear hear! Well said 🙌🏻

@RedToothBrush 👏👏👏

You can thank the prior management for that.
They had whole project teams working out framework and embedding code on how to minipulate the users feed and how to supress ideas or block users they did not agree with.

so because you’re being questioned about your ask that Mumsnet leaves the X platform, you call anyone who queries this a Trump or Musk fan?

You say you’re capable of working out who to hate all by yourself then make a huge assumption and generalisation about posters who do not share your views. Are people not allowed to think for themselves and have a different viewpoint anymore.

I can’t stand Bluesky which is (atm) an overly positive echo chamber full of earnest exiles who truly can’t handle any dissenting voices. It’s also a huge mess of feeds and seems to be the place for those disgusting MAP accounts to go and not get any pushback. Would I start a thread asking mumsnet to either leave the platform or not join it? Nope!

Hear hear @RedToothBrush , a heartfelt thank you for taking the time to post this

You started a thread entitled
'Is it not time now for Mumsnet to leave X/Twitter?'

Then said
Doesn’t feel like his/their values align with any of ours right now!

This reads like something of a demand and expectation. It was pretty strongly worded.

Then you said
I’m actually quite shocked that MN is still on X.

THEN when people said that disagreed, you replied, without any evidence:
Hmm. See my thread has brought out all the Trump/Musk fans
For the record, nobody is telling me who to hate. I’m quite capable of working out hateful behaviour myself. And how anyone can support Musk is beyond me.

That was the post that pissed me off tbh. I'd have ignored the thread otherwise.

I fundamentally disagree with it. I dislike intensely, many of the people who Musk has allowed to use the site, HOWEVER, I don't think always helps to have outright bans. It only further radicalises if too havy handed. It should only be for the most extreme cases. Otherwise you end up creating unintended issues and also making certain views almost 'forbidden fruits' which ADDS to their attraction rather than marginalising them.

Ultimately I think we need to have difficult conversations about and with people who have these views, because their power comes from the fact that they do connect with a level of disaffection in society. They feed off it and weaponise it. Trump and Musk have gained power due to a fundamental failure of the alternatives, who aren't willing to be self critical and more considered where appropriate. This left a political vacuum to be filled with conspirary theories and bullshit.

The solution is to resolve the disaffection - and that requires identifying the elements that underpin unrest. That's usually to do with some sort of sense of injustice. You then produce counterarguments and alternative narratives and you make change to improve things in life. These dissatifactions usually historically go hand in hand with times of poverty, lack of employment/ opportunity, poor quality of life and when large enough groups are struggling in some way. The tend to appear at the same time as large scandals too which expose a certain amount of institutional level self service. You don't get them in times of relative prosperity. This repeats through history. It is not unique to 2025.

A lack of engagement and dismissal of people because they are 'the wrong kind of person' or because they have 'the wrong kind of views' only makes things worse for this reason because it legitimises this sense of marginalisation.

Its only when people have disagreed that you are now saying
Mumsnet are also totally within their rights to do as they wish.
I believe this kind of questioning is also known as a discussion. No?

This is a reversing away from the strength of your initial posts and the attacks you made on others who posted.

There are a LOT of people on twitter who do not share these views. There are many American women who don't identify with the values of Bluesky, who are now on MN and benefit from the good stuff here. Indeed MN's real strength is precisely because it ISN'T the echo chamber that Bluesky and Twitter can be - if it brings in people from BOTH platforms thats a really GOOD thing for women and for ultimately shifting debate ON OTHER platforms (which we have seen MN do before).

Your initial posts did not read as the start of a discussion. It read as a demand that this is what MN should be doing if they have the 'correct' and 'right' values. You didn't want a discussion. You wanted to shame and discredit people who disagreed with you by smearing them as 'Musk and Trump supporters'. I can see a clear back tracking and I want to make that absoluetely clear and how this shaming by association using the propaganda technique of 'guilt by association' is a massive part of the problem which you can not just blame on 'the other side'.

I am done with cancel culture. We are in the political mess we are in with polarisation precisely BECAUSE of cancelation and a lack of engagement with complex and difficult subjects which require a huge amount of nuance and understanding that underlying causes may be valid and need recognition but can manifest in really unpleasant views. However it does not mean that there isn't a valid problem that we should be seeing and should be addressing. If we marginalise we simply stop our ability to offer a different solution and we stop discussion.

I do think some things need to be removed from the internet, but censorship has to be really thought out, and only used in the most extreme cases. Just to highlight the seriousness of the matter. The problem when too many people are being routinely censored is that it loses its effectiveness and it loses that idea of seriousness.

We are not having proper conversations about the limits of censorship and the negative sides of censorship because the mentality is 'that is bad, it must be stopped' and thats too simplist. 'Who decides' and who monitors the censors is a really important question because its about power and control. The comment of 'who do you think you are' has cropped up on this thread - and thats a reference to that concept.

Democracy needs to get its head around people having good and bad ideas is normal and healthy and then talking to make bad ideas less bad through adult reasoning. And that EVERYONE is wrong sometimes. And we need to involve EVERYONE. Not just the people we think are worthy enough or good enough. That includes 'stupid people' and 'very intelligent people'. The best moderation to that is to exposure to a wide range of ideas and values even if you strongly disagree with some. We should be making that the norm.

I'm kind sick of this Super Villian idea. Its not helpful. No Superhero is going to come along and make all the baddies disappear along with their ideas like magic cos the goodies are somehow infaliable. Its ridiculous. Thats not how real lie works.

I’m not on either but I wouldn’t be surprised those asking for this are on Bluesky.

As soon as you start accusing people of being Trump apologists you lose any and all credibility.

People don’t stay on twitter because they love Trump or Musk, they stay on twitter because it’s a long running platform where often useful information is available. In the same way people go on facebook/instagram.

Or do you think that anyone on facebook is a would-be scammer? Because facebook is known for that, amongst other unsavoury things.

TikTok is by far the most toxic platform out there, and yet people flock there in their droves. Does that make them toxic too?

What about companies whose practices you don’t agree with? Do you think, as I was accused of years ago, that not boycotting nestle means you’re proud of not caring about babies in the 3rd world?

Or do you perhaps not think that people buy nestle because they like smarties?

Not everyone wants to attach political meaning to their every move.

And attaching political meaning to people’s every move and using that to shut people down is far more toxic than actually just using something because it works for you.

Yanbu. Had you posted this thread (with the same circumstances), 15 years ago, most posters would have agreed with you and MN might have felt under pressure. But we didn’t have Trump apologists on the site then. And the ethos of MN as an organisation was less commercial.

Sorry but the idea that Twitter/X is the echo chamber rather than Bluesky is hilarious.

But that is exactly what Musk does. He blocks anyone who disagrees with anything he says or does.

If I was in a local organisation which was actively engaging on a world wide platform I would be using this as an excuse to remove the resources needed to manage it. And only use it as a notice board so read with no reply option possible.

Household brands should have realised how damaging viral SM can be and how badly some staff have reacted to bad PR. What benefit is it to an organisation to manage their complaints process in public?

And if it is for political reasons why is a household brands (normaly a for profit PLC) board of directors deciding on what the "correct" political opinion is?

No one is suggesting he isn’t though. I deleted my Twitter account because I don’t like Musk (and also because it became unusable due to ads and spam). I don’t think Musk should not be allowed to say his views though. It’s not cancelling someone to just not use their social media platform. Do you use Truth Social?

It’s perfectly reasonable to question if Mumsnet should still be on X. If you examine their account, their engagement has plummeted since 2021.

@Never2many I made a Bluesky account to try it out and there is already a lot of toxic behaviour on there. Unfortunately the social dynamics on that site are based on wanting you to block as many people as possible, which encourages an environment of purity culture and witch hunting. I’m not saying MN shouldn’t join it if they want to, but personally I feel it is a bad fit to this site’s culture. And I suspect the MN Bluesky account would end up in many “block lists” and be regarded as a terf account (however unfairly given the variety of opinions on MN).