General Election - is anyone else finding this worrying?

i'll dig as long as i blood like cat. you keep on whinging away too.

wereworm i dont have an issue with reporting trolls, go ahead and do it, lets make MNHQ life hell reporting every suspicious political view that we dont like.

Blimey, HH, what's to police?

It doesn't seem remotely unreasonable to follow the standard MN trolling policy and drop suspicious names over to MNHQ, if they are willing to have a quick look to see if, for example, there is one address producing lots of one-off partisan posts under a series of names.

That would only result in action if the poster's behaviour was clearly of the same pattern as social marketers who have been banned from the site before (I think this has happened e.g. the Halibornge Probiotic crew). Obviously, in most cases it won't be remotely clear that someone is abusing the site and no action would be taken. That can't make it wrong to try if only because making the effort helps to assert that it is wrong to engage in party political social marketing/word-of-mouth advertising, whatever they call it.

My point is a genuine one. how exactly do you police this? Many, many people "work" for political parties without having a party email address, and yes, guess what, some of them might even be mumsnetters already.

What a shame that you cant trust the good people of mumsnet to control this themselves in a way that has worked perfectly well until one person starts whinging about it.

And how will you decide who is a politrol? anyone expressing strong political opinions which mumsnet/catinthehat2 doesn?t like?

it makes me wonder how good they are as journalists if they can't manage the effort to blend in tbh!

I thought there was an interesting point in another thread (think it's in the news) about the Garry Lace and Beta incident. Someone had commented (in the article) that they weren't prepared when it all went off on here and how they should have had a 'team' to come on here and inflitrate the thread to try and make it more positive. I remember they had one person trying but it was so obvious it was someone infiltrating the board - I imagine if it had been a whole team it would have been carnage on here.

people who try that cat stick out like a sore thumb

there are still enough people on here who are known (i.e. been around for a while) that it would easily dilute any attempt to infiltrate

besides, their lack of knowledge of bumsex would show them up immediately

erm and what was it i said about witchhunt? isnt she the victim now?

It is not remotely likely (or desirable)that MNHQ would want to engage in a witch hunt like that. Particularly since there is such a broad grey area -- from out-and-out parasites to activists who join the site sincerely for political reasons but without wishing to engage with the site as a whole.

And fwiw it wasn't the Ben Furber article that made me feel irritable about the presence of 'politrolls' on this site. It was just seeing them sign up and post, not in large numbers but nonetheless annoyingly.

The action that can/should be taken is absolutely minimal. But it is still legitimate and very important for the posters in the MN community to make a distinction between people who want to join that community and people who want to exploit it. It is as valid a distinction for political infiltrators at their worst as it is for commercial infiltrators who exploit MN for paid word-of-mouth social advertising. And the two groups aren't disimilar, since political campaigning has been so devastatingly informed in recent decades by commercial advertising strategies.

You can't 'operationalise' the distinction between infiltrators and genuine posters in any way that would allow you to ban or expose certain posters but you can nonetheless assert community values, and assert the unnacceptability of the presence of people who are just using the site as a political instrument.

You don't have to be politically naive or ignorant of the precise gradations of parties' 'engagement' strategies with MN to feel pissed off by these things.

look, these posts will always be "infiltrated". if we start trying to control who does and doesnt post in a witch hunt fashion then arent we just as bad as them?

I think, though, that you will always get people with strong opinions, even if they are not actually employed by the party. You get it in every area on the site - and some issues are obviously more emotive/important than others. I think that it is up to individuals to be able to sort out what information to take on board and where it might be coming from, like we do on every other issue (including things like weaning and whether to get a FF or RF car seat)

When we had the DC webchat, the DM or simialr had loads of comments on their site that that was becuase we were Infiltrated by highly paid Labour activists.

yeajh right, I know two of the loudest yellers and I can asure you-nope.

I think its an easy scare tactic on an anonymous forum, and Mn hs a history of arguing things out so if so, just keep debating.

I hardly think they would be posting from the party HQ though, would they CITH2?

As herhonesty says, the people that do this type of marketing are fairly easy to spot, and most of us are familiar with the 'report' button.