Influx of far-right posters

[Slightyamusedandsilly]

Why has the site suddenly had an influx of far-right posters? Almost overnight.

Is this a concerted campaign by the black shirts from Dover, Reform or Tommy ten names to infiltrate women's SM?

Taxes are rising, unemployment is rising, the feeling of injustice (whether reasonable or not) is becoming more widespread. More people are feeling the pinch.

It's the perfect recipe for resentment to brew, and an anonymous forum is a perfect place for people to vent.

Plus women feel more threatened by the misogynistic attitudes and behaviour of some muslims, and Mumsnet is a mostly female body of posters.

Exactly.
But part of the issue is people often live in a bubble
I know the Brexit vote shocked me. And it took a lot of reflection and reading to realise what a privileged bubble I lived in.

I expect many "left leaning" people would feel quite differently if they were told that multiple houses on their street were going to be filled with people from these boats. In fact, I think that's the solution, we spread out the impact and house these people who arrive on small boats across all the leafy suburbs and gentrified MC city districts

Yep. In the old days it would've just been some muppet sock puppeting.
Now it feels like an Elon Musk invasion.

The term "bots" gets used to refer to people acting under instruction and to automated Twitter accounts, which didn't have to say anything long and complex.

But actually with AI becoming better I'd expect to see an increase in MN-length posts from accounts operated completely by AI or by AI with some human supervision.

Anyone who saw the Portsmouth thread in the small hours last night will know what I mean.

Nonsense. The Brexit vote did not shock me at all. I knew it was coming. I live in a very multicultural area and am left wing, I am not in a privileged bubble. It isn't white people in these areas shouting for stop the boats.
My friend lives in an ex mining village almost exclusively white about ten miles from me. They have a lot of reform voters and claim where I live is unsafe for white people. The only contact most have with where I live is driving through in their car and seeing people who are brown and black on the street.

Honestly the constant claims that it is only left wing people living in a privileged bubble who don't support stop the boats protestors and reform voters, is just rubbish. Reform voters are congregated in mainly white areas, yes often poorer areas. They are blaming immigrants for the poverty, rather than trump, Iran war, Brexit which many voted for, and the semi banking collapse that our economy has still not recovered from.

But it did shock me. Because at that point in my life I didn't really come across people in real life who hate the EU. And it's clear some people do still live in privileged bubbles.

It's easy to only see the world from certain perspectives

I don't like Reform as a party at all. I feel sick at the thought of them getting into power. But I can see why people are drawn to them unfortunately and that's why I really hope Labour can offer a true alternative that leads people to trust they will tackle these issues.

It used to be that a big player in this game was Russia's Internet Research Agency, based in St Petersburg.

It was owned by Putin's pal Prigozhin, whom Putin then assassinated. So I'm not sure what's happening with that at the moment. IRA or not, the Russians still do a lot of this...

... and so does everyone else.

This sort of media campaign gives exceptional bang for the buck and is a game anyone can play.

(Primer on the IRA from Wikipedia, although I haven't read all the way through the current version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency )

Far right?
Who decides what's 'far'?
Apparently wanting secure borders, controlled immigration and biological men to stay out of women's spaces means you're 'far right' these days.
Frankly... I'll take that if its the best insult you've got.

@Paganpentacle do you think reform are far right? Are the men in balaclavas intimidating people at Dover port far right?

Though having said that, European intelligence agencies did warn a couple of months ago that there was a Russian influence operation scheduled to ramp up in the UK this year.

And Stephen-Yaxley Lennon aka Tommy Robinson did recently visit Moscow. Now it's his right-hand man Daniel "Tommo" Thomas running the Dover and Portsmouth disruptions through a newly founded group called Patriot Platform

So make of that what you will.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Thomas_(activist)

I’ve managed to miss this - can you summarise what exactly people have been saying / supporting?

I think a tipping point has been reached and people are now prepared to say how they feel about mass immigration and not stay silent for fear of being called far right or racist.

I'm not a fan of Farage but no- I don't think either Reform or the blokes standing in the road at Dover are far right.
I've seen footage of locals bringing them water and applauding them, so they don't seem to intimidated either.

Have a look at the Portsmouth thread.

Taxes are rising, unemployment is rising, the feeling of injustice (whether reasonable or not) is becoming more widespread. More people are feeling the pinch.
It's the perfect recipe for resentment to brew,

Yes indeed. It's very important to have these ingredients.

It hasn't escaped my notice that the exact same individuals who helped create them (Farage shrinking the economy through Brexit, the Bravermens and Jenricks while in government directing more wealth to the wealthy) are the individuals now seeking to profit wildly from the brew.

I’ve been a Labour Party member since about the same time. I’ve always been surprised at how right wing a supposedly moderate site is! Not sure what your class reference is for….

Yes, I have noticed the Reform supporters/racist/xenophobic idiots are out in force.

It is the same thing on platforms like X. Just part of the far right attempt to influence opinion and manipulate the news agenda.

They pass themselves as people who have concerns about 'our women and girls' (although the recent Reform conference showed that they only show concerns with the women who agree with them and are happy to beat up those who don't) and hide their pure racism and xenophobia behind concerns about 'small boats'.

I have no sympathy either for the idiots who cowardly covered their faces while blocking Dover on Saturday.

We don't need the far right to continue to address illegal immigration in a sensible and effective way.

Oh, I see some of them have been deleted now.

But take a look forward and back from this post of mine, @MidnightPatrol .

You're not getting the full effect after the deletions, but they were the same poster spamming the same very long word salad over the thread. Some with very minor amendments like a customized intro line.

It was... interesting.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5575599-portsmouth-this-evening?page=11&reply=154606439

I don't disagree. The criminal idiocy of Brexit and the vile cronyism of Tory austerity all helped get us here.
The question is, how are labour going to tackle it? A few free bus fare gimmicks doesn't even come close. Nor does a promise to invest in the north when it's the south getting mega boats of illegal immigrants while we also live with astronomically high house prices and clogged infrastructure

I don't want to see Reform succeed. But I need to see Labour start to offer a viable alternative which rewards working people and doesn't threaten to squeeze them further

The group of men at Dover aren’t they the Patriot movement headed up by a devout Christian guy?

I don't want reform to succeed. But lower bus fares are not a gimmick, they make a real difference to people like me. Andy understands that working class people getting the bus to work and going out are helped by this.

Hi all. We haven’t seen any evidence of an influx of far-right posters, or of any organised attempt to infiltrate the site. Our users have always held a very broad range of political views, and those views shift over time just as they do everywhere else.

The current news cycle means that immigration and the recent protests are being discussed more than usual. We can understand why that might feel like a sudden arrival of bad actors, but we’ve looked carefully at the threads in question and haven’t found evidence that this is what’s happening. These are topics that genuine users want to discuss and it isn’t especially helpful in our experience to treat right wing and far right as interchangeable terms, as we have seen on many threads over the weekend.

We’ve always valued the airing of difficult and differing opinions on Mumsnet. It is one of the few ways we can understand other points of view in an increasingly polarised world. We will, of course, continue to take action on hate speech and other breaches of our guidelines, so please report anything you think crosses that line.

MNHQ

If you think some of the far right posters are genuine posters then there's no hope for MN.

It was exactly the same around Brexit. Some posters who were supporting Brexit posting on a full time basis who afterwards disappeared