@TeWiSavesTheDay
I firmly believe that political parties pay staff to spread their message/bring everything vaguely political back to them online.
There's a couple of very obvious UKIP suspects on Mumsnet unfortunately.
Actually I'm going to report this post to MN and ask, if it was found that someone WAS being paid to promote a political party on here whether that would be against talk guidelines.
Hi TeWi - thanks for flagging this one.
If we knew for sure that someone was a paid promotional agent of a party then yes, posting to promote them on the boards would break our Guidelines.
The difficulty lies in how we would know that they were a paid agent. Many perfectly ordinary people, after all, are very committed to a particular party without taking any payment or salary from them. In those cases it's not against our rules at all to post in support of parties.
We realise that it can be a bit tedious when posters seem to have signed up purely to promote a particular agenda, and where this seems to be the case we can email them off-board and let them know that their style is putting other posters off a bit, and/or starting to feel a bit spammy.
But bearing in mind that we're now very much in the run-up to the 2015 General Election, we think there might have to be a certain amount of acceptance that some posters just really are deeply affiliated to a particular party, and that their posts on MN will reflect this.
So a bit of a mixed picture really - as ever, the main thing is to report things to us if you'd like us to take a look.