to wonder if deleting troll threads is the right thing to do?

[HaveringWavering]

Yet again I’ve spent a chunk of time and effort replying to a thread with advice based on my own experience, only to find that it was deleted minutes after I posted for “breaking our talk guidelines”. There was nothing in the OP’s posts that was racist, personally abusive or the like and it hadn’t descended into argument, so I can only assume it was a troll in the simplest sense of being a fabricated story.

Thing is, about 100 other people had also expended time and effort that went up in a puff of smoke. Even if OP was making it up, the advice was most likely genuine and may have helped a real person in a similar dilemma. After all, didn’t newspaper problem pages do this for years-make up letters to use as a platform for giving general advice?

We can’t tell if anything anyone says on here is true, so is there any good reason to impose very high standards of truth on OPs? What is gained by deleting hundreds of posts of useful advice? From my perspective it just deters me from answering anything, and if enough others feel the same then genuine OPs will start to lose out.

So, AIBU to say that allowing a fantasist thread to remain is more respectful to genuine Mumsnetters than deleting it?

Well, I think that it feeds and encourages them, and it's very deceitful. I remember replying to one, giving advice to someone troubled - turned out to be a troll.
Delete and ban is the only way.

Deleting and banning is best. Otherwise it just encourages them.

I do wonder if MNHQ could just lock some of them, rather than delete them, when people have responded with very good and personal advice and experience on often painful and difficult topics. This would respect the time and feelings of genuine responders but mean that the process wasn’t prolonged and the troll doesn’t continue to be fed.

Perhaps this is naive but how does mumsnet determine what is a fabricated story thread and what is not? I've never understood that. I also don't think it deters future trolls by deleting it. If it did, then the problem would cease to exist surely?!

I reported that one as soon as I saw it. There’s a particularly unpleasant troll doing the rounds at the moment, claiming to be considering a termination which may be legal but is on the cusp (usually around 20 weeks.)

Yes, I've seen several abortion ones which turned out to be trolls. Very unpleasant.
I always spot and report the fabricated school/teacher ones.

@Maireas @SparklingPeach does it really matter if they continue though? Nobody is interacting with a real person on this site, and people are quite possibly fabricating all sorts when they respond to a post but nobody polices that, despite it being potentially more harmful to a genuinely-distressed OP than a thread started by a troll.

Also it’s acceptable to change some details to prevent being outed, where to draw the line between partial and total fabrication?

To my mind there are types of trolls that should be deleted- thinly-veiled beggars, those looking to goad with outrageous statements, MLMs, PBPs, but to delete simply on the grounds of being not true? Canmt see how it matters when nobody is identifiable or under oath.

To put it another way- I find it more annoying that my time and effort replying is wasted by the deletion than by knowing that the OP herself was a fake. If I only wanted her to see what I had written I’d send a PM. By posting on a forum publicly it becomes about more than just the OP.

There was one the other day, about inheritance issues. OP was a troll, but a lot of people gave really useful advice on there about the law that was of much wider application.

Not a bad idea.

Yeh, but they get their kicks still as it's published and with responses.

They don't. I know one previously banned poster whose thread was genuine but it was pulled for being a "troll".

does it really matter if they continue though

Yes, it matters

I read that one but didn't spot that it was a troll. (I'm very naive).

Genuinely, what was it that made people think it was a troll? As far as I remember she said she was 34 and pregnant, and didn't know whether to keep the baby. People gave her lots of practical advice. So who decides whether it's true or not?

This might get deleted, but I'm not quoting a deleted post, just saying what I remember. I didn't post on the thread.

It would be a faff but they could replace the troll username with ''deleted''.

It also creates an issue for MNHQ. As long as they hold themselves out as willing and able to police the truthfulness of threads, contributors have a legitimate expectation that the platform is only putting forward genuine real-life scenarios for them to respond to.

However being able to catch fabricated threads early is pretty difficult, so they make a rod for their own backs. People get annoyed that they were only picked up after they had invested time and effort in them.

Would be easier all round just to rely on people having the common sense to realise that you can’t trust everything you read on the internet. It’s up to the individual to decide before posting whether they would care if it turned out the OP was fake and their advice remained out there for people to see.

Can you explain a bit more why you think it matters?

Yes they should delete troll threads. Especially the ones who want people to post their often painful experiences.

They absolutely do need deleting to prevent any other MNer from sharing personal stories for the troll to get their kicks from.

The scenario in that OP was perfectly plausible though. Would you also have objected to that thread if the poster had been real? I’m pro choice but I don’t see anything wrong with the topic being discussed online.

If it's a troll the deletion message says it's a troll. So this most likely broke talk guidelines, some of them are very subjective

Trolling or misleading behaviour is part of the Talk Guidelines, so it’s not incorrect to say that a troll OP broke Talk Guidelines. I can’t see any other categories that that particular thread would have come under. Best in mind that MN have the power to delete individual POSTS if they break certain guidelines, but here they chose to delete the whole thread, which is the standard approach to killing a troll by removing its head.

As I said above, if someone is prepared to share a personal story online they should already be aware that it is not a private conversation between them and the OP. So it doesn’t really matter if the person behind the post is real or not- it is discussion of the scenario in a public forum that prompted them to share, surely in the knowledge that the answer would be of interest to more than the OP? Otherwise send a PM.

@HaveringWavering but there are troll deletion messages, either 'it's a persistent troll' 'removed for trolling' or 'MN are taking a look behind the scenes...and they never come back to update and keep the post removed

I think that each individual moderator can choose how they want to phrase the deletion message. Just because some are more explicit about the reasons doesn’t mean that others can’t choose to just post a broad deletion message about “breaking guidelines” when trolling/fabrication is the specific reason.

I’m not going to say any more about that particular thread as I’ll get deleted for starting a TAAT.

It's not quite the same issue but I had a thread pulled as it has been reported and was deemed 'unsupportive to the OP'. I'd actually got a lot of very good advice (as well as a kicking!) and would have appreciated the heads up that it was going, so I could have screengrabbed it all.

No idea why the first thread was deleted (how they knew it was a troll) but that one actually WAS dodgy. The giveaway was that she started another thread straight away and she went from saying in the first thread that she was approaching the deadline for an abortion to saying in the second that she was in her third trimester. All within a couple of days.

@HaveringWavering I’ve explained to you. There is a particularly unpleasant troll doing the rounds making up scenarios about late term abortion.

Can you not see why that’s wrong?