FFS Mumsnet HQ - illegal images on threads

[Lagirl20]

Beware, the thread “weird message from friend” has some child abuse images on it!!! @mumsnet

Except we’re still seeing the issue of people not knowing about The Night Watch.

I've been on here years and had no idea that there was a night watch.

And I wouldn't use them on the basis that I think that it's a joke to leave it to volunteers.

I would imagine Mumsnet are keen to hide what happened as much as possible. Don't want to put the advertisers off! It sucks because as you say, we deserve fair warning and a guide for how to report.

Closing the site is exactly what the criminal wants to achieve.

Not only that, but on the first occasion the night watch were asking people to distribute images of CSA. So even if we pretend that it isn’t a crime to distribute CSA, why are the night watch unable to immediately see detail on a reported post, surely if I reported a post and in that post wrote CSA, peadophile etc these reports should be prioritised by MN and so be at the top of reports. Or is the system so incredibly poorly designed that reports simply sit on date/time order, rather than report and word type order.

4/2/25 there is a BBC news article about. It's really disturbing. At least this time they were removed in minutes from reporting. Don't agree with having to report via a separate nightwatch thread. More needs to be done

You cross a line here Simon.

You know that isn’t what she means and it’s an awful thing to accuse someone of for the sake of a sparring match. I might not agree with everyone on here all or most of the time but I don’t think there’s one person on this thread who wants a child to suffer FFS.

Images seem to be disabled again now, I can only see an option to ‘Add GIF’.

I hope the police become involved

Plus this may lead to someone pasting the link, which the night watch encouraged last time, which surely comes under distributing images?

Completely agree. @Simonjt That’s uncalled for. And I hope MNHQ take action against the criminals.

Who is doing this? MRA’s? TRA’s? Fathers for Justice?
They all want Mumsnet closed down.

Images were disabled temporarily last time too. Mumsnet plan to use AI to detect CSA images being uploaded

Did MN follow through on their last promise to offer everyone affected counseling?

Did they?

See I don’t really like it when companies or people do that. It’s a dismissive, paying lip service thing. ‘You’ve seen this terrible thing which will haunt your sleep … oh OK. Counselling.’

People don’t need counselling. They need to have the confidence to open threads without being confronted with images like that. I’m going to guess we all know child sexual abuse happens but there’s a big difference in knowing and seeing.

Moderators were 'offered support'. Mumsnet also defended the use of volunteers as they are in different time zones.

Not sure, the volunteers clearly not trained to deal with it and probably panicked. Most agreed last time not their fault.

MN responded fast this time, so their structures have changed.

This will be with the police. There are separate crimes involved. MN will be focusing on site systems that stop it happening and better response times when it does. They aren’t going to give much information about that, as they’d be helping the animals who are targeting us in this way.

It’s hard to imagine the depths of depravity and hate driving this behaviour.

No, not their fault at all, but most likely due to very poor training, I wonder how often they receive training. Forums have the power for any reported post to be hidden until it can be reviewed by a moderator, that would seem the most simple solution surely?

I actually would say no. A post doesn’t have to be troll like to be reported and it would be incredibly disruptive to threads. Disabling image distribution at night is the most straightforward way of dealing with it.

Image sharing needs to be turned off and new registrations need to be disabled.

It's clear there's no control over the site and until such time as they can make sure this never happens again, they need to stop it from being a possibility

They need to ban images and gifs now. Someone will keep finding ways around any so called "smart" image checking.

Hopefully some additional training will be given following these incidents. The issue was, I think, that at night the moderators only review the nightwatch thread? or maybe because they are volunteers they don't have access to review reported threads and hide them