Community takeovers

[WarmLight]

My local community sites have become sort of infected with repetitious posts about migrants, stop the boats, racism, halal.meats and the odd degrading post about women and disabled people those on benefits etc. To an extent it's not mentally healthy. If course it's organised and reform campaigning.
I am concerned about the impact on kids and the wider locality.
Do any women in here have this experience? What do you do?

Offer to admin. It’s quite hard work. It will only make a difference if the other admins are disengaged or agree with you. It takes a team effort to de politicise a page.

Obviously, you can’t then allow different political positions to be posted. I find it easiest to be relentlessly local focused.

The other strategy is to get a group of like minded people and comment frequently on all the positive stuff. The less you engage with the nasty posts, the further down the page it will fall. So bump the nice stuff, post good quality stuff yourself. Drown out the rubbish.

Not going to lie, I did the thing I really didn’t want to do and walked away. Came off Facebook entirely. I didn’t want to because I fear these people and their awful rhetoric will take over, but it was impacting my mental wellbeing seeing all that horrid negativity every single day. Plus, I came to realise that arguing or fighting it online seems to get nowhere. Having actual conversations with people and talking things through is better and more constructive. The algorithm doesn’t help, as it constantly seemed to show me miserable things. I’m sure the algorithm has gotten worse in the last year and is more geared towards negativity because that’s what gets people talking. Like you, though, I do worry about the impact on younger people, but selfishly started to think “that’s not my problem” and instead engage with physical things in the community like volunteering to try and make some sort of positive impact

That would be a good idea if I had the time. I could even create a site. But also the ones I mean are either already adminned by reform supporters or free speech types. Problem is the less normal people talk, the more extreme it gets. I was banned during COVID when I said Johnson was an eejit. And I was completely right. If more women had stronger voices I really don't think that these bad politicians would flourish so easily.

So I can see some admins locally doing the same. ' keeping politics out of it. ' I think this is probably replicated around the country as it saves hassle.
Trouble is as a woman on sites used mainly by women, I find that a bit restrictive.
I'd like to find ways to help women develop their political voices without having to navigate ban halal meat , Nigel farage and stop the RNLI. Oh and 'have more babies' popped up there recently.

Our city Facebook group is like this. A second one was started that is less political but anyone can see the people who post on the city one are thick as mince.

I can imagine it would even be hard to mod to keep it local issues because it's so embedded. A ot of our posts are "ooh look they've finally cleared the roadworks...which were there BECAUSE OF THE IMMIGRANTS"

Really sounds like you found a constructive channel that works for you. Don't blame you one bit it is hard going sometimes. But I find the little bits and pieces fit into gaps in my day.

It seems.important to me people see this is replicated across the country and entirely organised. It's the same stuff: grooming gangs, anti Muslim or migrant, really negative stuff only about black people. Vent/no filter/ free speech groups are used where little control is exercised, but local community groups also. This I think has been planned in some cases for years, the groups are very large sometimes.
I'd say the country's being groomed through local sites with the intention of reaching women and I don't think that's putting it too strongly.