Guidelines regarding agitation on boards

[woollyminded]

Mumsnet, like many other online fora but in particular as a result of it being a female dominated public place is subject to attack by men who come here explicitly to dominate, derail and ultimately silence discussion.

This can be seen across almost all boards on the site. This is different to goady fuckery, they do find it fun but it is also much more insidious. When it is found and women begin to point to it, challenge it and discuss it between themselves Mumsnet deletes the thread and does his work for him. The women have been silenced.

How could Mumsnet do better? After all if there is anywhere on the internet that should lead the way and do better it should be here surely?

Thought of another reason a sticky might be useful: often the derailing works because posters engage - and off goes the thread (with the Pollutant getting loads of - primarily female - attention). The old and hardened will ignore and try and carry on with the discussion but it will get drowned out (because Pollutant will just keep adding incendiary/inflammatory nonsense). With luck, a sticky might warn the uninitiated that this is 'a thing', so they can make an informed choice as to whether to engage or not.

It's the least intrusive response, I think, and one that (hopefully) still allows space for people with heterogenous opinions to voice them. It might just make it a little less easy to derail (and a little less frustrating when they turn up).

@Rufus

Ofcourse, but you are willing to take it for discussion and that is a good thing.

My last sentence is angry and not meant as a quote (although I can see it reads like that) - it is my genuinely held belief if that by silencing the discussion, by not indicating that you can see what we can see, by not challenging not even standing up then the site not helping, not even neutral but is part of the problem. Where women in public places are told to hush or take their discussion outside the room.

Crosspostingalltalkingatonce - my last comment was to Helen

Part of the problem with this and other goady fucker/troll thread is that so many posters rise to the bait. If everyone ignored the knobheads then we could just go on with our interesting conversations (and MN wouldn't have to spend ages splitting hairs about why twatty post X didn't quite meet the deletion criteria while twatty post Y did).

Irene - I think there is a difference between being goaded and calling out the goader. And I don't think ignoring the goader makes them go away. In any public place I'm not going to ignore somebody goading with homophobic/racist/sexist intent, I'm going to call them on it, especially if I see that their intent to upset, divide, derail and silence is working. There are so many threads here where conversations pitter out as people abandon them in silence and that is part of the intent.

I am aware that they try to be clever but I know some of their habits and their code words. For example, I know how some of them use words like cockroach, flower, SJW (not so much here on this forum tho, just an example) and I know what they mean to do with that. If someone in my conversation uses those words I will say 'those are words used by hate groups, it makes me wary of what you are trying to do here'. We should share that knowledge and empower each other to speak out.

I know how some of them use words like cockroach

I thought we weren't meant talk about it.

snigger

I'm not entirely sure i agree, woollyminded. I don't know that it is effective calling them out. They are perfectly aware that what they say is often heinous. The only point of what they do is to derail and pollute. Engaging is, I suspect, futile: it gives an opportunity to respond, promotes the illusion of engagement (when there is none), and derails.

The only thing they want is to basically destroy a communicative space. They don't care about what is said. They have no interest whatsoever in the value of communicative exchange - other than to seek to destroy that value.

I honestly think a cordon sanitaire around them is the best approach, along with an ability to tell others to do it too. At the moment, you can't even warn people that this is a real internet thing, and that Poster X is behaving in ways synonymous with these social media pollutants. Which is beyond absurd.

It's particularly upsetting because they attack one of the really valuable aspects of Mumsnet: its ability to host interesting political communication - predominantly (though not exclusively) amongst women. And that, of course, is why they attack/target it.

I see your point about educating people about codewords but ... it is very difficult to call them out without effectively falling victim to their strategy.

It's difficult: since the aim is to pollute - to make a social media space unusable - it is quite tricky to deal with them: engage, and they dominate conversations; ignore, and they get to dump vile language/posts on threads.

They need to be dealt with, though, because the aim is to destroy particular communicative areas of Mumsnet, make them utterly unusable (specifically politics and feminism) - and with the MRAs, they just don't like women talking together, full stop (I suspect). That is a problem for all of us (MNHQ included).

It would be grim if the actions of some men (and I think a lot of them are men) turned MN into a site where we can only talk about things like make-up and food preparation (great though these things are) because a group of angry men (and libertarian trolls) managed to exert their way.

Fuck them.

I agree with the OP though I'm not sure how to deal with it. I have seen posters who are expert at massively winding people up whilst extremely carefully staying just within the guidelines.

Perhaps I think perhaps MNHQ could more robustly moderate posts like this where there is a clear pattern of posts in a thread which are obvious designed to derail / merail / generally wind people up.

MNHQ are generally pretty good, but I suspect some of these slip through the net because often that may be looking at a report of a single post out of context (of the posters other posts on the thread, and of the thread itself)

Mumsnet lost its ability to host 'interesting' political discussion when it became clear it was unrepresentative and enduringly so. And pretty intolerant, as the level of invective was predominantly one-sided (of course if you're on that side, it just seems well reasoned, disagreement not welcomed). I don't think outsiders made MN an echo chamber.

I agree with both of you, didn't come here with a prescription. But I really do think the tactic of ignore, report, destroy the evidence has to change and that this should be a place with the will to try.

Yes, woolyminded It's frustrating, to say the least. I suspect MNHQ would like to come up with something more ninja-like (and are open to suggestions/experiment). I also suspect a sure-fire way of dealing with this is the social media equivalent of the Holy Grail.

I don't think outsiders made MN an echo chamber

Is MN an echo chamber? I guess some threads end up a bit one-sided, MNers seem to give short shrift to folk who present opinion as fact, other than that I have seen some great debates on MN political and otherwise where both sides have delivered reasoned verifiable arguments passionately but still courteously.

clear pattern of posts

This

I dont know how you would moderate it though

Can we start with them (HQ) in moderate and clear language to explain when they close a thread? To at least acknowledge what was going on? I know heavy handed moderation spoils dynamic conversations and the lines between in a foul mood - spoiling for a fight - having an unpopular opinion - goady fucker - and MRA can be very hard to navigate but it's up to Mumsnet to set the tone. There are reasons why Mumsnet is different from Reddit, Digital Spy, stormfront, David Icke, whatever your forum of choice, and I would expect a robust defence from MRA type attack should be pretty high on their agenda.

Definitely something in monitoring where they post. Some of the dicks that I have given way too much energy to conversing were all around women’s issues. With the theme generally being NAMALT and women abuse etc.

When I searched their name - some of them particularly seemed to focus / target the feminist area which should be a red flag?

peanut

There are a number of 'male' posters who only post in feminism

Or are recent name changers and do the same

Occasionally they make a half hearted attempt to post on one or two other threads as camouflage

Is it at all possible to stop people posting on feminism chat who haven't been here or had that name for a certain period of time?

How does it work on the SN board (sorry if i havent phrased that right)

Don't forget the horrible poli-bots, sock-puppets and derailers on the politics boards ...

Perhaps more boards should be restricted in the same way that the Sex topic is? Perhaps if you needed a period of membership before you could post on politics / feminism / Brexit boards etc could put some of them off, without leaving any posters unsupported in dire straits?

Hi everyone, thanks so much for the continued thoughts on this thread. We're here reading through, and as YetAnotherHelenMumsnet says upthread, will be discussing all the issues you've raised at HQ.

In the meantime please keep posting, it's really good to get your thoughts on this.