Should there be an option to request the removal of a thread for 'dangerous misinformation'.

[ticktickticktickBOOM]

I feel that some of the threads about the riots are fuelling misinformation, driving division and becoming quite toxic and dangerous to communities.

It is time for a new look at the thread removal options?

This all feels very primary school

'Teacher, teacher, stop them'

'What are they doing?'

'They're annoying me'

'Why, what are they doing?'

'They just are - make them stop'

'Just move away from them then'

'No, you have to stop them, they are saying things I don't like'

'Are they swearing at you or calling you names?'

'No, I just don't like what they're saying'

'They're allowed to do that, now go away and play'

It's not "primary school". It's about unpicking the crazy situation we have got ourselves into where people are running around the streets throwing bricks because they have been sucked into credulity online.

(I don't think the boxer case is one that necessarily needs a flag of any sort. I think it is just an area where there is a lot of detailed and varied medical info relevant to each DSD case, coupled with an unwillingness on the part of the IOC to supply realism in the manner that they would for other sorts of medical issues. )

Look whilst you all worry in case it means it might affect your FWR forum because clearly nothing is more important than that! My relatively small town is essentially closing up today because of riot threats. So is the town next door. My kids summer class is cancelled - too close to where trouble is. And my eleven year old's best friend isn't allowed out to play right now because he's not white and his mum is scared someone will hurt him. I would be too.

Stuff like "x people have been stabbed" is a factual statement which is either true or false. If true it should be provable with something other than "a guy told me". It's fanning the flames right now and some of it is absolutely astroturfing.

The only way to get around this problem completely is to control and censor the internet. Do you want to be China? Iran?

Education is the way forward. And by that, I do NOT mean education on what is the right opinion to hold, or the right politics to vote for, or the right way to feel about any given social or political situation. By education I mean we should be teaching awareness of how easily we can be manipulated, tricked and lied to through social media and the media in general, AI, and careful editing of recordings and videos to make something appear different to the whole truth.

Any video you watch where you see or hear something, you should always be searching for what happened immediately before it, which was handily edited out, before you rush to judgement. And don't take everything you read or hear at face value. Unfortunately Chinese Whispers have always, and will always exist. It's just that since the internet and especially since the cesspool that is Twitter/X rumours move at warp speed.

Sometimes it's more effective to correct on thread and say "no, the perpetrators name was not X and he was not a Syrian refugee: here's an authoritative link" and sometimes it's better just to get it removed. If you're not sure then report as "other" and let MNHQ decide.

Yes I agree.

Isn't there already some kind of general disclaimer to the effect that one shouldn't believe everything people post nor automatically trust it?

I think that's a warning they put when it looks like someone is posting a thread for sympathy (rightly or wrongly) when they are having hard times, because Mumsnetters sometimes want to help financially and they may get taken in. Also the reason why direct crowdfunding links are banned.

I’d usually agree, but now I’m not.

The government and the media have been pretty biased in their coverage of the past week. Places like X and other media are putting up the info they want to keep from us, even if it comes across as unpalatable.

I can’t believe how the narrative is controlled and so, no I’m no longer in favour of curtailing free speech or peoples views. I want to hear all sides now.

I can’t believe how the narrative is controlled and so, no I’m no longer in favour of curtailing free speech or peoples views. I want to hear all sides now.

Yes, me too.

I've reached the same conclusion sadly. I wish I was wrong but I don't think I am. I am not one prone to conspiracy theories and I don't generally bang on about how you can't trust the MSM to tell the truth and not to manipulate it, but I feel like the scales have fallen from my eyes a bit this week.

I read three newspapers yesterday and the coverage of what had happened in Birmingham the night before was almost non-existent. What was mentioned was a brief, two sentences at the end of a three page article about the 'far right' saying 'some people in Asian communities came out to form protective rings around their mosques' or something similar. And that was pretty much it.

Having spent a fair bit of time on X the previous night watching event unfold in Birmingham, with a lone men being set upon by gang outside a pub, the pub smashed up, groups of Muslim men sauntering past reporters, casual as you like, carrying machetes, lumps of wood and metal poles, and seeing cars blocked, their windows smashed in and their occupants dragged out and beaten up, I did feel I had woken up into some weird parallel universe or a dystopian fiction novel.

The other thing all this has caused me to do is to take some notice of the man who is currently on a sunbed in Cyprus, and his little documentary film which is available on X. I have paid no attention to him before now. I am fully aware that he's some reformed football thug with a dodgy past and some dodgy racist views and he certainly has some extremely unsavoury people among his followers. I don't doubt that he is a hypocrite on many levels. Would I want to be friends with him? No. But I watched his film anyway. Because when something is banned and people riot over its banning, you do tend to want to know why.

Fuck me. What an eye opener. Even if you allow for a great deal of bias in the way some things were presented, and some laying it on thick in places to suit his own agenda, that was quite some enlightening watch about how the establishment doubles down and kills something stone dead, when they don't want you to know any other version of events than the one you've been spoonfed. And about how we can be told who the baddies are, who the victims are, and how we obediently swallow it whole, without question. Because we trust the people whose job it is to tell us what's going on.

The Birmingham events were extensively covered on Channel 4 news last night, and I have read or heard about them in other outlets. I think that perhaps once you start to feel anxious about certain events being under-reported it is easy to develop a kind of confirmation bias, ie to misperceive the relative frequency with which certain types of events are publicised. I know I am prone to that myself. We are all vulnerable.

Yes, last night. Not in the papers the morning after it happened, even though there was ample time to do so, given that the attacks were being filmed in daylight. White thugs rioting and setting upon blacks and asians was happening that evening and that did miraculously appear into the morning papers, in glorious technicolour three page spreads.

There was a definite delay in the reporting of the Birmingham unrest, I know I am not imagining it. And what was reported was underplayed.

Only once the cries of 'two tier Keir' started to ring out yesterday and people on SM were like 'hang the fuck on, what exactly is going on here?' the Birmingham reports started to emerge in a more expansive and truthful way.

The rioters don’t seem like how I’d picture MNers. Have I missed something?

This may already be happening, but certainly at school I believe children should be taught about misinformation (neutrally) and how to assess the validity of a source online.

The rioters don’t seem like how I’d picture MNers. Have I missed something?

That's what I don't get. Shuttting down "misinformation" would mean shutting down threads that are discussions over contested matters, which, would mean shutting down all contentious threads. The only alternative would be for MN to somehow conjure up a massive fact-checking apparatus, lacking any bias.

So, let's say discussion of contentious matters on MN is stopped. What would the actual real world impact be?

The best response is for MN to not be an echo chamber and to enable challenge where contested interpretations spill over into mis-/disinformation.

MNers take all shapes and forms - they're not all nice people who refuse to answer their doors to strangers and practice sniffing disdainfully!

If you mean "not male" then you'd be wrong. There's absolutely been women involved, some arrested already, some photoed whilst looting.

Even 'fact checking' isn't all it's cracked up to be though. I've seen fact checking websites (which are not always coming from a completely neutral and unbiased perspective themselves) proclaim something to be False, by presented some sort of smoke and mirrors use of statistics, and we all know what Mark Twain said about statistics.

Even 'fact checking' isn't all it's cracked up to be though. I've seen fact checking websites (which are not always coming from a completely neutral and unbiased perspective themselves) proclaim something to be False, by presented some sort of smoke and mirrors use of statistics, and we all know what Mark Twain said about statistics.

I agree.

And now you are spreading misinformation yourself.

The IBA has been clear the entire time that they have tested and even done second testing for both athletes to confirm. They cannot give more details due to privacy. In fact, both the male boxer's country boxing organisations threatened legal action against more information being released. Sure the press conference was a shambles, but the information was there. It was released. It was released in a press release, then a second press release and then a conference.

So, you now have three boxing organisations, IBA, WBO and the EBC who have all seen the test results and all agree and have confirmed publicly that those boxers are male.

Yes. Posters have been sucked into the drama of it, they are the ones using emotional reasoning and censuring other posters for using clear and precise language.

That doesn't remove the facts though. Maybe if you want to continue to declare there are no 'facts' it is because you don't like who have presented the facts or respect that no one is going to release the private medical information for these boxers. And they shouldn't .

The only reason we know that Semenya is male is because Semenya took the IOC to court and the evidence was made public. Semenya is a male with a difference of sex development categorised as 5ARD and had testosterone levels measured as 21 nmol/L. So much for the continued labelling of 'female with high testosterone'. No fucking way. A female with that level of testosterone would be gravely gravely ill. No female could race with that 'high level of testosterone.

Yet, that is what the IOC and many sporting federations and media have described Semenya as. And this is the same Semenya who gave interviews recently saying 'my testicles don't make me less of a woman'.

No. Because some of this stuff is akin to shouting "FIRE" in a theatre. If you start authoratively saying "X nationality stabbed someone in X city" on page 1 of a 20 page thread and it's not true then it's no good saying that by page 5 people will be calling you on your nonsense. We all know people only skim page 1 half the time then go to replying.

Bluntly, when things are at this stage Mnet needs to think about putting their own controls in place or risk having someone put them in place for them. It's not a tiny forum with half a dozen mums. It's a huge social media site and whatever applies to facebook or telegram legally will apply to them.

[responding to Ereshkiga/Twiglets]

Yep.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

This, for example, is an article on Forbes, talking about a Daily Mail article on Snopes.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-daily-mail-snopes-story-and-fact-checking-the-fact-checkers/

Do we trust Forbes? Or the DM? Or Snopes?

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.” – John Stuart Mill

Bluntly, when things are at this stage Mnet needs to think about putting their own controls in place

What controls? People online are sharing a list of supposed far right riots tonight to be aware of them (there's one near me), it appears to be completely unsubstantiated, just a screenshot. This sharing comes from anti fascist people who want to mount a counter protest. Should those posts also be deleted?

Here's Stella Creasy, MP for Walthamstow saying although the authorities don't believe the screenshot is necessarily genuine they have no choice but to put in place measures to protect mosques and get extra police in the area, she's also advising people to avoid the area. Is that misinformation?

https://www.instagram.com/stellacreasy/reel/C-V3tffo79c/

I don't like Stella particularly but I think she did an excellent job with that message.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Absolutely.

It's never easy to monitor social media. On balance, and looking at other social media sites, I think MN do quite well, perhaps because there's space for more longform discussion, but also perhaps one could argue because they allow a relatively free exchange of ideas. In the long run, I think that's what is healthiest.

Honestly I would say yes (and whilst I understand the urge to do it to organise counter protests I wish they would think before doing it). Because it makes it very easy to hide a list of places to riot under "but I had good intentions". And if they fuck up and there wasn't a riot in Nottingham planned, guess what? People who do want to cause trouble have seen it and there is now.

People are literally getting on trains and buses to try to get to where they can join a mob. It's terrifying.

When information is need to know it can be and has been circulated by police.

I know other forums which have instituted a blanket ban on posts of "I heard they were rioting in X place tomorrow" and that's not a bad rule. It's also why I'm not naming where I am on my posts.