It's time to rethink the Night Watch volunteer system

[TwigletsAndRadishes]

After the truly awful photos that have been posted on MNin the early hours of this morning, which I will never un-see, I think you need to have a different policy for overnight moderation.

The site is big enough and money-making enough to support a better system by now. There really needs to be proper 24 hour IT cover. At the very least, the Night Watch volunteers should be able to call a member of MNHQ who is on call overnight who has the ability to either deal with the issue or shut the whole forum down until it can be dealt with properly by the IT bods in the morning.

It's only been a handful of threads affected this evening, but it could potentially be a major spamming of dozens or even hundreds of threads next time. This site is used in other parts of the world in different time zones where more people risk seeing the grossly disturbing content than a relative handful of us up at 3am in the UK.

The current system relies on posters reporting any offending theads and hoping that a volunteer will pick up the report in good time and hide the thread. This morning one of the threads affected took far too long to be hidden, not that I am blaming an unpaid volunteer for that.

Wow, I can't believe the lack of response from MN or that this was able to happen without any swift action being taken.

I just thank god I don't log in at the weekends. Do you understand how traumatising this could be for everyone who saw it @BeckyAMumsnet.

There used to be limits on the amount of images you could upload on MN, there also used to be a 3 month waiting period before being able to post on the sex topic (which was another recent bone of contention with MN basically knowingly hosting a hook up area on that part of the site for some time) Both of these limitations have been reduced or removed in recent times, so I think this could be reviewed alongside what you've also suggested.

As others have said, things are / have become very lax on MN and I guess it was only a matter of time. I've always been disgusted at the use of voluntary mods during the night. It just seems so negligent and out of touch.

What reason could there possibly be for not having round the clock moderation other than £££? What reason could there possibly be for no action to be taken while they ‘look behind the scenes’ other than £££? I don’t buy into this ‘it’s the internet, the internet has filth on it’ argument. I have spent my entire teenage and above life on the internet and have never seen CSA images. Never. This should never have happened and it certainly shouldn’t have been left festering for as long as it has. And here we are, still nothing done to stop this from happening again. The majority of the users right now have no idea what even happened and that it could happen again.

Just to add that it's been blatantly obvious for a long time now that trolls are aware of the lack of mods in the evenings and weekends. I've lost count of how many obnoxious things I've reported and noted it has been during the evening on a Fri / Sat / Sun.

Has anyone reported this to the media? I have a lot of pals working at newspapers thanks to my own career. Is this the best way to force some change? Does anyone have receipts for reporting to police and the media?

I was reading on my laptop (rather than logged in on my phone) so I couldn’t report.

I would argue that the fact any measures they had in place not working is evidence that they didn't have suitable measures in place.

It appears there were multiple failings highlighted last night. It isn't good enough.

And this should have obviously highlighted a major weak spot in the website. It is also completely unethical to have volunteers moderating a massive site like this. I really hope the mods that witnessed this get therapy asap and sue for a payout from mumsnet. Absolutely raging this was allowed to happen.

All posters who saw it should sue, not just Night Watch! It's really unacceptable. I can't imagine how traumatising it must be for those who saw it.

It's like you have read my mind! I shouldn't in ANY circumstance observe the horrors I saw at 4.30am this morning. Even before I saw it, other mnetters had put up posts asking for it to be urgently looked at.
The poor nightwatch volunteer having to navigate this.

In all my years of being able to access the internet, I CANNOT FATHOM how fucking easy it appears to have been for someone to just post some of the most horrendous images I have ever seen. The lack of mnet response is quite frankly disgusting and clearly driven by damage limitation and ££

Yes it was this. The night watch were trying their best, but I can't imagine the panic and trauma of having to view the images to delete them whilst getting messages from other users that more have popped up, and all whilst trying to locate which threads they are on.

I’d say the biggest, or at least most obvious failing was the lack of support/structure for the Night Watchers. It’s not a suitable mechanism.

I know there are filters, but they clearly aren’t adequate.

Sometimes you can’t know a system is broken until it fails, but the night watcher system was already clearly inadequate.

I did, I hope others have/will as well.

Yes exactly! They haven’t made a statement and offered support to those affected. Not only the people who reported were affected! Some people saw the images but also posts that they had reported them, so didn’t report, or couldn’t if not logged into their device. There should be signposting support available to those who need it and offering to pay for support for those who need it, that they are silent is arse covering instead of honouring their ethical obligations as the host. This could trigger someone with csa experience to self injure or worse. Soon as I finish my meetings today I’m going to contact some news contacts. If anyone has receipts please DM me

thank you! Hopefully with a bunch of us getting in touch with the media, this will get looked into and get police involved to work out who this sick is and who are his poor victims. Can’t even write properly. So worked up.

I have reported it to the BBC. I was hesitant to, but the lack of response from MNHQ or Justine herself made me feel this is only likely to be escalated appropriately if there is gear from the media.

That was when I saw them. I think it was at about 2am that I saw one. I scrolled away when I realised what I was seeing, then sort of blurred my eyes into double vision to go back and report it without seeing the photos again. It came up in my ‘I’m on’ as hidden quite quickly. I was scared to click on anything else after that and went to be very disturbed.

It would be pretty bad of there's only a response from HQ due to fear of posters going to the media, but I suspect it might happen.

I think I might. The fact that other posters have pointed out that there have been obvious issues moderating on nights and weekends and they didn’t switch to paid (and accountable mods) and create filters for issues like this is completely negligent. Will also call the Daily Fail (amongst better and respectable papers) , because while horrendous they will report it, and will be like a dog with a bone with it.

To my mind MN could do more / the night watch clearly doesn't have enough capabilities to handle this - but the real criminal is the one who made the images and did the posting and if. MN HQ are more concerned about that than anyone else at this point then they are doing the right thing

Best if someone is archiving this thread. I don’t know how. Lawyers are advising remember and probably a or firm.

I agree. I’ve been reading for a few hours and seeing a lot of upset, anger, fear, disappointment, etc from users and yet very little to reassure us that this can’t happen again. I’ve not been looking at as much as I often do, and when I have, I’ve been scrolling slowly to make sure there isn’t an image on the next post. If we have to push it outside to get a response we should do - this isn’t something minor, it’s CSA, the worst thing that could have been posted.

As people have said, the night watch should have been retired years ago - I think MNHQ should come under heavy criticism for this, as they’ve had plenty of opportunities to sort it. They also do not make it clear on the site where to report urgent things at night. A few months ago I reported a post late at night as I was very, very concerned that the poster might take her own life. I kept checking the post and my emails but had nothing until the morning. I hope the poster was ok, but of course (rightfully for privacy) we have no way to know. If I’d known about the lack of moderation overnight I would have gone to the night shift page - but even then, would they have had the tools to look up the user and send police on a welfare check? I suspect not. Fully trained and paid employees need to be on 24/7. They don’t have to be located in the UK, as long as they are able to contact and escalate things in the right way.

This isn’t to say the night shift volunteers haven’t done a good job. They have done their best with what they have been given. This is on HQ - clearly the poor volunteers last night had had either no training, or not enough in what to do in these circumstances. They should have had an emergency contact - and it should be clear what constitutes an emergency. There should be essentially a big red button that closes the site - maybe it needs 2 night shift people to both input a code to confirm it is to go offline to prevent it being taken down maliciously - I have no doubt last night they could have got 2 people to agree that!

The current moderation system is entirely unfit for purpose now. I spend a few hours a week on one of the smaller niche boards and end up reporting the same repeated AI spam posts and threads over and over. And I'm not the only one there bothering - smaller boards are now practically unusable. I've tried bringing this up in site stuff before only to be told to report it to get it removed; which entirely misses the point.

Threads are basically unusable when it's a sea of 30 removed posts and the odd real reply in between, and since they are constantly doing it to older posts it's impossible to find actual active conversations as everything is out of order.

Add in tonight's issue and it's clear the entire system needs an overhaul with robust filters and screening systems in place. This post-first-react-later system is making the site unusable outside of the main boards and is leaving those boards open to abuse like last night. We need more preventative systems.

Here for updates.

Yeah it sounded fishy, and if you’re not ‘in the know’ about this sort of thing, why would you even think to @ some random strange sounding name rather than someone official? Most people know nothing about this night watching volunteer contingent. And especially when dealing with this sort of content which no random user should have to be dealing with in order to get it removed! The whole system is ridiculous and not fit for purpose.