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.

(They weren’t links by the way, they were just images posted directly on to a thread)

That control is what exactly… don’t go on the internet at any time, on any site? Because last night I was around when all of this happened and there was no control that anyone had. Unless that control is hide from the internet. Talk about victim blaming. Why are people so hell-bent on defending MN for the completely indefensible lack of any meaningful safeguards that pretty much every other social media/forum site has in place already? Because duh, the internet is full of sickos and they can’t leave it up to a handful of unpaid volunteers to keep in check? Oh, and that’s after the already traumatised users have to painstakingly link it of course, because the report button might as well not exist during those hours. But yes, keep banging on about personal responsibility.

@FreshEgg you should never link images of CSA. That just distributes it further.

We cannot expect internet sites to be safe at all time. Surely that's what we drill into our children- of course we need to take responsibility for ourselves. I expect Mumsnet to act as well, which is appears Justine is doing.

That is what people were instructed to do! That’s what a complete shitshow it was.

You were here, you saw it and what? Keep bleating on that people are defending mumsnet (they're not, it's insulting though which is the point), it's not going to get the safeguards in place any quicker but, if you prefer to risk traumatising yourself then that's up to you.

Yes. Personal responsibility. When something is/has gone wrong and I can't fix it, I'm out of there. You do as you like.

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I agree with PP that mumsnet should perhaps send a message to all users? They did this previously when the site was hacked.

I'm not going to describe what I saw as soon as I clicked on a thread. It wasn't a link, it was a direct photo in my face of something that I cannot unsee.
I have "seen" this image replay in my vision all fucking day. All day it has preoccupied my every minute.
I am incandescent that I have been put in this situation.

I don't even know why I was awake at 4.30am. I wish I hadn't woke up to this horror.

I’m ’bleating on’ because it has taken how many hours and how many posts to get them to finally disable the ability to post photos. Something that should have been done immediately. Something that should have had safeguards built in to begin with. And we still don’t have a site-wide statement to let people know what has happened. If MNHQ had their way they would sweep this all under the carpet. So yes, very sorry for ‘bleating on’ and holding MNHQ accountable for allowing this to happen. And yes they allowed it to happen.

@JustineMumsnet could you look at a system like twitter has where you can turn off 'preview images' - you only see things you actively interact with?

On here it could be done so all images are automatically blurred unless clicked on? This covers against the medical photos that appear & can be upsetting for some users. I think, though, that the users who got caught up in this will NEED extra assurances - if it were me I'd be constantly terrified my next swipe contained something horrific.

I only saw one post as I closed MN straight down after reporting it, but there were multiple images in one post on one thread at 11.15pm. I didn’t choose to see that.
ETA for those who aren’t aware, it wasn’t just one image posted per thread, it was multiple images per post. So it’s not like those that were exposed to multiple images had gone looking for them across the site or anything like that.

I've been wondering about the security and integrity of the site for a while now. We seem to be too easy a targets for trolls, shills and bots.

I never in my wildest imagination thought that the running of the site would be so lax that pictures of paedophiles abusing children could be posted here! Not fucking ever.

What happened last night was a number of actual fucking crimes!

@JustineMumsnet's response minimises them, is dismissive of legitimate concerns and offers no reassurance whatsoever.

Some of the posts here aimed at Justine and some of the MNHQ staff are absolutely disgusting.

And yet you can guarantee many of the people typing those posts will be watching MN like a hawk over the next few days.

They seem to forget they have the option to either close their account, or take a break until HQ have announced any new measures that will be put in place.

But no, I expect some will be hanging around just to continue to put the boot in.

Justine may have been advised by lawyers to not say anything more than is absolutely necessary at this stage. An apology might be something she's been told not to make. I doubt she's feeling quite as unbothered by the whole thing as she sounds.

@LoudSnoringDog I'm so sorry you saw that. As I said earlier in the thread, playing Tetris can help after being through something traumatising.

The tetris research is actually quite interesting, apparently it works a bit like EMDR.

this 👆🏼 It’s a parenting forum. I expect children’s and family’s safety would be of the upmost importance. But it isn’t, and I hope brands will avoid them like the plague.

All those feeling sorry for Justine, why? There have been multiple incidents before this that highlighted that the systems in place don’t protect users. Many of us saw CSA images and were traumatised. I’ve reached 40 without ever seeing them, but thanks to Justine and her poor web security I have, and I can’t unsee it. She deserves the anger directed at her.

100% - having it splashed over the papers risks putting ideas into the heads of others with malicious intent.

Yes there'll be sickos galore here tonight if the press take it up.

The image sharing has been removed, so they can’t. And hopefully, given Justine hasn’t made any change to site safety with previous incidents some media attention might change that.

I'm not going to trawl through 25+ pages but has MN said anything about the exploitation of unpaid women to police this very profitable site every night?
And can any 'volunteers' tell us why on earth they are giving up their time to assist a company's profits for free?!?

Not that I‘ve seen

I think people who use mumsnet ought to know that their lax site security allowed this to happen, and that no support was offered to those affected. I imagine both advertisers and members would be keen to be alerted.

Has there been a thread about this in AIBU? I saw MN took down all the other threads about it.

I believe this is the only thread on this issue now, so MNHQ comments and announcements are all in one place.

No they haven't and they haven't confirmed whether there will be a paid professional moderator online tonight in the event of further serious issues.

It's just allowed me to add an image on my garden to this post. Obviously I didn't submit it but clearly image posting has not been disabled