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.

I think sadly it's too common a problem for news outlets to deem it newsworthy.

The Daily Fail might do a small one I suppose, using the 'it was poorly dealt with' angle.

But in the past Facebook and Reddit have had similar things happen and I didn't see it in the news at all.

I think you are right. It is a horrible thing to have happened, but not massively newsworthy, sadly.

If lots of us just refused to log back in I bet the danger would be addressed faster.

Isn’t that fucking depressing? Celebrities doing mundane shit is newsworthy, but vile sickos sharing photos of children being abused is not deemed not newsworthy.

Our society makes me despair.

I certainly don't want MN to shut down

Yeah, some do though. Blatantly obvious by now.

I know. It is very, very depressing.

In what ways specifically is it blatantly obvious? Because all I see are people who care very deeply about MN and don’t want this to ever happen again.

It isn't news that criminals are sharing images of child abuse online. It may be mildly interesting to some that MN was targeted.

No, it's not blatantly obvious. People are rightly concerned, upset and passionate about a very serious issue. What is it about this that you fail to understand?

Also, nice way of semi quoting a post to suit your own agenda.

This is the kind of info @JustineMumsnet should have been providing first thing this morning instead of mealy mouthed platitudes FFS. Actual useful information that users can discuss something with.

@FreshEgg @FrustratedandBemused

As I've said several times in this thread, I have experience working with law enforcement in stopping the spread of online indecent materials of children. I've been dealing with the wider problem and its perpetrators, and MN is no worse than any of the major social media platforms.

I agree there is a distinct lack of knowledge or critical thinking on this thread, and especially a lack of understanding of the actual problem, but it's not coming from me.

I had no idea until now that the report button didn't work overnight and you had to post to a special board - that's just crazy! And when's "overnight" any way? Also seeing as there's an "Aussie and NZ Mumsnetters" board they're well aware that the site's not just used by people in the UK. At the very least there should be a supervisor on duty with the power to suspend all new posts to the whole site if necessary until more staff are on duty.

If you'd seen how MN reacted to other emergencies in previous years, you'd note they're not doing anything different they didn't do on previous occasions.

I dont recall the precise emergency, but i do recall that last time something upset the users to this level, it took days to get an official response that was more than platitudes from MNHQ.

What nonsense.

Mumsnet makes its money from its users - we are the product. We use it on the understanding that they provide the framework of a large community of (mostly) women that can provide entertainment, support, debate etc.

Tacit in this agreement is that the framework they provide is safe - they keep our anonymity and enforce community rules about the kinds of post that are tolerated.

They broke that agreement when they failed to remove illegal and hugely distressing content for an unacceptably long time - because they do not have appropriate safeguarding procedures in place.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with people holding MNHQ to account, and suggesting otherwise smacks of ‘pick me’ mentality.

Well said.!!

I think that time was when MNHQ changed things so that threads from the Sex board were appearing in Active often with lurid explicit titles and MNHQ were reluctant to change it back

This in turn exposed some dodgy going ons on that board which previously PP had been unaware of eg a 'hook up' thread

Removing the functionality to post images is a sledgehammer to crack a nut and punishes the wrong people - perfectly legitimate MN posters wanting to share everything from gardening images, to NDN parking threads.

This is horrific. I am leaving the site until we can have reassurance that this will never happen again.

Needs must at the moment. Safeguarding trumps everything else right now (and I say that as someone who hosts a long running thread whereby we share a lot of photos). We won't perish not being able to post images whilst this is dealt with.

The post directly below this one of yours illustrates what the problem is and why people are angry.

There is a report button and it's fair to assume that report button will do something or send a message to someone who can do something, sharpish, 24/7. Only it doesn't and many posters don't know that and we end up with the situation we had, last night, of a prolonged and persistent attack with no means of shutting it down because the volunteers trying to deal with it don't get those reports and have very limited means to react to the messages if they do get through.

This is not a cosy little hobby forum. It's a major social media platform that is always going to be vulnerable and it needs to be operated with that in mind. Most of us do not want it shut down, at all. We would very much like it to stick around but that is at risk with inadequate means of dealing with criminals and bad actors.

Well if you've left then you won't be around when a solution is announced and reassurance given, will you?

I remember Night Watch shutting down the site one New Year’s Eve when
people were mostly being daft.

I remember there was a lot of fuss and an apology from MNHQ about it.

I wonder if that functionality is still available to Night Watch?

Yes, how will you know.... 🤔

Someone posted about this today and was told that it wasn’t NW that shut that particular thread down, it was a new member of the mod team?

They have every single users email address.

I would think a blanket email outlining what steps have been wouldn’t be too much to ask.

I must admit that was my first thought!