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.

Yes exactly, this is a risk anywhere online that people can post pictures. There doesn't need to be any political goal. Competent sites have processes in place to deal with it.

Yes I imagine you are right. We can block URLs but not images that randomly appear on pages we've chosen to open, especially live ones like a forum thread. I know next to nothing about IT but I suspect that is the case.

MN are still using volunteers, on what is an internationally used site? That's unbelievable. That could put them in a difficult legal position when things like this happen. This is not the fault of the volunteers, who presumably have seen some awful stuff overnight and are now being wrongly criticised by other users. Where is the safeguarding in all of this for them?

The whole system needs reforming. In the meantime, I hope the volunteers are given free access to counselling, should they need it. Witnessing CSA images is traumatising.

I am genuinely sorry to say this but I totally agree ^

The exploitation of volunteers (and whether they meet the legal definition of an employee) and the position on providing a safe online space shouldn’t be conflated. Both are relevant of course.

I’m not sure how This has progressed but none of it is optional.

And we all have a duty of care to children. There are real children involved yet no protocol to report csa to authorities.

Does the person who sent the link to the volunteer then commit a crime by doing so? It's a minefield.

Completely agree with all of that. I said on the thread someone started to flag up the problem at the time that the whole site should be temporarily taken down while it was dealt with. I think only the limited ability to post a few photos at a time stopped the poster going further, but if there had been more planning and multiple accounts set up in advance it could have been so much worse. It would have been like Whack-A-Mole all through the night. That' just not fair on the volunteers apart from traumatising the people who unwittingly might open the wrong thread.

If I was a volunteer id be stepping down after this. For numerous reasons

Or on the victims whose abuse was being publicly exhibited

MN would be fine without the ability to post images - I can remember it from the days before it could be done at all.

MN is not, and never has been, a ‘safe space’ (and posts that suggest it are should be challenged), because it’s a wide open site that anyone can join, and can post what they like, where they like.

It’s too late to get back the old MN community habits (‘unwelcoming’) of posting in the right topic. And MNHQ need systems that deal correctly and promptly with illegal content (a poster said earlier that it was unforeseeable - I’d disagree and say it’s basic practice)

@MNHQ I’m posting this then deleting my account. I’ll keep an eye on the press as I’d like to come back when proper measures are in place, but I can’t risk seeing images like those. I also sometimes scroll when the DCs are on the settee with me. It’s unthinkable that they might see something. And although it’s not an airport, in this instance I do feel the need to announce my departure.

I don't know, but it was certainly the quickest way for the night watch to find the thread rather than having to trawl a topic looking for a specific thread title. I hope that if it was technically a crime, then common sense would prevail and they'd not be punished for it. Ideally they'd have sent the link as a private message but not everyone thinks straight in those situations.

It's absolutely disgraceful and exploitative that MN use volunteers to moderate at night. I really hope that the nightwatch people have a rethink about doing this after this incident and realise that MN is not a charity, but a very profitable business. They should never have been put in the position they were last night and what is most shocking is that they didn't even seem to have any way to contact any paid employees to deal with a problem that was outside their scope to deal with.

The problem isn't that photos can be posted, many sites such as Facebook, X Instagram etc. do this without these sort of problems. There are obviously reliable ways to filter images being posted, but I would still expect that all these sites have plans in place in case something like this happened even if they never expected to use them.

It's clear that MN are more interested in making profit than investing in decent IT and moderating staff.

I was shocked that just anyone could post photos as soon as they opened an account. It needs to change.

I can’t believe Mumsnet still uses unpaid volunteers at night. It’s a big, profitable business and needs to behave as such.

As I’ve just said on another thread, I worked for a charity with a support forum and we used a paid agency for our of hours moderation. I’m staggered that MN thinks it’s ok to rely on volunteers for this when it’s a commercial business!

I'd like to hope it didn't take someone reporting CSA images to get a thread hidden, no matter how swiftly. It's never going to be swift enough to stop at least a handful of posters seeing it, and that's more than is acceptable. There has to be a better way. No photos outside of regular office hours?

Also, doing an auto-hide feature on any old thread means the frothers who like to report anything and everything they don't like will have a field day getting all sorts of threads shut down and the power will go to their heads. Plus it will create a ton of work for the mods in the morning. I think whatever is set up needs to be more nuanced and more targeted than that.

This

And This

Those calling for MN to be shut down entirely —

Quite possibly that's the desired outcome, to panic people into closing spaces where women gather and support each other

This is a serious situation needing a professional, competent solution. But let's not forget why some people hate mumsnet.

For the first time I hope this is picked up by DM. It feels like a business model that completely takes advantage of people. Shame on you MN. Sorry for those that had to see the awful images and for those who had to voluntarily deal with them in the middle of the night.

I opened that thread but didn't see any images? There wasn't any comment at that time though. Did they get posters to post for a while and then post the photos?

This is actually quite shocking.

And do the volunteers (who are working for free for a paid business, not sure how anyone thinks that is ok?) get any support with things like debriefs and supervision? Does MN at least have an on-call safeguarding lead available at all times?

And still no statement.

Sorry to be upsetting but this failure has allowed this site to publicly exhibit images of real life victims of abuse. Imagine if those images were of you, or your child?

Safety protocols are there to protect actual victims as well the people unwillingly exposed to those images.

I’m not sure everyone understands the importance of preventing such publishing. Experiencing csa is bad enough, I can’t imagine how much worse knowing there are permanent records of that which could pop up anywhere to anyone is.

I don't know. There was quite a wide time spread between each of the affected threads though. That was really where MNHQ need to take accountability and work urgently on a solution, because clearlty the night watch volunteers don't have sufficient training, powers or tech ability to act decisively enough.

I'm pretty shocked there has still been no statement or comment from MNHQ.