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.

There is a lot of women who use this site to tear other women down and it goes on and on with no input from MNHQ. Let's not pretend it doesn't happen.

Rather than warning posters not to open threads, surely MN should turn off the ability to post images?

Oh thank you! And apologies to the poster I misread. Lost my cool headedness around the time that someone posted words describing csa would be just as damaging 🤯

Thanks and sorry!

Shocking but sadly this was inevitably going to happen at some point. I agree, the motive is to discredit a predominantly female online space.

MNHQ need to disable photos immediately until a robust plan in place.

Also cannot believe a site the size of MN still relies on volunteers through the night. Times have changed and they are in a very unfair position. I don't blame them if they all quit over this. In fact they should.

If you can’t follow legal requirements overnight you shouldn’t be open overnight.

Or that, yes. They should certainly do something.

Everyone on this and related threads who is against a blanket ban on uploading photos - why? I don’t get it. At least until some other way of controlling content is used. Who would be negatively affected by not being able to post a photo?

Can we move away from this talk that this is an attack on women/done to disrupt a female space.

A thread where the focus is on images of abused children is not the place to try to make your feminist point.

Exactly. Justine cannot continue to pretend that MN is just a cosy little coffee clique or hobby forum. It's a major platform with international reach, large and important enough to be targeted by people with all sorts of agendas.

The site needs to be staffed appropriately and controlled appropriately.

That's not who frothers is referring to. That is a reference to the people who frivolously report all kinds of threads they don't like.

I'm surprised that wasn't obvious from what followed the use of the word.

It's the internet, it could happen anywhere and there's no such thing as a "safe site" if there are people posting comments and pictures.

What makes MN different IMO is that they rely on volunteers overnight, so these things are dealt with much more slowly overnight than during the day (and not just the horrific edge cases like this, the normal stuff like spam or racism).

MNHQ can't stop the internet being the internet, but they can invest in proper infrastructure. This isn't the first time they've been exposed.

Why is the “add image” function still available @BeckyAMumsnet ?

I agree with this. Thankfully I managed to miss the images last night (I normally scroll through MN while I’m up feeding the baby), it sounds horrific. MNHQ have a duty to keep its users safe.

Unfortunately because the majority of MN users are women and MN is known as a meeting place for women, it seems that we’re likely targets for this kind of thing (surely targeting MN users like this is VAWG, just online?) and a site of this scale should do better to protect its users.

Care of children is a feminist issue.

This was done here because of who would see.

I sincerely hope it was AI images and no children directly harmed

This^

The only person I see that keeps bringing up 'feminist rants' here is you.

If you don't like the posts speculating about the sort of people who do this then don't read them? You seem to be taking it
quite personally.

Those images were truly disturbing.
I’m glad to see MNHQ have reported this to the police and I hope that the sick individual can be traced.

I would like a reassurance from @MNHQ that they will be putting something in place so that when I’m using their forum I’m not going to come across that type of material again.

Thank you

X-posted - you put it much more succinctly than me!

I am often on here at night, when I can’t sleep. I think I saw one of the threads (when it was still just about the thread title) and am grateful I did not see these images. I’m horrified that other site users did and that Nightwatch were scrambling to search for the threads in question, and that there is obviously no system in place to flag them on a thread without posting a link to it, which must be illegal.
(no blame to nightwatch, it must have been an awful experience and totally unfair on them)

I really hope one change is that volunteers are paid and have the same process as day time version

For goodness sake, I am not saying that people reporting or complaining about this specific issue or others like it are frothers. I'm saying that the answer is not to give every poster the chance to become a de facto moderator from 6pm to 9am every day, simply because they find someone else's opinion offensive or because they've been told 'Yes YAVBU' by 150 people and they feel cross about it. There needs to be a more targeted and intelligent approach or it cripples the site.

Whenever I've seen a contentious thread hidden while MNHQ 'have a look behind the scenes' I don't think I ever recall any of those threads being reinstated, and certainly some of them should have been. There may have been some very robust debate on some 'sensitive' topics, with some polarised and divisive opinions expressed, but that in itself is not illegal (yet.) Some people do like to shut down debate around subjects where they don't like to hear opinions other than their own. They get triggered by being reminded of biological fact or science or the lack of hard evidence for a God, for example. A case in point would be the 'Will the UK eventually become a Muslim majority country?' that didn't get to stick around because MNHQ obviously found the reports of Islamophobia too many to deal with, even if those offending comments were not actually Islamphopic, when examined intelligently.

I just think it becomes too much work and too much hassle to moderate these threads and MNHQ lose their nerve when faced with multiple reports of various alleged phobias and isms, so they stay hidden in the hope that everyone will eventually just forget about it and it will drop off their Threads I'm On. That way the mods don't have to make a judgement call on deleting dozens of specific posts, or having to justify to the frothers why they haven't done so. It's a minefield, I get it. But it's too easy to close down debate these days; take the path of least resistance for fear of being accused of being a platform for the 'far right' or 'TERFs'.

Of course I do want a solution to the very serious problem we encountered last night, but I don't think an auto-hide feature available to every single poster who wants to shut down a thread simply by hitting the report button is it.

@TwigletsAndRadishes that poster misread what you had written about 'Frothers' and did apologise in a later post

Thanks HP

Thankfully I missed the images posted last night. I'd support the "Add image" function being removed until MNHQ have systems up to stop it being exploited like this.