FAO Night Watch: please stop letting Mumsnet exploit you!

[myotherusernamesarebetter]

Mumsnet is a business, not a charity or voluntary organisation. There is no justification for using volunteers.

I urge the Night Watch to rethink their choice to help out a commercial business who should be using paid moderators.

If they didn't want to do it they wouldn't.

What is the problem, weren't the posts deleted as they would have been during the day?

No one is twisting their arms to volunteer for mums net .

Obviously the folk volunteering want to do it. I don't see why pressure from outside should stop this system if it works.

I don't understand why the volunteers couldn't report it to the police? Why on earth would they wait till morning? I even read that a poster was asked to send stuff to them from the pages with the vile stuff on! Like they do with the fake ads that take over the page or when the page freezes. This is CSA FFS you can be screen shotting and sending that stuff on! Just absolutely shocking all round.

This it isn't a good idea!

DONT SCREENSHOT CSA!

There should always be someone available to quickly take a site offline if there is a serious enough reason to.

Child abuse imagery is one of few things that fall into that category.

It's inexcusable nobody was available to do that, or even stop the image posting function site wide temporarily while child abused imagery was being posted.

Unprofessional and inexcusable for a business with a multi million operating profit.

And as said by a poster on another thread, one of the issues with the night watch in general is how disappointing it is for a site like Mumsnet to rely on women's unpaid work. They know better and could absolutely afford to pay moderators to cover overnight and in doing so have tighter rules and greater powers for those moderators.

I hope they offer them some counselling for seeing the imagery and this is a wake up call that expecting volunteers to moderate a site overnight without a paid staff member always available is completely insufficient for a business of this size (and operating profit) with an audience of this size.

We’ve literally just seen that it doesn’t…

Same here. Around the same time there was some sort of IT bloke too? I can’t remember his Mumsnet official username, but it appeared that he did all the techy computer stuff. In my rose tinted toddler specs I remember Nightwatchers being around then too. Probably wrong.

Anyway, this site is huge now. Volunteers overnight?? WTF??
Christ alive, move with the times Mumsnet.

I really feel for the Nightwatchers who viewed horrific images last night, you all do an incredible job, without support it appears. Thank you.

The problem is these are unpaid people (most likely women) who have seen some of the worst things imaginable.

They didn't have the adequate controls to stop it (take the site offline until MNHQ woke up), and nobody has confirmed if they'll be receiving help with what happened and if they'll be working tonight.

Because it is illegal to use people as ‘volunteers’ doing essential work for a business.

They deleted the posts which is exactly what would have happened during the day.

Why on earth would we be told what support they'll be getting and if they are working tonight, that is private and confidential information.

If you had to deal with images like that in my job, there would be a raft of support made available to you - for example counselling and paid time off.

How does this work for volunteers?

It’s unacceptable to use volunteers to take on the responsibility of making a site like this safe - and last night shows in sharp relief why that is.

@DameM it occurred 15 times between 11pm and 4:30am, according to posters who were online at the time.

As soon as it became clear that this was happening, the site should have been taken offline until such time as MNHQ could intervene and report to the police.

A simple message from MNHQ confirming that the night watch volunteers who had to deal with it are being looked after would be enough.

But it doesn't, as clearly exemplified by last night

So the images were online from 11pm until 4am or they were deleted within the same time frame you'd expect during the day?

I'm not by any stretch suggesting any of this is ok but sadly there are some awful people out there and as long as action was taken and I believe further action is being taken as posted by mnhq on the other thread then surely it was handled as well as could be expected?

Agree, I think it’s disgraceful to have overnight run by volunteers for a company as big as mumsnet, pay workers overnight, with the proper tools, don’t have an essential part of your business run by volunteers.

Let’s not forget that using the report button didn’t work during that time - because nobody is on the other end overnight - which hardly helped matters.

@DameM apparently towards the end of the night some were up for over an hour.

These women are unpaid, giving their time for free, and the site that exploits them didn't protect them.

Quite. Volunteering is for charities, not commercial businesses.

Sorry I didn't realise I presumed nightwatch had reports diverted to them. If not that would seem a bit unhelpful to say the least.

No, reports are not diverted to them so the report button is completely useless overnight.

Long-term MNer, and I had no idea about the Night Watch volunteer system. It's pretty outrageous, particularly if allegations of no way to escalate to MNHQ are true. Has @mnhq commented or explained anything about what happened last night?

It's not illegal at all to use volunteers to moderate internet forums?!

Evidently appalling images of child sexual abuse.
I didn't see them, thankfully, as I don't know how one could ''un-see'' serious illegal abuse like that.

Once I did see a nasty 'niche' porn image,{At night on Mumsnet} but it was at least adults- a child's image would be very distressing.

Yes, on another thread about this.
They have {Thankfully} disabled the posting of images {apart from the 'app'} which apparently takes longer for MN to disable image posting on.