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.

As above - I saw the threads commenting on this early this morning but at that time no response from mnhq. Have they made any comment yet?

I didn't know that. Now realise that the trolls do hence their behaviour at night and weekends. Threads descend into a morass of nastiness then.

My tuppence worth...

Pay for staff to moderate overnight.

Or close the site down overnight.

The NHS doesn't shut down overnight, they still pay their staff to work overnight instead.

Lots of places stay open throughout the night and pay staff.

Volunteers shouldn't be moderating unless they're trained to cope with all safeguarding issues and paid as well.

It doesn't work, that's the point 🤷‍♀️

Nightwatch - do take a look at the other thread where the high level finances of MN have been posted. If someone came onto MN and asked if MNers thought it was okay to regularly work a shift for a corporation that makes £2mil in profits each year there would be an unequivocal pile-on to explain about slavery/exploitation/minimum wage etc. If you want to 'volunteer' that's great - but do it for a charity or a not for profit organisation, don't give your valuable time for free to a company so that its owners get to take more profits home each year to spend on their families.

Well, that's stupid, isn't it. It blows my mind, also, that there are no paid staff on overnight.

My understanding of the NMW act is that it is, but perhaps an employment lawyer can wade in here and confirm.

Presumably there are obligations placed on the nightwatch - times they have to be online, they can’t just cancel, can’t ask someone to do it in their place etc.

All of this would - in my understanding of the law - make them workers, and thus subject to the NMW.

I can see this comment from @mnhq :

JustineMumsnet · Today 17:48

Hi all,
We've now disabled image posting from the site and are working on removing it from the Apps. We're also looking at some longer term AI alternatives to prevent recognise harmful content prior to being posted but they'll most likely take a few days to implement. Thanks.

But nothing about the Nightwatch situation. Am I missing something?

Also, given that Mumsnet now offers a premium subscription service, it’s harder to argue that it’s just a big friendly online community.

So if someone's happy to be exploited we should just let them?!

Because I honestly had no idea how it worked, I've tried to find some info or a policy about talk moderation: there's this policy, but it doesn't talk about how moderation works or mention the Nightwatch. They must have had a horrible time of it last night. I'm sure they do a good job. But maybe MNHQ do need to be more open about how moderation works.

https://www.mumsnet.com/i/netiquette

Clearly.

And never mind that these people have no training, no support, no rights or protection if anything goes wrong.

Never mind that the use of free labour is illegal and - even when used appropriately - reduces diversity within the organisation.

Never mind that a voluntary system cannot legally compel anyone to work or enforce hours, so potentially at any moment the site could be left without any moderation.

Never mind that the unpaid workers volunteers have no access to the report button, or that the site users haven’t been made aware of the correct process for reporting threads at certain times.

Apart from all that, seems as thought MNHQ were just terribly unlucky to get hit.

I've volunteered to moderate. But behind the scenes we talked to each other about reported posts, reaching agreement and could delete posts, suspend. Was up to the bosses to reinstate.

Honestly, you're presuming far too much.

We've had NW volunteers for over 10 years and it's well documented that HQ ask that they just give whatever little bit of time they can.

There's been plenty of nights were none of them have been around for hours.

And the NMW act has nothing to do with volunteers who are not employees and are not covered by the same rights.

Ironically one of those threads has just been deleted by mumsnet.

They posted here

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/site_stuff/5266690-its-time-to-rethink-the-night-watch-volunteer-system?reply=141875463&utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

They had said hours ago that they wanted to keep everything in one place so would be deleting other threads

Indeed. Volunteer mods are not unusual even on very large commercial sites whose turnover and profit margin make MN look like the pennies down the back of the sofa. If informed adults wish to give their free time and work to a for profit organisation then that is largely between the volunteers and the organisation.

What matters here are questions such as training provided, support provided, tools available and existence of/training in clear processes to manage incidents, especially serious incidents. None of that information should be business or security confidential and could be covered in a simple outline of how NW works.

Its screamingly obvious from this and other threads that many users do not know they exist and do not understand the process to report incidents at night. That is before you get to the issue of having a public thread as the venue for posting links in order to report porn, CSA, vulnerable posters etc.

That is two bits of communication which could and should be addressed without requiring lengthy investication -all the infor should already be clearly documented in the processes.

It would be helpful to see them posted soon.

That’s such a naff excuse for a cover up. They could easily start a thread, disable comments, and pin it to active or trending to acknowledge the incident and keep people up to date (not that people need to know the ins and outs, but an explanation about photos being disabled for instance, confirming person was reported to police).

It'd be great if a Night Watcher could do an AMA thread but I'm not sure MNHQ would allow it @C8H10N4O2

I saw a post saying earlier threads on last night would be closed, not deleted. Was there a subsequent comment about deleting discussions rather than closing them with a divert?

The general subject of night watch and night moderation is a seperate discussion from the incident and merits its own discussion. Especially as it seems so poorly understood.

I don't think AMA format would really work tbh.

It needs to be something clear and based on MN processes and including guidance on how people should report issues at night. Its really a site issue.

You cannot replace a paid worker with a volunteer wherever you fancy. There are strict rules about it.

I would be interested to see where anything is ‘well documented’ about the NW scheme, because many people - including me - are quite confused by it.

Interesting that you say, ‘we’ - why ‘we’?

I think it is different where mods are looking after the entire MN site, not just a page or community they have set up, as happens on FB or Reddit.

FB / Reddit will hide behind the ‘we are just the platform’ excuse, but as far as I know, you can’t make your own community on MN, or restrict membership of a given topic.

And the use of paid moderators during some times of the day makes it even less likely the ‘volunteer’ system is not contrary to NMW.

But it would be interesting to hear from an employment lawyer on this.

Yes, I reported one of the perverts but didn't know about the Night Watch.