Dear MNHQ please either moderate autism/disability posts or allow us to hide posters!

[IWonderWhereMySharkPantsWent]

Every time a thread is posted in one of the main boards about autism or disability posts, certain posters will come on posting ignorant rubbish, are unable to take on lived experiences and post really offensive crap about the children and parents.

MN has been slack at responding to these for years now. I know this has cropped up several times in my 15 years here.

I know offending people isn’t the worst thing in the world, but if you’re not going to moderate the ableist posts could you at least allow us to hide posters to make our lives just a smidge more pleasant?

Do what? Can you explain specifically what you are asking for and how the conflict between anonymity and tracking a specific hidden user between usernames can be resolved?

Or are you just calling me a liar for fun?

We have to keep the ability to name change. I'm autistic and like many autistic people I am prone to oversharing. Being able to name change is a lifeline for me. It means I can still engage without making a complete tit of myself.

What wasn't clear? If they updated this forum to something more modern, they come with blocking abilities. It's that simple.

I think one of the main problems with disability is the huge divide between those who have the day to day struggle of living with ill health be it physical or mental or have the unending burden (wrong word as most of you do it from love) of caring for loved ones. This is against the absolute reality (my lived experience) of people scamming and exploiting the disability system. I work on a multi agency team dealing with county lines. On almost every occasion that we make arrests for dealing and distribution the driver is n a motability car and the late teenage dealers are on PIP.. for MH issues .. That said .. the amount of people I have met in this work , who are NOT on PIP/DLA who actually should be - but find the process too onerous.. is much greater . I have no solution.. but that is my ‘lived experience’ ..

I think one of the main problems with disability is the huge divide between those who have the day to day struggle of living with ill health be it physical or mental or have the unending burden (wrong word as most of you do it from love) of caring for loved ones. This is against the absolute reality (my lived experience) of people scamming and exploiting the disability system. I work on a multi agency team dealing with county lines. On almost every occasion that we make arrests for dealing and distribution the driver is n a motability car and the late teenage dealers are on PIP.. for MH issues .. That said .. the amount of people I have met in this work , who are NOT on PIP/DLA who actually should be - but find the process too onerous.. is much greater . I have no solution.. but that is my ‘lived experience’ ..

I’m ND and part of ND groups in real life and online. I have noticed over a long period of time that members who are ND themselves can have significantly different views on many differing issues. We have had a fair bit of flouncing over the years from groups I’ve belonged to where people have felt that the group founders are not doing things their “right” way. I have even flounced myself from a group as is my right.

I think it is the nature of the beast that with any conversation including those around disability and maybe even particularly ND, where we tend to be even firmer in our views that non NDs, that not everyone is going to be happy with how groups are run.

Overall personally I’m pretty happy with MN’s approach. I think sharing ideas always has the potential to offend and so long as that is done in the spirit of sharing ideas and without malice then that is life.

@Vatsallfolksdo you think that’s because criminals with no legitimate claim are exploiting the system or because criminals are exploiting those with a legitimate claim? I thought it was well known that young vulnerable adults are exploited in this way?

Sometimes people want to share something deeply personal/sensitive/ outing and they don’t want people to be able to build a picture from their other posts that may prove to disclose who they are.

I’m happy with a robust sharing of informed views backed up with detail of real life experience.

I’m less happy with ignorant views (inconsistent with freely available data) and only backed up with anecdotal information about someone else’s imagined life.

I’m not happy about these being treated as equivalent.

I, as a white women of 60 would never believe that my views of the experience of racism in young black men was an equivalent different view. Even if I knew young black men that I thought were playing the race card to gain ‘advantage’ (I can’t imagine thinking this and even as a thought experiment it is shocking to me).

I don’t understand why overtly disablist views have become acceptable and expressed freely. Or why they are allowed to stand as alternative views rather than hate speech.

Autism in particular has a very wide spectrum so there is no single way people are. My dd has autism but I’m pretty sure my experience will be different to yours, or any other individual because of each individual is different. It doesn’t make your or my experiences any less valid nor our opinion. If someone posts for advice I can only answer from my lived experience!

Agreed,I think I tallied 31 hidden during the pip hatred period.

I'm usually on most these threads. I have an autistic teen. I'm also vocal on disability bashing threads.

I usually find there are a good number of articulate posters able to clearly correct those who are making things up with their viewpoints.

I don't like the idea of censoring discussion. Yet, if say 90% of posters on a particular thread all piled on with the same uneducated nonsense I see often, I then would struggle with this.

I agree with this.
If I couldn't name change I'd need to stop posting altogether.

I'm fairly recently diagnosed as autistic late in life. Tbh I hadn't really taken on board the level of ignorance about autism and the dislike of autistic people on MN until very recently. It's quite shocking. As actually are the almost inbuilt ageist views of a lot of posters.
There are some really unashamedly nasty posters.

I understand that and it's fair and nobody needs to explain themselves to me. My point is, you physically can't introduce a hide poster at the back end and have name changing. It's not possible.

certain posters will come on posting ignorant rubbish, are unable to take on lived experiences and post really offensive crap about the children and parents Black MN

If a poster was blatantly racist you would expect their posts to be deleted.
Why are we not allowed the same respect when it comes to disability?

What do you know about the moderation of racism on Black Mumsnet or the main boards or our lived experiences? Come over to Black Mumsnet and ask us if we are happy with the moderation in respect of racism. Offence has come from both able and disabled MN. Do you really think the experiences of Black and White MN with the same disability are equal? Educate yourself on the racism in your own community before bleating on about how we are more protected from racism but the powers that be here.

If racism is still a problem on MN then I apologise, it should not be like that.

On an anonymous forum I have zero idea if anyone I interact with, or fellow autistics, are black or white, I have no way of knowing unless I’m told.

I don’t ever post on Black Mumsnet because it’s not my community and it’s not your job to educate me, the same as the autism boards a few years ago felt like they should be for those of us who are autistic and for people to come and share their nasty views - this caused an exodus several years ago because MN would not step up their moderation (familiar story). If that is still the case for racism then MN yet again need to step up.

In the case of this case, I naively assumed that racism would be moderated heavily, as it should be, and that ableism should also be moderated better, because this has been ongoing for years.

Wrt blocking a user - surely a block on a name could block their email address behind the username, so any name changes wouldn’t make a difference to the block?

Of course they could register new email addresses, but that’s the case for any banned poster.

I’m not tech savvy, but this doesn’t seem like an impossible task.

Anyone else could switch between their blocking settings to see which usernames are and aren't blocked when you block one account.
All name changes would be out in the open for anyone that wanted to look, or even compile a list.

Would that not make it easier to identify posters?

Yes that's my point! As soon as you can block a single account with multiple name-changes, that account and related usernames become open for literally anyone to see.
That's why you can't continue to have anonymous name-changing with it.

Obviously you could hide posts by a certain username only, but people will soon complain that people are name-changing to get around it.

As I said, it's a discussion that's been done to death.

But surely those reading the comments don’t have to give them equal weight or respect? They’re only treated as "equivalent" in the sense that people are allowed to post views that you, and probably I, find offensive.

It would of course be utterly impossible to have a rule that only those who had "lived experience" of a topic were allowed to comment on it, and in any case I think any rule banning posts that didn’t meet the criteria for "hate speech" but were just unpleasant would be the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge. Rigorous policing of posts only seems a good idea to those who happen to agree with the views of those doing the policing/moderating.

Opinions on what is "acceptable" change over time (cf the several recent court cases won by people forced out of their jobs for making "gender critical" comments deemed by their employers at the time to be unacceptable).

Ah ok.

Even blocking a single username on a post would be good.

Tbh I think that's a recipe for instant derailing of threads. Some people will be seeing a different conversation on the thread from everyone else, there will be parallel discussions happening with people responding to the "hidden" post. It's already frustrating enough when people don't read past the first post and this would exacerbate it.

I do think if half of the posters on a thread had a couple of posters hidden, the discussion would become impossible to follow as everyone would be reading a different set of posts.

Honestly no-one of this would be a problem if people had an agreed way of dealing with goady posts - report, ignore, and/or only refer to it obliquely instead of responding directly to them, eg "some people say that autism means xyz but we all know that's incorrect".

I know as much as anyone how hard that is! And I think agreeing a way of moderating it is the best hope.

I'd like to refer you to the post - ' Ex leaves our Autistic son overnight'. Look at the posts in here in response.

The OP has mental health struggles, clearly had a breakdown after caring for the son who is Autistic. Am I losing my mind to think people are appalling here in their replies.

What bizarre responses!
People don’t understand but still reply - why would you do that?