Concerns about racism

[PandoraSocks]

Hi there Mumsnet HQ

Many of us are concerned about the uptick of hatred, xenophobia and racism on the site over the past couple of weeks. Most of the bigotry is focused on asylum seekers. MNHQ will of course delete racism etc. if reported, but this has gone way beyond a few hateful posts.

Links below to three examples of threads which have descended into real nastiness.

Cheers.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/in_the_news/5385273-civil-unrest-whats-really-going-on?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5385914-do-you-believe-there-will-be-a-civil-war?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5386073-to-be-so-fed-up-amd-disheartened-with-all-the-xenophobia?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

No. Did you read every thread ever about Israel?

The Gazan children thread was full of awful comments. And yes, I report anti-semitism too.

Yes it was absolutely devastating, the photos, the stories. Just hideous.

Read the Gazan children thread. It's a bit of a Swiss cheese because of all the deletions. Most of them from people basically describing Gazan children as terrorists in training. It's horrific.

I have seen enough Israel threads to disagree with your position.

Ah well, as I said, we’ll just have to disagree about the rampant antisemitism bound up with fixation against Israel, the Jewish homeland.

I have no wish to import argument about Gaza, Hamas, Iran etc into this thread. I just think there’s an appalling blind spot.

The blind spot is your insistence that a dislike of the Israeli state means a hatred of Jewish people - your refusal to separate the two different concepts. People
elected the government and some who didn’t are still Jewish

No. I can easily distinguish between genuine and considered criticism of Israeli governmental policy, and antisemitic opposition to all things Israeli and Jewish.

You don’t get very much of the former on MN.

It was never a potatoe famine. But I'm trying not to be pedantic. and failing, clearly

Actually, I think you get a lot of considered criticism of Israeli government policy on MN from people who believe that a) Israel has every right to exist, b) that it had every right to defend itself after the October 7th atrocities and c) that Hamas is a despicable terrorist organisation that should release the remaining hostages right now BUT ALSO feel that the Israeli government's response has been horribly disproportionate, that Israel's ongoing actions in Gaza are totally unacceptable, and that the suffering of innovation Palestinian civilians needs to stop.

Absolutely you get some vicious antisemitic comments on some threads, and I have reported these when I have encountered them. Such comments are utterly abhorrent and they should be reported and deleted in the same way that every other racist comment on this site should be reported and deleted. There should be no place for those spewing their hatred of Jewish people here on MN, or indeed, anywhere else in any civilised society.

But legitimate criticism of the Israeli government is not inherently antisemitic, in the same way that criticism of the UK's immigration policy is not inherently racist. It tips into antisemitism/racism when people start trying up stir up hate or spread claims that aren't true.

Which point? A bunch of your posts have been zapped so it is hard to tell.

Obvs. don't repeat anything that will be deleted again.

I'm very disappointed today. I reported a couple of posts on one of the threads in the OP. I received a couple of response emails saying they're keeping an eye on things but the posts don't break talk guidelines. I said this was shameful and I think the talk guidelines need revisiting if false info and racist comments are allowed to stand.

The response was a warning about the tone of my posts.

It's really not worth reporting anything if MN seems to be happy to be a forum for disinformation.

That is disappointing, @Zonder.

I do personally think that the talk guidelines need to be updated.

I personally think that a lot more than that needs to change. We were told yesterday to report what we thought was racist AND to explain why. If you do then you get threatened by the moderators? The site slips further and further into disrepute.

I am pretty disheartened by it all and don't really feel very welcome on the site.

It's a shame if the moderators can't use common sense and judgement instead of rigidly adhering to the guidelines. Any right-minded person looking at those threads would recognise that a lot of the content is racist and shouldn't be allowed to stand. I think it's the tickbox mentality that gets in the way.

I've been deliberately reporting posts on this thread in the hope of an explanation as to why they have been left or removed. I would love an understanding of the thought processes behind the decisions so that I can adjust my expectations of what is acceptable. I've only had the stock standard, thanks for posting/ challenge on the thread but nothing about the decision made.

@BeckyAMumsnet I think the purpose of the thread was to ask for guidance in the best way to manage hate on the platform. I would be appreciative of receiving this, particularly as experiences of moderator responses on this thread appear to be so different.

Apparently it is acceptable to be racist or offensive provided you are doing it defensively and not offensively. That's what I was told.

If anything this thread seems to have made things worse. The zapping of my post -which I’m pretty sure didn’t break the guidelines - has really made me wonder what the hell’s going on round here. Like you Pandora I’m not sure this is somewhere I feel comfortable any more.

I didn't see your post @BIossomtoes, have you asked why it was deleted?

No point. I’d just be told it wasn’t in the spirit or something.

What this thread shows @BeckyAMumsnet is that posters are experiencing different, and probably inconsistent, responses from the moderator team.

I appreciate, as you’ve told me in a recent email, that you’re a small and busy team. But all of this does suggest to me that you need to review how reports are dealt with, and how moderators determine whether a post/poster is racist/breaching Talk Guidelines, etc.

Dealing with disinformation is clearly a broader issues than just dealing with any of the ‘isms’, and therefore needs much more nuanced consideration by the moderation team. I’m wondering if you just don’t have enough staff, or if they don’t have enough time to really consider how to deal with reports from posters?

It really can only be a choice and that’s sort of unpleasant to look at.

We’re all reading the same posts. Some of us on this thread think there are really, really bad posts out there. MN do not think those posts are as bad as we think they are. That’s all there is to it I think?

It doesn’t actually matter, it’s a website, but it is fascinating and bizarre to see. I went on the ‘poor people with pets’ thread, ten years ago that sort of thing would’ve been laughed out of town.

The mods being under resourced is a shame. It makes me less likely to want to report as I don't want to make their workload heavier.

Ah well.

The MN Reformites are pretty chirpy about all this, so we can take comfort from the fact that the outcome of the thread has made some people happy, even if it's not us 🤣.

I did warn about this upthread @Zonde @PhilippaGeorgiou

I've given it a try on the food prices thread linked by @PandoraSocks, but too early to tell how that one pans

That's tragic.