Government crowdsourcing sites in danger of crashing due to hate comment overload
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The government's Spending Challenge site is proving to be very popular but critics worry the lack of moderation is attracting some less than helpful suggestions on ways to curb public spending – some of them racist.
Deliberately left open to encourage outreach and spur dialogue, the site is now being filled with messages such as "Get rid of all the Muslims" and anti-unemployed and disabled people. Furthermore, the site is becoming overloaded with traffic to the extent it is currently experiencing intermittent periods of downtime.
When PublicTechnology.net checked, the top post was the charming 'Child Benifit [sic] for Immigrant families,' with the helpful suggestion, “Payment to immigrant families should not be paid unless they have been in the UK for at least 5 years then only pay child benifit [sic] for the 1st and 2nd child. When the sums are done the immigrant population seems to be exploding far out stripping the local population.”
Another UK citizen found use in his time posting a suggestion that the UK somehow find another Australia to build what sounds like our own Gulag: “uk gov to buy an island somewhere and build some static caravan type home with only basics and send them all to live there and make it thier own insteed of trying to make uk like back home for them” [original poster's spelling mistakes].
One example of backlash to some of the racist posts however, is the comment, "The lack of moderation on the site is an utter disgrace; the publication on a government website of disgusting hate speech towards immigrants, the unemployed, disabled people is absolutely repugnant and unacceptable, if not in some cases illegal."
A spokeswoman for the Treasury told an IT news site that over 15,000 ideas and 25,000 comments and "the vast majority are constructive and helpful".
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