Are Manchester’s social meetup groups a terrible idea?

It was the beginning of April this year and Manchester’s Reddit page had a new public enemy number one: a 31-year-old postman called Kyle. A post by an anonymous user had drawn 771 likes, and attracted 283 comments, making it one of the most viral posts on the page in the past few months. It was titled with a warning: “Women of Manchester, please be careful with the newly forming social groups.”

The poster explained that she had recently joined an online social group designed to organise meetups between strangers, simply named ‘Manchester Social’. There are loads of these types of groups in Manchester, aimed at the many people — often new arrivals to the city — who are looking to make new friends. Kyle, speaking to The Mill via email, insists this was his only motivation when he set up the group in January: “to foster genuine social connections and friendships in a welcoming space.” Soon after establishing the group he put out a call for moderators to help prevent “seedy or sexual” behaviours. Safety, he wrote, would be his top priority.

At least according to the poster on Reddit, this wasn’t what happened. Her testimony was damning. Having originally joined the group hoping for a “genuine, fun, inclusive social experience”, she instead found a community which had not “been created out of goodwill, but as a way for the founder to place himself in a position of power — particularly over women.” Though Kyle was not addressed by name in the original thread, other commenters on the thread soon named him. 

When Kyle himself finally surfaced on the thread, he gave an entirely different account. He said he was the victim of “slander” and threatened legal action, as well as saying he intended to involve the police. His reply was down-voted 241 times. “If you cared about women feeling safe on your group at all then surely you should be trying to find out what it is you've done that has been seen as inappropriate rather than resorting straight to legal threats,” was one response.