Notorious UES Mommas FB group mysteriously shut down for six days: Got really out of control

It needed a timeout.Early Friday morning, the infamous UES Mommas Facebook group – known for its exclusionary membership practices and petty parenting controversies – was suddenly shut down by parent company Meta.The mystery cancellation immediately prompted outcry and speculation. “Good riddance,” Wednesday Martin, a social researcher and the author of the bestselling memoir “Primates of Park Avenue,” told The Post.A social media post about its demise on rival Facebook group Moms of the Upper East Side (MUES) quickly drew nearly 300 comments, ranging from “OMG!” and “So horrible!” to echoes of Martin’s sentiments.First launched in 2011, UES Mommas was initially a neighborly group where a couple thousands moms shared recommendations for pediatricians and mommy-and-me music classes.“It was just a great resource for the things that I needed,” Kate Donnnelly, an Upper East Side mom-of-three who first joined the group in 2012 after the birth of her eldest son, told The Post.But as the group grew to have more than 40,000 members, it became a venue for heated and political exchanges.“Despite its protests to the contrary and its insistence that its mission was to ‘support mothers,” its very essence was about keeping ‘certain people’ and ‘certain ideas’ out,” Martin said.“Eventually their exclusionary ‘mean girl’ essence became the group’s identity.”Donnelly, a stay-at-home-mom whose husband works for the NYPD, struggled to pinpoint a turning point but recalled tensions around topics such as police officers and a children’s book called “P is for Palestine.”She also remembered a growing number of “shaming” posts attacking others’ parenting decisions, and, especially the behavior of strangers’ nannies on public playgrounds and the like.

“Those got really out of control,” she said.“It didn’t feel good to me.” Wealthier members of the group could also seem quite out of touch.

Donnelly noted a comment...