Moderation

Moderation is a tool to build a vibrant, respectful and inclusive digital community. It helps you communicate with users and allows you to bring marginalised groups into the conversations. Moderation can encourage users to actively participate in the conversation and create a safe space where young people feel not only able to take part but benefit from it.  

Careful strategic moderation of online conversations helps build trust among community members who then feel safe to express themselves freely. This, in turn, nurtures diverse and resilient communities with strong relationships among members. From a more operational perspective moderation offers you the chance to set the tone of discussion on certain content, bring users back on topic if they go on a tangent, diffuse tense conversations, provide additional information or answer users’ questions, and propagate a healthy, respectful dialogue.  Online abuse and harassment can discourage people from discussing important issues or expressing themselves and mean they give up on seeking different opinions. Therefore, discussions should be  moderated with the aim of ensuring they remain a safe place for discussion and debate.   

Users’ comments and intentions can be categorised, based on the moderator’s judgement. Moderators don’t have to record and categorise all user comments, but when deciding how to respond, these descriptions below can guide:  

1. Supportive/Constructive: a user responding to the page or another user with the intention of having a respectful discussion.  
2. Inquisitive: users asking a question, clarifying content, or requesting more information on the topic.  
3. Negative/Unconstructive: negative response from a user to another user or the page – not really seeking deeper conversation. In the polarisation context, this would be monologuing  
4. Antagonistic: a user participating in the conversation but not with good intentions – really aiming to stir up discord.  
5. Abusive/Offensive: this can be anything from threats of violence, hate speech, etc. 

If you want to read more about moderation strategies and how to deal with the different types of user responses, click on the file below.

Community Guidelines

It can be very useful to set up online community guidelines. In addition, you can make policies for all your staff to be clear how to react online to attempt to undermine your campaign. 

If you run a successful campaign you should anticipate some negative comments. But don’t freak out! It means that you reached someone on an emotional level, which – in itself – could be a success indicator. Trolls and hate comments are still annoying, so here are some tips on how to deal with trolls: 

• Report/Flag: If you don’t think a comment should be allowed on a platform you’re active on, you can report or flag it and a moderator will look at it. If you think it is illegal content (like calls for violence, discrimination or terrorist propaganda) you should report it to the police. 
• Delete: If you don’t want any vulgar language on your page you can delete the comment. 
• Hide: Another option is to hide the post. No one will be able to see the comment anymore, except for the author. (S)He will therefore never find out about your censorship. 
• Respond: You can respond to a comment if you think you can engage in a dialogue. Try to ask open-ended questions and don’t be too defensive. 
• Block: You can also block an account to make sure that your annoying troll won’t come back to haunt you. 
• Ignore: Sometimes it is best to ‘not feed the troll’, just ignore the comment and move on. 
• Counter: You can also use emotional messaging to counter a troll, but this could be very time-consuming, and it is difficult to really make an impact. Quite often you’ll end up in a yes-vs-no game with no end in sight. 
• Seek Help: You can always ask for help when you’re not sure on how to deal with a specific situation. Reach out to other campaigns like the ‘no hate speech movement’ or ‘get the trolls out’ and ask for advice.