Where’d my Facebook comment go? We apologize to those whose comments were inadvertently hidden by our new moderation tool.
To everyone in our Facebook community:
We apologize that some of your comments have been inadvertently hidden lately. Here's what's been happening.
Here at Coffee Party USA, we work hard to create a safe, welcoming, and friendly community where we can share our stories and diverse views on the issues we care about. This starts with our Civility Pledge, which we ask all of our friends and members to read and follow. We also moderate comments on our Facebook page to ensure that our conversations meet our community standards (and Facebook’s). One tool we have relied upon is the Facebook word filter.
As Facebook tools evolve, our page administrators are learning, too. Recently, we discovered our word filter had become the Moderation Assist tool. What this meant was that comments containing words – or fragments of words – commonly used by spammers, phishers or to denigrate others, resulted in an abnormally high number of hidden comments.
For example, when we flagged “hi” because spammers use this greeting to phish, any comment containing a word with the letters “hi” in them, like the word “this” were also hidden.The result was too many of your good comments were needlessly hidden. And this hampered our community’s ability to engage in thoughtful conversation.
That said, another reason otherwise appropriate comments might be automatically hidden is because of inappropriate and unnecessary profanity. Our filters will continue to hide the “F-word” and the various iterations of “BS.” We will maintain our higher than usual internet standards in order to create safe and civil space for intelligent conversations.
We have made three adjustments to our process. We are:
- reviewing the list of words we hide more frequently;
- monitoring the Moderation Assist activity log daily and reversing inappropriate actions; and
- refreshing our page header and creating a meme reminding readers about the civility pledge and our commitment to moderation.
Your thoughts? We’d love to hear from you via email or on the Facebook page.