Facebook publishes new recommendations for group admins, suggests adding people of color as moderators to help navigate conversations about the BLM movement
To help them navigate the Black Lives Matter movement — Facebook published new recommendations for group admins yesterday evening …
The VergeAshley Carman
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands on top of reporting from the same weekend that Facebook groups were grappling with inadequate and uneven moderation as members tried to discuss Black Lives Matter — admins were improvising rules with no playbook, and Facebook's answer is advisory rather than enforcement: publish best practices and lean on volunteer moderators, including new ones recruited specifically to steer race-related conversations.
Group admins of large communities are immediately affected: Facebook is asking them to recruit and elevate people of color into moderator roles, expanding their unpaid moderation workload during high-volume BLM discussions.
Second-order effects
Facebook's own Groups roadmap becomes the real response — by October 2020 it shifted to automating moderation and surfacing public group content in News Feed and search, replacing manual admin judgment with product features.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, community governance on Facebook migrates from volunteer human moderators toward AI-assisted tooling and credentialed 'experts', with the platform setting policy defaults and admins administering them.
The trend: Platform moderation is moving from ad-hoc human judgment inside communities to centralized, algorithm-assisted governance built by Facebook itself.
so in response to all this, facebook published recommendations for group admins, including making a more “diverse” group of people mods and changing that whole “political” rule https://www.theverge.com/...
A local neighborhood Facebook group I am in is currently tearing itself apart over what constitutes “politics” for a “no politics” rule (when, e.g., there are posts about local ordinances all the time). This is a fascinating content moderation problem. https://www.theverge.com/..…
facebook groups are melting down over BLM content. mods, given advice from fb, are told to stick to hard rules to help moderate content. many say no “political” posts, but lots of members don't consider BLM political and those posts are being taken down https://www.theverge.com/.…
great @ashleyrcarman story about facebook groups splintering over bizarre moderation practices, including a Hozier fan group where the only permitted discussion of Black Lives Matter is direct links to Hozier talking about Black Lives Matter??? https://www.theverge.com/...
Maybe “I'm unhappy that people are being killed” is not a “political” issue. (Maybe forum-style structures were better for organizing discussions than fb is.) https://twitter.com/...
I'm so disappointed with FB groups splintering not just over BLM but injustices happening in Philippines. You would think that calling for a world that is fair and just would not be a controversial stance but here we are. https://www.theverge.com/...
I saw this happening in two different sourdough groups over the past week. BLM posts were deleted while another user kept posting a “white flour” meme ft the pillsbury dough boy giving a heil salute. A new group has formed called “inclusive sourdough” and it's lovely. https://twi…
This echoes a lot of what I'm seeing in the Theme Park Facebook groups, albeit more around the pandemic: this notion of what qualifies as “political” is a moving target that admins/moderators are deeply struggling to reconcile. https://twitter.com/...
When a corporation controls what is acceptable communication, you get the corporation finding a way to censor. In this case, declaring that content claiming “black lives matter” (could you have imagined an objection to this statement 10yrs ago?) is “political” and thus prohibited…
this is a complex problem but i'm sure they will address it with the simple solution of putting a “racist” stamp on groups that explode over statements of basic human decency https://twitter.com/...
I'd say FB should have more materials to train community mods, which can be a tough job, but judging from their advice here, maybe someone else should do it. https://twitter.com/...
the fascinating thing about this is that Facebook's moderation problem is fractal, runs all the way down to individual page moderators, and illustrates that all of this is, at the end of the day, someone's judgment call https://twitter.com/...
“If Zuckerberg can't even determine when a post should stay live, without following his own stated rules, how are moderators supposed to do better?” https://twitter.com/...
Was very happy to talk with Ashley from @TheVerge about how Facebook leaves group moderators out to dry by having us be the ones to enforce all the community standards, and how that's lead to a lot of censorship of Black Lives Matter within fan groups https://twitter.com/...