It’s important that members feel safe to speak freely and be authentic in posts or chats. Here are some strategies and tools to help foster safer real-time chats.
Start by clearly communicating chat rules via your broadcast chat. All members are automatically part of this chat, making it a great place for announcements. Importantly, should a member need to be reminded of the rules, you can easily direct them to this chat. Some examples of chat rules include: Be accepting, respect boundaries, don't criticize, don't flood the chat and don’t self promote.
Terri H. of Women Like Us 60 Plus uses chats for her members to talk in real-time. She’s encountered a couple group rule violations in her chats, including one instance of a member trying to sell something. When these occur, she makes an announcement to remind all members to re-read the chat rules.
Moderating chats requires a different approach than feed posts. Because chat communication is instantaneous, members may expect issues to be resolved in a fast manner. In addition, members feel safer and are more likely to engage when admins & moderators show some type of presence in the chats.
Building a passionate moderation team can help you—and your community—thrive. Along with using tools like Admin Assist, recruiting a team will help:
Assist with your workload
Resolve issues faster
Enable members to form closer connections
Empower members to engage authentically
Give those on your moderation team a stake in the group, empowering them to become group advocates, both online and off
All of the above will, in turn, help keep your community cordial and safe
Admin Assist lets you set criteria to stop certain messages from being sent, such as those containing keywords you select, phone numbers, and links to specific sites. Leveraging Admin Assist can help slow the spread of negative and inappropriate content, even when you aren’t online.
Your members can flag community chats and content that they think violate your chat rules or Facebook Community Standards. There are two ways of reporting: either to the group admin(s) or to Facebook. It can be helpful to remind members in a post or in your chats (such as your broadcast chat) that these avenues are available.
When members understand they have the ability to report, they feel empowered to help—which in turn, gives them confidence to engage openly and authentically in chats. For more information on how Facebook Community Standards impact your group, scroll to the bottom of this article.
When you’re presented with content that’s in violation of your chat rules or Facebook Community Standards, there are different actions you can take. You might consider:
A soft action, such as sending a direct message with a warning
A hard action, such as suspending or banning the member
It helps to create a set of guidelines for your moderation team, so everyone understands the protocol for different levels of reported content. When in doubt, consider discussing the violation in question in your Admod-only chat to get your team’s input.
At any time, leverage the “pause” feature for individual community chats as a way to let conversations cool down and plan the right way to get things under control.
Our Facebook Community Standards help promote safety in your group.
Below describes how community chats will impact your group.
- If an admin posts content in a community chat that goes against Facebook’s Community Standards, we'll remove it and may then apply a strike to your Facebook account. This strike could also count against your Facebook group. Whether we apply a strike depends on the severity of the violation, the context in which it was shared, and when it was posted.
- Admins and groups do not receive strikes for policy violating messages sent by members who don’t have admin or moderator privileges.
- If an admin repeatedly violates Community Standards, they might lose access to chats. This can happen at a personal level (only the admin loses access to chats) or the group level (the whole group loses access to chats).
- Admins will be notified of violations in the Facebook Support Inbox as well as the Group Quality tool. They may have the option to appeal the decision.
For more information on Community Standards enforcement, see here.
