Nearly seven years ago, I wrote about how to deal with negative or inappropriate comments on social media for this site. I now realise I knew nothing about negativity on social media.
by Emily Taylor
The intervening years have shown me how negative it can really get and given me the experience to really be able to advise how to deal with negative or inappropriate comments on social media!
I started to write this and quickly realised that actually, it should be entitled, why we took the decision to close comments on our main corporate social media accounts. A drastic step? Yes. A necessary step? Most certainly.
Let me explain.
I never expected to write this post. Indeed, when I wrote my original post, I could never have envisaged a point at which I would choose to do this. But circumstances change and we have to adapt. Social media has taught me that over and over again over the past decade. Social media can be our best friend but also, on occasions, our worst enemy.
Our circumstances? We have had a series of events in our town which have brought with them a high level of trolling and abuse (often deeply personal) on our social media accounts.
Initially, we tried to leave comments open but found ourselves spending a large amount of our time monitoring and deleting comments. I abhor the idea of deleting negative comments on social media – I don’t think that if someone doesn’t agree with everything we do, we should shut them down. But these comments were personal, libellous, or defamatory. Monitoring and deleting comments became an almost full time job for days at a time around these events. So we had to make a decision. It was clearly no longer economical to have someone watching our social media channels 24/7, nor was it any good for those individuals and some of the people under attack.
This is not a decision we took lightly.
It is not a decision which will be repeated in a hurry or without much discussion and deliberation. It will be on a case-by-case basis and I sincerely hope not to have set a precedent BUT I do hope we have managed an unpleasant episode in a manner which helped to protect both vulnerable members of the public, members of the team, a number of officers and councillors, as well as our reputation – without compromising too much our commitment to openness, transparency, engagement and honesty.
NB. We tried not to post during these periods unless it was absolutely critical. This meant that comments were turned off for historic posts – which had already been given time for our audience to interact.
NB. Facebook has made it harder to turn off commenting – if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, please do ask.
Emily Taylor is digital communications and campaigns manager at Telford & Wrekin Council. You can say hello on Twitter at @EA_Taylor84
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