Moderation Guidelines for Social Media Engagement

Once your House Rules are in place, offering additional guidelines for your moderators, which include more nuance, can often help them to perform their jobs with more certainty.

Moderation Guidelines may go into detail about: when and how to reply to people; when to block or ban people; when to escalate internally and when to potentially report something to the police; and what exactly your organisation does find “offensive”.

The below are sample Moderation Guidelines intended as a starting place for organisations to formulate their own guidelines, to sit alongside your House Rules.

It’s also advisable to have plans in place for if your organisation experiences an emergency comms situation. You can download my sample Social Media Emergency Comms Plan template document to get started with that too.

Sample Moderation Guidelines for Social Media Engagement

The law

The right to free speech is central to many organisations, but there are legal constraints to communication in most countries.

In the UK “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression”, but UK law states that this it is an offence for a person to use “threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour that causes, or is likely to cause, another person harassment, alarm or distress”. It is against UK law to use language that is deemed to incite “racial and religious hatred”, as well as “hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation” and language that “encourages terrorism”. It is also illegal to send a message via a public electronic communications network that is considered grossly offensive, or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.

Communication laws in other countries will differ, but it’s useful for social media managers to have an understanding of what is and isn’t illegal in the country where their organisation is based.

House rules should strive to balance freedom of speech within legal constraints, implementing additional rules to reduce the noise from potential online abuse and to make room for genuine debate.

Deciding when to moderate a comment

Commenters may challenge why a comment has been moderated so you should be prepared to explain why comments have been moderated based on your House Rules.

You should consider keeping a living document of example comments that moderators can refer to, especially focusing on new and evolving language which may not be in dictionaries or widely used.

  • Recording borderline decisions

    Often the volume of comments being moderated means an organsiation cannot make records about every decision being made, because the social media platforms don’t have this facility. It is, however, often available via third party online moderation services.

    But where the decision to moderate is borderline or involves a context that may not be obvious to others, it’s best practice to make a record in case someone comes back and questions it in the future. Make a note of the House Rules that you feel have been broken and any other relevant information about your decision.

    Where you are unable to reach a decision, you should follow your escalation procedure and probably refer to the Social Media Manager or other senior role.

  • Considering the implied meaning of comments

    When moderating, your organisation may want to consider the implied as well as literal meaning of comments, including the use of acronyms, emojis or imagery. Emojis should be considered as though they are words. Due to the fast-changing nature of online communication, you should moderate acronyms or emojis where they do not have an obvious meaning which is within the house rules. For example:

    • “Oh FO” in a comment is short for “f**k off” and may break your House Rules for two reasons: being abusive and off topic.

    • An emoji of a clown, depending on context, may break the House Rules for two reasons: being abusive and off-topic again.

  • Moderating offensive and argumentative comments

    Comments may be posted which are offensive towards other users, sometimes in a trolling and argumentative manner, which should be moderated.

    Strong swearwords, their abbreviations, or instances where they have been implied, should be moderated depending on your house rules.

    Some words, such as “woke”, are often used to cancel other people and their ideas and are intended to shut down discussion and dismiss other people and what they stand for. While these words can be used without being offensive to individuals (for example, when used about an organisation), they often are abusive and should be moderated when used in this way. For example, the following comments aren’t abusive to anyone, so if they are on topic then they should probably be left up: “Load of woke crap" or “Woke fest alert."

    Vocabulary in this area can evolve quickly and new examples should be considered as they develop.

  • Moderating comments aimed at presenters

    People often direct their comments at the presenters of social media videos. While expressions of thanks and genuine questions are fine, comments where people go beyond the subject of the post, or beyond the presenter’s professional expertise and into realms which may be considered more personal (and less comfortable for the presenter) could be considered for moderation because they are off-topic e.g. where people introduce themselves personally to a presenter.

  • Moderating off topic comments

    If you decide to moderate off-topic comments, it means you will hide or delete off-topic comments whether they’re positive, negative or neutral in tone.

    Many off topic comments are found in arguments and so if your community spaces are often derailed by argument, the off-topic rule can be of great help, especially if you’re resourced to get to comments fairly quickly.

    What you consider off-topic is for your organisation to decide, but as a guide you should probably consider on-topic to include the post and its wider subject area, as well as your organisation, its content and activities. When people share your post by tagging others in it, that probably shouldn’t be considered off-topic as it’s someone simply passing on the content of the post.

Blocking people

Blocking people should be a last resort. People who are repeatedly posting comments which break your House Rules in highly offensive or concerning ways, and those who are behaving in a highly provocative manner should be considered for blocking.

The best approach for consistency around blocking people is to devise a workflow where you can record when someone has behaved in a very troublesome way, on a shared document for your team. Simply recording their user name, the date and your concern in a secure document should be fine, but you’ll of course need to consider your local privacy guidelines, such as GDPR in the UK.

You can then decide on how many times someone is permitted to behave like this before they’re blocked. Three times seems like a good number.

This guidance is intended to prevent people from repeatedly returning and causing disruption, rather than people who may be having a bad day. For this reason, offenses on one day by one person may be considered as one offense, unless they are extreme in nature.

However, if someone is posting spam they may be considered for blocking immediately. This is because they haven’t come to join in with your content and community, but are posting in a disruptive way for another agenda and are unlikely to return and take part in a positive way in the future.

Equally, if someone posts content which is very extreme or illegal, they should be considered for immediate blocking too.

In line with UK law, comments which are grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or menacing character may warrant the user to be considered for blocking immediately. While the social media platforms are unlikely to take up legal action against such users, it is advisable to also report grossly offensive comments to the social platforms too.

When to report a comment or user to the police

You should devise your own Escalation Procedure, but comments which carry an immediate threat of violence, harm, danger or serious criminality should be reported to the police. You may ask your moderators to escalate internally first e.g. to the Social Media Manager, who will consider whether something should be reported to the police.

Examples include threats of harm/violence to themselves or others, terrorist/bomb threats or threats of serious criminal activity.

Safeguarding Members of Staff

Specific safeguarding situations sometimes arise around individual members of staff. Whilst confidential details will not be shared beyond those who need to know directly, your moderation teams may be alerted to look out for comments about an individual member of staff or originating from specific social media accounts.

In such situations, you’ll almost certainly want to have your Social Media Manager alerted to any relevant comments as a priority.

Replying to comments

To avoid escalating conflict, it’s advisable not to reply directly to comments that break your House Rules.

Advisable situations in which your social media team or moderators might reply to comments include:

• Complaints about your organisation, perhaps pointing them to where they can complain in a private way.

• Where you can answer a practical question about your organisation or its activities.

• Inaccurate statements made where the author shows an interest in genuine debate. You may consider replying to share the correct information and/or to point people to further reading. There may be occasions when users challenge your approach, and you may need to respond to protect your reputation as a reputable source.

• To act as a warning reminding people of the House Rules if comments are being posted that break the rules (see below).

You might advise your moderators to refer comments which need some greater consideration upwards.

Reminding people of the House Rules

There are three benefits to posting a reminder of your House Rules:

• It might correct the behaviour of those breaking the rules.

• It might help someone to understand why a future inappropriate comment they might make is then moderated.

• It might reassure people who are reading inappropriate comments in your spaces that you are actively monitoring and moderating content, and that you have a commitment to managing a safe social media space.

In situations where there are lots of comments breaking your House Rules, it may be helpful to decide on a number of comments after which you post a comment reminding people about the House Rules e.g. 50 comments.

If there continues to be a significant number of comments that break your rules, you could leave further reminders after each 50 comments. If the negative behaviour continues on a post with more than 200 comments, you may request your moderators to escalate it.

Escalating posts with large numbers of comments that break your House Rules

When a paid post elicits very large volumes of comments which break the house rules, it may be sensible to remove the ad.

At e.g. 200 comments, it may be advisable to request that your moderators escalate the post to your Social Media Manager for potential removal. By this time three comments may have been left reminding posters about the House Rules, if following the above protocol.

Managing challenging content that does not break House Rules

If you cannot identify a House Rule that a post breaks, then do not moderate it even if it is posing complaints or challenging comments about your organisation.

Reporting comments on Twitter/X

You cannot moderate comments on X and so cannot directly enforce your own House Rules there. X is unlikely to act on minor infringements of its rules, so there is little point in reporting them. However, you may want to report comments which you reasonably believe to be a serious breaches of X’s rules.