This post is a part of a series of articles which addresses the daily tasks and responsibilities of our Group’s Admin Team. To see all of the posts on Admin responsibilities click here.
As our Group is so constantly active, with numerous new comments added every minute, every hour, every day, one of the tasks that we have been spending a lot of time on, is moderating and managing “keyword alerts”. What are keyword alerts?
Keyword alerts is a tool Facebook provides us, as Admins, to moderate our Group efficiently. It scans all the discussions on our feed in order to spot specific terms used, and certain types of content – things like language and keywords that could signal spam, conflict, harassment, violence, and so on.
To make it easier to spot when specific keywords show up in our Group, we use Facebook’s Keyword Alerts feature. This feature tell us, as Admins, when Members use certain words or phrases in our Group.
The custom alert keyword list that we created for our Group reflects those key moments when we want to be present in our Group’s discussions, in order to keep our Community loyal to its loving nature. We choose our keywords to help us find those moments. The keywords that we have currently set up on the list, can be divided to three types:
- Keywords and phrases that may be evidence to comments added by spammers and scammers, such as “bitcoin”, “forex”, “add me up”, “love spell’, “bring my lover back”, and so on.
- Keywords and phrases that reflect offensive language used in our Group, such as “f***ing”, “idiot” and “bi**h”.
- Keywords and phrases that reflect political comments, which Members are requested to refrain from in our Group (such as T***p, B***n, etc).
As a matter of routine in our work, each time a word or phrase appears within a comment or post in our Group, the on-shift Moderator receives an automatic notification. Then, once the alert is received, our Moderator will research, analyze and respond to content that may need more immediate attention. The Moderator may decide, according to the circumstances, to remove the comment, advise the Member of the Group rule they violated in their comment, block the Member in cases of severe violations, or to keep the comment without taking any action.
The task of creating, fine-tuning, experimenting with, and updating the custom list of words and phrases is the responsibility of our Group’s Project Manager. The Project Manager analyzes the performance of various keyword set on the Alerts section, identifies related trends in the Group, communicates the matter and consults with the Moderators as they think of new ways to use the tool, and then updates the lists Keywords.
The task of dealing with the keyword alerts is of utmost priority, and our Moderators are instructed to take care of them with urgency, for two main reasons:
- The keyword alerts reflect activity of the worst kind in our Community – such as scammers, spammers and harassers. If such content is left in our Group without removal, it would create a risk to our Members, who are then exposed to dubious characters seeking exploitation. These spammers cause an immediate and serious risk to our Members and to our vision of maintaining the loving nature of our Group. It is one of our top priorities to block these negative characters and the content that they create right away.
- The keyword alerts in our Group also reflect comments that are related to violence, hate speech and politics. From our experience, such comments, if left un-moderated, have sparked heated, controversial and argumentative communication, which we need to prevent.
For these two main reasons, as well as others that we will address in additional posts, and due to the very high level of activity in our Group, we have set ourselves the goal of having a Moderator on-shift at all times, 24/7, so that such types of content will be removed with urgency, immediately. We are the guardians of our space, we know its needs, and we are determined to keep it loyal to its loving nature. We take this seriously.
What do you see from your window?
With love, stay safe ❤️
Arik
We are doing our very best to ensure, with limited resources, that together with the rapid growth of the Group, this space will be safe for everyone and stay true to our Community’s positive vision.
If you should receive any unsolicited message or friend requests from these spammers – we advise you to take every precaution and to protect yourself from exploitation. If you respond to them, you do so at your own risk. We cannot be held responsible for any consequences that might come from that.
The information in the following article may be also useful for your protection: