Broadcasts.com - "The Role of Credibility in Community Management" (Community Signal)

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The Role of Credibility in Community Management

Published: Feb. 4, 2019, 5:46 a.m.

With a global network of content moderators, it seems that Facebook might be the largest employer of community professionals in the world. But even with these resources, their content moderation practices continue to make headlines. Outsourcing this work barely seems to help Facebook keep up with the volume of content that needs to be reviewed, not to mention the toll that this takes on the often\xa0undervalued and underpaid people that are responsible for it. To this\xa0Ben Whitelaw, the engagement lead for the\xa0Engaged Journalism Accelerator, asks when Facebook is going to start taking bigger risks to solve this problem?

While Facebook\u2019s moderation practices have lots of room for improvement, Ben also shares how the platform proved to be an asset when\xa0Times\xa0readers needed a space for discourse around Brexit. For newsrooms organizing communities today, Ben shares that Facebook\u2019s ease of use makes it easy to spin up new groups and show proof of concept, but that this isn\u2019t a full solution for long-term reader engagement. Patrick and Ben also discuss:

How Brexit played out in comments section at\xa0The Times\xa0and led to internal advocacy for readers
Scaling the work of moderation and the importance of consistency and credibility in community management
Whether or not big platforms like Facebook should be allowed to self-moderate

Big Quotes

On public policy playing out in the comments:\xa0\u201cOur columnists who wrote about Brexit would get 1,200 comments on an article. \u2026 Some of [the comments] were very good. Some of them were very informed.\xa0The Times\xa0has got a pretty interested and educated audience. You would have lawyers and people who work in policy, people who are civil servants often anonymous, comment on intricacies of Brexit, and it made for very interesting discussion. \u2026 There was a real passion for the topic and a need for it to be heard. Obviously, in hindsight, we see that \u2026 legacy media in the UK didn\u2019t really highlight some of the voices of people outside London who were wanting Brexit to happen, and that was playing out in the comment threads under articles.\u201d -@benwhitelaw

The potential impact of governance of the web:\xa0\u201cI am afraid that Facebook will trigger something legally that will harm online communities as a whole. I think we sometimes forget that the vast majority of online communities do not have Facebook\u2019s problems and are probably fairly well managed and are one person operations with volunteers. \u2026 Government intervention, if it happens, really needs to be targeted at people above a certain scale, above a certain size. \u2026 If it falls hard on small communities, it\u2019s really going to stifle a lot of voices.\u201d -@patrickokeefe

About Ben Whitelaw

Ben Whitelaw\xa0is the engagement lead for the\xa0Engaged Journalism Accelerator, a program run out of the\xa0European Journalism Centre, where he is responsible for the growth and engagement of grantees and content programming. The Accelerator is a $1.7m program that provides funding, mentoring, resources and events to support a more participative kind of journalism across European news organizations of all sizes. It recently announced\xa0its first twelve funded news organizations.

The program is supported by\xa0the News Integrity Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism\xa0and\xa0Civil, the blockchain-enabled journalism community. Prior to joining the accelerator, he was head of audience development at\xa0The Times\xa0and\xa0The Sunday Times\xa0in London. Over seven years there, he built an award-winning team, ran several high profile editorial campaigns, including\xa0Cities fit for Cycling, and helped both newsrooms reach 500,000 subscribers before leaving in 2018.

Ben has also worked at\xa0The Guardian\xa0as a health and government IT journalist and set up\xa0Wannabe Hacks, a online platform dedicated to helping young journalists get into the industry. He writes a weekly newsletter about content moderation on the web and the policies, people and platforms that make it happen. Inevitably, it is called \u201cEverything in Moderation\u201c.