Facebook has been focusing on building its approach on better incentivizing creators, and has just announced that it’ll be releasing a new set of comment moderation and support tools to help creators further maximize their use of its platform. On top of creator-specific updates, regular users can also look forward to a new treat – a new live chat option for those who get locked out of their accounts. Bye bye petition emails!

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

As per the announcement, especially for creators, who prioritize community management among most other things, the new tools will provide them much needed support in order to better manage post comments, which often fall prey to the detractive and degenerative effects of spam-like behavior .

The new change is basically a simplified option to hide in-stream comments, which was spotted in wild testing by the legendary social media wrangler, Matt Navarra. Just to set records straight, Business Pages have been able to hide comments on desktop for quite some time now, but Creator Pages have not, until this update that is.

‘Hidden’ comments are only visible to the commenter and their connections, while Page admins have oversight on all hidden comments on any post. Admins simply need to select ‘Hidden by This Page’ in the comments drop-down of any post.

In addition to heightened comment management, Facebook’s also adding more blocking controls, improving your overall ability to block problematic users, as well as any future account that they create. There’s also this new keyword blocking option, including the ability to automatically hide comments with variations of words that use numbers, symbols, and even different spellings. Moderation Assist for groups is also being brought in, which automatically moderates comments based on whatever criteria or terms you set.

Facebook Live is getting additional profanity blocking tools, user controls, and ban hammers, along with enhanced comment controls. Facebook expounds:

“We’re also about to kick off a test for Facebook Live community moderation so creators can designate a specific viewer to moderate comments on their behalf.”

But the real star here is the live chat assistance in the event of certain issues. Facebook explains:

“We’ve begun a small test to provide support through live chat for English-speaking creators in the United States who do not already have an assigned relationship manager from Meta to help with questions they might have about Facebook or Instagram. Creators can access a dedicated creator support site when logged in through Facebook. There, they can chat live with a support agent for help on various issues ranging from status of a pay-out to questions about a new feature like Reels.”

It’s worth noting that this new option is only available to users who’ve been locked out of their accounts, which is one of the most commonly reported frustrations of users, highlighting a lack of communication ability to get the necessary help. Let’s wait and see if this new addition would actually make a difference and if it does help resolve these types of issues.

Lastly, Facebook is also pilot-testing a new ‘Safety School’ initiative to help provide users with more information on how they can better manage the time they spend on its apps.

The Wrap

Digital literacy has been identified as being a key gap in our current educational curriculum. While many among the academe and educational institutions seek to fill this need, it requires even more focus if we mean to truly banish most of the major negative impacts of unmoderated digital consumption. And such, it’s quite refreshing (and good) to see Facebook actually take initiative and lead a personal push itself.

Despite needing to iron a lot of things out, Facebook hopes that these new options spark for it just a little bit more interest over the holiday season. This, along with a couple of new creator and admin-focused updates is sure to make everyone’s Christmas that much merrier.

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Sources

https://bit.ly/33l8jRj