Use Admin Assist to Automatically Mute Trolls in Your Facebook Groups
If you’ve ever started a large Facebook group, you know how much spam, trolls, off-topic posts, or other conversation-killing issues can take a toll on maintaining a sense of community. Now Facebook is trying to simplify the monumental task of keeping peace in these online spaces a little bit with the launch of new auto-moderation features to help you automatically deal with problematic commenters and posts before your group falls into chaos.
Facebook’s automatic moderation features, dubbed “Admin Assist”, can be found at the top of the left sidebar of your Facebook group if you have access right now; Facebook is slow to implement this feature for groups and group admins, so you may not have noticed it yet. However, keep reading to know what to do with these settings when they become available.
To start setting up Admin Assist for your group, click the link in the sidebar. You will be taken to a page that looks like this:
These tools allow you to set specific criteria for children of posts that are deemed to violate your group’s posting protocols and decide what happens next. You can choose from three results – reject the post, delete the posted post, or disable commenting on the post – and you can set separate rules for what triggers each effect. For example, for “reject incoming messages” you can choose one of the following:
And if that’s not enough, you can choose your own set of criteria (at least from the options that Facebook gives you) by clicking on the More Options link:
Within each criterion, you can choose even more options for what you want to do when the user breaks the “rule.” For example, if someone in your group continues to link to an external site that you banned, you can set up a rule that automatically rejects the post and disables anyone who continues to post the link:
My most commonly used feature will be the simple “keywords” rule, which allows you to automatically reject messages containing certain words or topics that you don’t want to be discussed in a group. I’m also a fan of automated tools that allow you to turn off comments on controversial posts (judging by the number of comments they received, the number of posts by other users, or the language found in said comments). This can be a very useful tool to help people calm down if they worry about something quickly, or at least give you the option to re-enable comments after a warning so everyone is polite.
Up to this point: Any action your auto-moderator rules take on your behalf can be undone in the activity log, which is worth checking from time to time to make sure your filters aren’t accidentally catching anyone trying to post as per the rules your group. It’s a shame you can’t automatically send them a quick apology message.