Turning off comments a slippery slope for councils

Scroll through Nelson City Council’s Facebook page and you’ll notice a curious thing.

Every second or third post features the same line where the ‘comment’ button should be:

“Nelson City Council limited who can comment on this post.”

It’s part of a new approach by the council, one recently articulated by communications manager James Murray in an RNZ article on council abuse and in an opinion piece for Stuff.

In the RNZ article, Murray said he often spent time reassuring staff who were distressed by commentary on social media.

"It's not OK to call people working for their city 'idiots' or 'clowns', and we're under no obligation to respond to people who engage with us in that manner."

This is great to hear, as too many public sector organisations have walked past far too much bad behaviour for far too long.

But I also think there are better responses—or perhaps more helpful reasons.

When you look more closely, it sounds much more like a resource issue than one of effectiveness or health and safety.

“With a quarter of the comments on our page made by approximately 46 people, there are more effective ways for my team to communicate and engage,” Murray notes.

More effective than directly having a conversation with a resident?

"With the time saved from comment moderation, our team can spend more time on fun, informative posts for wider audiences."

Excellent, but surely such posts will generate even more comments to moderate, including from the people who comment all the time because that's what they do.

Turning off comments is just one lever we can pull to help deal with trolls. However, there are other proactive strategies to consider.

First, we can review our content strategy. Many councils share way too much content that plays into the hands of the trolls—and for little gain. By not having a clear, focused content strategy, councils and government departments can unwittingly create unhelpful impressions that reinforce negative stereotypes among their audiences.

We can also explore how robust our processes are for dealing with comments, including keeping people on-topic so they can’t distract from the original purpose of the post. A lot of councils don’t police this well enough.

There's also the issue of training and support—things like resilience training or mental health first aid courses, as well as detailed scenario training to give team members confidence in responding to criticism, racism, or misinformation.

Then there is your comments strategy itself. Comments are content, and lots of people will glance at a controversial post before diving straight into the comments section to see the fireworks.

It’s accepted practice in the world of social media that organisations have greater leeway in their tone and language when replying to comments. If your team has more freedom to be cheeky, direct, or funny, you can get your point of view across and win over some of your followers who are watching but prefer not to like or comment. A few councils are doing this really effectively.

Finally, and most importantly, there's the issue of resources. Monitoring negative, crappy comments is an insidious task. The fewer people you have to shoulder the burden, the worse it is for those who do it. A lot of councils have just one dedicated social media advisor, and sometimes those advisors have other responsibilities too.

In a digital world where interactions via social media are increasing (and phone calls are going the way of the dodo), a lot of public sector organisations are still woefully under-resourced in this area.

Which begs the question, if Nelson City Council had enough people to safely and effectively use and monitor its channels, would it keep comments on?

And if they don’t have enough people to do the job, why not yell that from the rooftops?

I’d argue that in an ideal world, every council would be able to engage with any of its residents (even the miserable, super-engaged, annoying ones) whenever they got in touch - provided they weren’t being rude, abusive, or vexatious. After all, councils do often ask for residents’ views via their ‘have your say’ posts.

Framing the issue as one of health and safety or value for money deflects from the council's responsibility to provide the means for its residents to communicate with them openly on their channels.

It also gives councils the ability to limit debate around uncomfortable issues. Once people are used to one-way communications, will they notice that more and more posts are becoming “information-only”?

There is a real danger that councils will further lose the trust and confidence of residents, negatively affecting things like consultations and the idea of local democracy itself by increasingly making social media a one-way street.

That’s not what social media is about, and it certainly shouldn't be what democracy is about.

Effective engagement requires more resources, not less conversation.