Comments sections have forever changed the relationship between journalists and readers. Whilst social media has allowed both independent and publication journalists to reach their audiences quicker than ever before, that is very much a two-way street thanks to the introduction of the comments section.
With the added complication of not being able to paywall most social media platforms, comments sections have become a breeding ground for discrimination, misinformation and hate speech. There’s even legal dangers that an unchecked comments section can leave you open to.
So what are your options as a journalist adapting to the new form of social media based journalism?
Manual moderation
We all know that social media platforms can be negligent when it comes to their duty of policing comments sections, and so having your own checks is often a necessity. The problem is that this is only really an option for the smaller or much larger publications. Smaller publications have fewer comments to manage and larger publications can, and often do, pay people whose specific job is to moderate comments sections. For the in-between social media journalists, who run pages with some hundreds of thousands of followers all on their own, it’s just not a feasible solution to manually police comments. It is either too time consuming to do themselves, or too expensive to outsource.
Disabling the comments
This does almost entirely eradicates the problem at hand but it does also have its flaws. The most notable one is that comments help to boost your content into the social media algorithm and disabling them means putting more weight onto the other ways of doing this such as likes and shares. A similar sentiment is also reflected in journalistic websites, where a University of Texas study found that turning off comments negatively impacted average time spent on the site. On a more intimate level, it is harmful for loyal audience engagement, as devoted readers of your work want some sense of ability to interact with your work.
Leaving comments on with no restriction
Unfortunately, this is probably the best chance you have of getting the furthest reach on your content. In fact, many posts and articles have gained their renown purely by being so provocative that the comments section alone does most of the work driving it into the algorithm. But as Anil Dash argues, as well as the legal dangers, you also have an ethical duty as a journalist to ensure that your platforms aren’t contributing to making society a worse place.
So what is the perfect solution? Well luckily for us social media journalists, a lot of platforms have taken these concerns on board and have come up with solutions that try to maintain a best of both worlds mentality.
Limiting and restricting
Instagram and Facebook are just some of the platforms that have introduced limited comments, which allows posters to have the opportunity to choose who can say what on their content. For example, Instagram offers various restricted comments options including only allowing comments from people who follow you.
It acts as a type of subscription service within the social media platforms, eliminating the chances of opportunistic trolls or people who want a reaction rather than to engage wholly with your work as a journalist.
There is also the option to filter specific words off your page, for example Facebook has the option of a ‘Blocklist Filter’ where you can type out a list of words, phrases or emojis that you don’t want to appear on your profile, and it will hide variations of that word for you as well.
And of course, never forget the power of the block button for repeat offenders!