I’ve said elsewhere (many, many times over the years) but it bears much repetition - if a community is important in any way to a business, it should as much as possible own the forum in order to protect it.
For those who don’t know me, from Facebook or elsewhere, I’ve been a community member, moderator, and occasional admin since the old IRC days. An active member of web forums since the mid 90s when they were a lot uglier (back before we had CSS, layers, etc) and simpler. I’ve also built or run or consulted on literally hundreds of communities and forums (of various kinds) for businesses, back when self-hosted forums were ‘social media’ - all of it.
Facebooks atrocious errors in how they handle the automation of moderating are always mind-boggling to me. I’ve literally never worked for or with any company or entity that simply cared so little for users, or the user experience. And I’ve worked in such cuddly, caring industries as banking, insurance, and the adult industries.
For anyone with a business-affecting stake in Facebook, let me tell you how I got banned. One (unknown) user in one of the open (non-private) groups where I was a moderator, a group with over 20,000 members, posted something apparently offensive or indecent. We don’t know which or what, as Facebook caught and deleted it before any of the (quite large) moderating team actually saw it. Just minutes later, every moderator, admin, and member of the group had their accounts suspended.
Something horribly wrong in the automation banned all of the members of an open group with tens of thousands of members, despite the group having been running for many years, having an excellent reputation, etc. MOST of the damage has been fixed, accounts unfrozen, bans lifted, and the group restored in the days since, but a couple of moderators remain locked out of Facebook and all other Meta-owned accounts and services. Not for anything they posted, nor anything they did, but due to poorly coded automation, and a policy that effectively eliminates any human review.
That’s not just a warning about Facebook for any of you who depend on it. It is also a very important warning about automation itself, especially relevant to our community.
My father used to say “To err is human, but to really F*©x everything up you need automation/computers”.
It’s funny because it is so true. Humans build and run machines, so the potential for error is always built-in - but automation can scale that error across a thousand, or a million instances, before you even notice an issue.