Here’s one thing to be wary of with your Facebook group strategy… rancid groups run by political parties
I’ve long been flagging up Facebook groups as being important corners of the internet for public sector people.
The data is strong. Two thirds of the population use Facebook and two thirds of them are a member of at least one Facebook group.
Their effectiveness is also clear. As newsrooms have shrunk the Parish pump of their neighbourhood group has more than filled this role with news, gossip and recommendations. But it can also slip into a much darker place, too.
There’s good and bad Facebook groups. Good can be the community-spirited Brownhills Bob with 50,000 members, five admins and a willingness to share police missing persons appeals alongside a request for a decent plumber.
But there is also the unpleasant.
There was a 5,000-strong Facebook group in West Bromwich where every post attacked the council. Daily Mail headlines were shared to attack the council. Anyone in favour of the council were shouted down.
Oddly, the admins of the group didn’t appear to be from West Bromwich.
Even more strangely, people in other parts of the country I went to they spoke about community Facebook groups with violent language and a clear political agenda. Posts in these spaces could run from opinion to outright abuse.
What was clear was that there was a strategy to spread hate and disinformation in specific locations.
So, it was no surprise to read a Guardian story alleged some Facebook groups in London were being run by paid Conservative Party activists and had comments that threatened to kill the Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan.
Now, I’m not suggesting that those activists themselves broke the law or that other political parties may have supporters who had taken it upon themselves to foster hate.
But what this absolutely does do is highlight the issue of hostile Facebook groups and what to do.
Advice
The first problem is that the local government communications person is politically restricted. They can communicate the policy of the council but they certainly can’t jump into the trenches and conduct hand-to-hand combat.
Before the internet, the advice was to challenge misinformation wherever it was be that the newspaper letters page, the radio phone-in or the council committee. There is certainly something in this.
However, there reaches a point where threats and abuse make the environment unsafe.
Besides, people in those spaces are unlikely to listen to a balanced perspective. Academic research points to bubbles where existing views are reinforced and counter views are shouted down. This is not good for democracy.
So, what do you do?
Well, for the first part it’s knowing that there are corners of Facebook where you just need to navigate past.
Don’t use a fake profile to see what’s going in. Don’t use your own profile. There’s a strong chance it’ll end in tears.
The example of the West Bromwich group was that Facebook itself took the group down. That’ll be from people reporting it.
If the issue is threats against named individuals then its report it to the police. The Center for Countering Online Hate has got a particularly good download ‘Don’t Feed the Trolls’ for helping an individual if they are in the thick of getting trolled. It’s worth keeping a copy handy just in case.
There’s also a balancing act that you need to strike when engaging with something. The Streisand Effect talks about the time when the filmstar took legal action to ban a tourist map that marked the homes of the stars that had her location. The result? People detoured to look at this location she didn’t want us to see.