Tod Maffin walks through moderating a Facebook brand page, covering the three levels of comment control: hide, delete, and ban. Learn how to reverse these actions, configure Facebook's profanity block list, and manage banned users from your page's friends list.
Moderating your Facebook brand page is a bit like playing whack-a-mole these days, but let me show you the 3 levels of moderating and also how to unmoderate if you have to. First of all, make sure that you have admin access on the page you're trying to moderate. To find out, just go to that page. In this case, I'm going to the CBC Fan Club page, and up at the very top you should see this window of settings. At the very least, you should see this area here with Edit Page, Build Audience, and so on. If you see it, it means you're in the right place, you're an admin, all is well. If you don't see it, you need to either log in with the account that is an administrator of that page or ask the administrator to make you a moderator as well. So let's go through those first 3 levels of moderating comments. So we're gonna scroll down here to this particular post, and you'll see that Sarah Guild has posted, "You suck." The first of the 3 levels is to hide the post. Now, hiding prevents everyone on the Facebook page from seeing it. It essentially is like deleting it from the page. The difference between hiding and deleting is that in the case of hiding, it's still visible to the person who made the original comment and all of their Facebook friends. This is a tricky little way that Facebook has put in place to prevent the person from knowing that you've actually taken it off the page. To do that, to either hide or delete or even to ban, which we'll get to in a moment, you need to put your mouse over top of the comment, and you'll notice that as I do that, this little X will pop up. Watch as I move my mouse over other comments. You'll see that X shows up as well. But this is the comment we want. I'm gonna move my mouse over the X and click it. And that has now hidden that post. Again, it's still visible to page administrators, the person who wrote it, and all of their Facebook friends. But nobody else can see it. Let's say that you want to go one more level in and you want to actually delete the comment from everyone so that, so that the person who wrote it can't see it anymore, their friends can't see it. It's easy to do. Just click Delete. Now, if you don't see this Delete icon, it means you haven't taken the first step and clicked Hide. Let me just unhide this to show you what I mean. Again, notice there's no Delete here. The first step is to hide Then you get the option to delete. The third step is to prevent the person from ever posting on your page again, and that's called banning someone. Now note that banning doesn't mean they can't ever go to your page ever again. Your page still shows up in their newsfeed when you post content, and they can still go to it just fine. They just can't add any comments, they can't click like on any posts, or so on. It essentially makes it read-only. And to do that, as you may have imagined, you just click ban. Sometimes there is a bug on Facebook, as you'll notice I've just clicked ban, but up here it hasn't actually told me that I've banned the person. So I'm gonna refresh the page, and we can see here that it's in gray. So let's go down and let me show you a couple of other things here. In this area, I'm gonna expand the comments. And look down here, you'll see there's 3 dots. That means that Facebook has already done some preemptive work for you and hidden that post. This usually happens because of the page settings that you've got. So let me show you where those are. Up at the top under Edit Page, go to Edit Settings. And here under the Profanity Block List, set it to either Strong, Medium, or None. On all my pages I have it set to Strong. That'll prevent all the dirty words and even some mildly dirty words from showing up. If you are a restaurant, you may wanna add specific words and make them dirty words like salmonella, poisoning. If you're a hotel, you might wanna have the word stolen, party, theft, and so on. This doesn't prevent anyone from putting that comment on your page, but let me show you what it actually does. So let's go back to the CBC page that we were using. And underneath here you'll see— again, I'll expand these comments out— you'll see these three dots. That means that Facebook has preemptively hidden it for you. It's done it proactively, and it's done it based on those block words or the profanity block list. So let's open it up and see what it is. So here's the word— well, there's a couple of words in here that it caught. If you actually want to let it go on the page, you can just click unhide. And now it's on the page. If you leave it as is, it's essentially hidden, which means the person who posted it can see it, all their Facebook friends can see it, but nobody else can see it. Sometimes you'll notice that it will— Facebook will catch stuff that isn't even necessarily profanity in there. Here's a comment here that's hidden, and you'll see there's not actually any profanity on here. It says, "Just found this out on," and then it's a hyperlink. Facebook will take an educated guess at the hyperlink of a comment to see whether it's on topic or not. So in other words, this person has posted this link that has reference to Radio-Canada's new controversial name. It's on a post about the name, but for whatever reason, Facebook didn't take a good enough guess and thought that this was off topic. In fact, it's not off topic, so we will unhide this post. Let's see what this one is. Sometimes it just misses. In this case, it could have caught it because of this word. It could have caught it because of that word. It's all fine to me. Unhide. So let's go back up to the top here and ban— I think we've already banned her, but let's just reverse the process here. Hide, delete, and ban. Let's say you've done that accidentally and you want to unban the person. You could either navigate to their post like we've done here, or you can do it at the top under the friends list. But right now I'm logged in as myself. I have to be logged in as the page. Now that I'm logged in as the page, this friends link up here aren't my personal Facebook friends, they're actually people who like the page. So if I click on it, I can see all the people who've recently liked the page. But I'm gonna click "See All" and pull this menu down and go to "Banned." Now here's a list of people who I've banned from the page. So I'm gonna just click "Unban," and she's back in business. And that is how to moderate your Facebook brand page.
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