Steve Brock discusses Online Safety on the Community Signal Podcast
Recently I was the featured guest on Patrick O’Keefe’s “Community Signal” weekly podcast, where we discussed my career as a community manager for over 25 years (17 of them with many of the same clients and members of the Mzinga moderation team), how to use law enforcement agencies to keep clients and their customers safe, and attempts to “patent” bundles of community management tools and management models.
At the heart of community management is keeping community members safe. If a member threatens another member with harm (i.e. “I know where you live and I’m coming over right now”) or harming themselves (“I’m going to take every pill in my medicine cabinet”), community managers need to act fast. They need to know who to contact (the client’s security division, the IP and ISP of the member, and law enforcement officials) and what information they need to provide (at the very least, a copy of the message, the IP address, and a log entry that identifies the exact time of the post). Usually, security, ISP, and law enforcement officials take it from there.
It’s important for community managers and moderators to know the difference between a credible personal threat and “trash-talk” that takes place in the heat of a debate or argument. As a best practice, my moderation team and I err on the side of caution: If I think a threat “may” be credible, I will escalate it to the next level. If law enforcement is contacted, they track down the poster, and that person may be charged with a crime if they were “trolling.”
Patrick and I also discussed Facebook’s intention to use machine learning to automate the moderation of its interactive areas. We agreed that Facebook’s moderation tools are severely lacking and that patenting them isn’t something worthy of a news release.
For more information and to hear the podcast, stop by the Community Signal website.
