Nextdoor Announces Automated Comment Moderation
Nextdoor periodically announces updates to its Agency platform, but one of the most recent features caught our eye: “automated comment moderation.” Per Nextdoor’s email: “Focus on connecting with your community and we’ll take care of comment moderation. If comment threads become uncivil, commenting will automatically be disabled.”
Naturally, we had some questions:
- How does Nextdoor define “uncivil” conversation? What will be the threshold for automatic moderation kicking in?
- Will there be any visual cue/explanation that the Nextdoor system automatically disabled comments so public agency staff don’t get blamed?
In fact, one of our longest-standing public agency clients had the exact same questions after seeing the Nextdoor announcement. So, we reached out to the Nextdoor Agency Support team for answers. See below for their explanations.
To clarify, if Nextdoor closes a discussion on a post if the comments have violations of our Community Guidelines, there is a distinct message displayed on the post that the discussion was closed by Nextdoor. This will ensure that your Neighbors know that we took action rather than you or the Agency. Common violations on Agency posts are rude or uncivil comments/attacks (ie. name-calling, slurs, rude comments) and they are reviewed by our team here at Support and the determination to close a post is made on a case by case basis.
Agencies are given the autonomy to re-open discussions on closed posts, however, if there are numerous and egregious violations of our Community Guidelines, we may have to close the discussion, remove comments, or remove the entire post altogether. Please note that this is an extremely rare situation and our policy is generally not to make any changes to a page without the consent of the admins.
If you need additional help with understanding comment moderation on your Agency Page’s posts, visit the links below. If you would like help with your broader Nextdoor Agency Page strategy and leveraging other features of the platform, contact us today.