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# Social Media Archiving

Protecting Open Dialogue with Social Media Blocked Lists

Authored by Civic Plus Logo

CivicPlus

August 8, 2021
5 min

We hear about it in the news more and more. At its best, social media is an incredibly effective tool for communicating with the public, and we all know what it can look like at its worst. All it takes is a single misinformed comment to muck up an important public announcement.

The good news is that a well-constructed social media policy combined with an actively managed account can mitigate the disruption caused by the malicious and misinformed. Social media networks provide administrators with tools they can use to protect and manage dialogue on their social media accounts, like hiding or deleting content and banning, blocking, or muting users in extreme cases. We encourage you to use these tools with caution! It can be a violation of someone’s First Amendment rights for you to block or otherwise prohibit their freedom of speech without proper cause.

All too often in the news, we see agencies get afoul of First Amendment lawsuits from blocking users. So, before you go blocking someone or hiding their content, you should have a legitimate reason in place. But for the purpose of this article, we’ll assume you have that (and your reason is not along the lines of not liking what they had to say). In this article, we’ll talk about the documentation you should have in the unfortunate event that you find yourself using these tools.

Hiding or deleting content:

  1. Get a social media policy in place and make sure you share it publicly
  2. Verify that the content you’re hiding or deleting violates the policy
  3. Save the content for your records:
  4. Content source data
  5. Contextual content source data
  6. If the content was related to a post or other comments, then you’ll want to save those as well
  7. Offending user’s name and ID
  8. Notation for the violation on how it violated the policy
  9. In accordance with your policy, hide or delete the record

Banning, Blocking, or Muting Users:

  1. Get a social media policy in place and make sure you share it publicly
  2. Verify that the user you’re blocking, banning, or muting violated the policy
  3. Save the content for your records:
  4. Content source data for each violation
  5. Contextual content source data for each violation
  6. If the content was related to a post or other comments, then you’ll want to save those as well
  7. Offending user’s name and ID
  8. Notation for each violation on how they violated the policy
  9. In accordance with your policy, ban, block, or mute the offending user

The benefits of social media as a tool for communication outweigh the drawbacks, and we’re all still learning the rules of engagement. You can keep these ideas in your toolkit when you run into situations where the content from a social media user is jeopardizing the purpose of your account and the public dialogue. But remember, public entities are responsible for identifying any records that have been hidden or deleted, as well as any users that have been blocked, why they’ve been blocked, and when. Because the absence of a record is still just as important as a record. Social networks don’t report this information, so it can be very difficult to tell when something has been hidden or edited. This can lead to a compliance gap and also remove any examples of trolling that caused you to block a user.

Of course, you could also just get yourself a digital archive from the CivicPlus® Social Media Archiving solution, which includes Blocked Lists. Our social media Blocked Lists feature lets you create and maintain a single list of all blocked users and pages for your managed accounts, along with when they happened and the comments that resulted in the block, so you can always feel prepared with clear timelines and strong supporting evidence to defend your actions and prove a false claim, timeline of events, or if your social media policy was followed correctly.

Disclaimer: Be sure to consider all applicable federal, state, and local laws when formulating your social media policy and acting on policy violations.

Learn more about our Social Media Archiving software’s Blocked Lists feature. Download the fact sheet.

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Authored by Civic Plus Logo

CivicPlus