Risk mitigation involves identifying known risks, issues or potential opponents to your planned messages and campaigns, and how you plan to react to these risks or respond to them. This can be in the form of prepared responses to likely questions or documenting agreed processes to handle posts, comments or replies that are abusive or threatening, or negative sentiment about a project or issue. A Risks and Mitigation Action template is available in Appendix A.
It’s important to plan how to reduce the likelihood of such risks occurring. Identifying campaigns or messages that are more likely to give rise to potentially defamatory comments can help determine whether comments on posts should be either pre-moderated or as a last resort - disabled. Creating a plan for community management and moderation can help reduce defamation risk before posting by considering:
- whether the nature of the material is particularly controversial
- whether the material refers to a specific individual, or is likely to facilitate and encourage comments regarding a specific individual
- whether the comments are likely to relate to persons associated with the agency, or more likely to relate to third parties
- the approach that a department or agency might wish to take if one of its employees is named in the comment section of the department or agency’s post
- whether third-party comments are likely to be critical, as opposed to positive.
These factors can then inform the response set out in Moderation tools page.
Updated