How to Stop Spam Comments on Facebook

Method 1: Catch spam by behaviour with Moderation Assist

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The only Facebook tool that looks at who is commenting rather than only what they said. You give it conditions, and anything matching gets hidden until you review it. Almost all comment spam carries a link or comes from a throwaway account, so two rules here beat two hundred keywords.

1. 1Open Moderation AssistSwitch to your Page as an admin and open your professional dashboard. In the left menu, select Moderation Assist, then click Let's Go. It is not in Meta Business Suite, which is where most people look first and give up.
2. 2Hide comments containing linksAdd a criteria for comments that contain a link. This is the single highest value rule on the page, because a spam comment almost always wants you somewhere else. You can also narrow it to links pointing at specific sites if you only have one problem domain.
3. 3Hide comments from brand new accountsAdd a criteria for accounts less than one week old. Spam accounts get created, used, and reported within days, so the account commenting under your ad is very often younger than the ad itself. Real customers almost never comment from an account made last Tuesday.
4. 4Add the empty profile rulesYou can also hide comments from accounts with no profile picture and accounts with no friends or followers. These stack with the age rule and cost nothing. A real person with something to say usually has at least one of the three.
5. 5Hide repeat offendersTurn on the criteria for accounts that have had at least 3 comments reported, deleted, or hidden by an admin in the past 30 days. This handles the spammer who keeps coming back, without you having to notice them each time.
6. 6Check the activity log after a dayClick Activity log to see what Moderation Assist hid, filtered by time and by which rule caught it. Nothing is deleted, so anything caught wrongly is waiting there for you to unhide.

Method 2: Add a spam keyword list with Content Moderation

Now the word list, in its proper place: as backup for the spam that carries no link and comes from an account that looks real. You give your Page a list of words, and Facebook hides any comment containing one of them, across your Page rather than post by post.

1. 1Open your Page settingsGo to your Page as an admin. On desktop, click Settings in the left sidebar. On mobile, tap the gear icon on your Page. This is a Page setting and lives nowhere else, which is why searching Meta Business Suite for it never works.
2. 2Go to Privacy, then Public PostsIn Settings, open Privacy, then choose Public Posts. Scroll down to the Content Moderation section and click Edit.
3. 3Add the words spam actually usesType the words and phrases you want hidden, with a comma between each one. For spam, the useful entries are the ones scams repeat: whatsapp, telegram, dm me, message me, click here, congratulations, winner, crypto, plus the phone number formats and domains you keep seeing. Emojis count as words, so paste those in too.
4. 4Or upload a list instead of typing itClick the three dots to upload a spreadsheet. This is the fast way to put the same list on every Page you manage, and to keep a copy somewhere you can actually edit.
5. 5Save, then read the activity log in a weekSave your changes. After a week, open your activity log and look at two things: what the list caught, and what it caught wrongly. A short word like win lives inside winter and winner, and it will hide a happy customer eventually.

Where Facebook's own tools stop

Both are free and you should turn them on either way. They share one blind spot, and once you see it you cannot unsee it: each one is matching a pattern that somebody had to describe in advance.

• The spam with no link, from an account that looks real

  "Hi, message me about your order" carries no link, uses no banned word, and comes from an account with a photo, friends, and two years of history, because it was stolen rather than created. It passes every native rule you just turned on, and your customer reads it as your support team. That is the entire point of it.

• A keyword list is always one incident behind

  It only catches the words you thought of. Next Tuesday's scam will use a phrase that is not on your list, and it keeps working until you notice it, open your settings, and add it. Then it changes again.

• Behaviour rules trade real customers for spam

  Hiding every comment with a link also hides the customer linking to your product page. Hiding new accounts also hides the person who joined Facebook to follow you. The rules that catch the most spam cost you the most real comments.

• Moderation Assist's keyword and profanity criteria covers a fixed set of languages

  It currently reaches English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Italian, Arabic, and Russian. If your audience comments in a dialect outside that, or in Arabizi, those criteria have nothing to say and you are back to typing words by hand.

• Ad comments are where the spam is and where nobody looks

  Your Page keyword list does apply to comments on your ads. Finding what gets through is the problem: ad comments do not always appear on your Page timeline, so a scam under a live ad runs for days while you check the timeline and see nothing wrong.

None of this makes Facebook's tools bad. It makes them what they are: a good way to catch spam that looks like spam, on a platform where the spam that costs you money is built to look like a customer.

When it does not work

• Why is spam still getting through after I set up Moderation Assist?

  Check the activity log to see whether your rules fired at all. If they did not, the spam is passing them honestly: no link, an account older than a week, a profile picture in place. That is the spam no native rule catches. If the rules did fire but comments are still visible, confirm you clicked Let's Go to switch Moderation Assist on rather than only adding criteria.

• Why did my keyword list hide a real customer?

  Almost always a short word living inside a longer innocent one, or a word that means two things in your market. Open your activity log, unhide the comment, and remove or lengthen the entry. A phrase is safer than a word: message me about your order catches what me never will.

• Why does the same spammer keep posting after I banned them?

  It is a different account that looks the same. Banning removes one account, and spam operations run many. Stop chasing the accounts and turn on the criteria for accounts under one week old and accounts with no friends or followers, which catch the replacements before you see them.

• Why can I not find Content Moderation in my Page settings?

  You need to be an admin of the Page, not an editor, and you need to be in the Page's own Settings rather than Meta Business Suite. The path is Settings, then Privacy, then Public Posts, then scroll down. If you are on a personal profile rather than a Page, this setting does not exist for you at all.