How to Moderate Comments 24/7 on Facebook and Instagram

People skip this because it sounds too small to matter. It is the opposite. A keyword list does not clock off and has no timezone. It applies at 3am on a Sunday exactly as it does at 11am on a Tuesday.

1. 1Open Content Moderation on your Facebook PageAs a Page admin, click Settings, then Privacy, then Public Posts, then scroll to Content Moderation and click Edit. If you hunted for this in Meta Business Suite and found nothing, that is why. It is a Page setting.
2. 2Add the words your own spam actually usesType the words you want hidden, with a comma between each. Do not write a general list of bad words. Read what is genuinely under your last three posts and write that. Any language works.
3. 3Turn on the profanity filter next to itIt sits in the same section and runs Facebook's list rather than yours. Medium catches what most people call swearing. Strong reaches into words that were not swearing when your customer typed them. Start at medium.
4. 4Add Moderation Assist criteriaOpen your professional dashboard, select Moderation Assist, then click Let's Go. It is the only one of the three that looks at who is commenting. Hide comments from accounts with no picture, no followers, or carrying links.
5. 5Do the same on Instagram under Hidden WordsOpen your profile, then Settings, then Hidden Words. Turn on the offensive words filter, then add your own custom list. Same idea, different name, off by default in the same way.
6. 6Check the activity log in the morning, onceHidden comments are not deleted. They wait for you out of public view. Read the log after a day to see what your list caught overnight, and what it caught by mistake. If you read it daily, the list is wrong.

This takes twenty minutes and almost nobody does it. You do not need to cover 168 hours evenly. You need to know when your comments arrive and when you are asleep. The gap between them is the real problem.

1. 1Write down when your comments actually arriveOpen your last ten posts and read the timestamps on the comments, not the posts. Group them roughly by hour. Most Pages find their comments cluster in two or three bands, then go quiet for stretches nobody had noticed.
2. 2Mark the hours your ads are runningIf your ads run around the clock, so does your comment section, in your audience's timezone rather than yours. The ads are global and the person watching them is asleep for eight hours of it.
3. 3Mark the hours somebody is genuinely watchingNot the hours somebody could check their phone. The hours somebody is awake, looking, and able to act. For most businesses this is well under the working day, because the person on comments has another job.
4. 4Subtract one from the otherWhat is left is your exposure: the hours when comments arrive and nobody is there. That is the only number worth staffing or automating against. Everything else is a rota that makes a promise sound true.
5. 5Decide what happens in those hoursThree honest answers exist. Automate them, staff them, or accept them and say so out loud. Picking none and calling it always on is what costs you a customer at 3am on a Saturday.

24/7 feels impossible because people imagine a person reading every comment. Almost none of them need that. Separate the two piles and the one that needs a human is small, and it can wait until morning.

1. 1Put obvious spam in the no judgement pileCrypto bait, contact spam, a link to somebody's shop, the same seven words of abuse under every post. Nobody needs to think about these. They need to be gone before the next person scrolls past.
2. 2Put real questions in the human pileDo you ship here, what size is this. A buyer who asked at midnight expects an answer in the morning. A buyer who read a scam accusation at midnight does not come back at all.
3. 3Put complaints in the human pile, and leave them visibleAn angry customer is a customer. Answering one in public is the cheapest trust you will ever buy, and hiding it is how a complaint becomes a screenshot. This pile most needs a person and least needs speed.
4. 4Automate the first pile and only the first pileThis is the whole trick. The overnight problem is not moderation, it is the first pass on obvious rubbish. Take that off the table and what is left is a handful of comments answered with your coffee.

Where always on stops being enough

Give Meta's filters their due. They run every hour of the week, cost nothing, and need nobody awake. Coverage is not their problem. A filter that runs all night still only knows the words you gave it before you went to bed.

• It is last week's list, running at 3am

  Always on and always right are different problems. Your list is a snapshot of the spam you have already seen. Tonight's scam uses a word that is not on it, and it works every night until you notice.

• The worst comments contain no bad words

  "Amazing product, message me and I will double your money" has no profanity, no banned word, no link. Every filter Facebook has reads it as a compliment. Your customers read it as a scam under your ad at 2am.

• Coverage is hours, and it is also languages

  Five people covering 168 hours does nothing if none of them read the language your ads run in. A word list only covers the dialect somebody typed out.

• The rota is generous to you in every direction

  Any plan built on 40 hours a person assumes nobody is ill, nobody is away, and everybody makes the same call at hour eight as at hour one. Your gap is a floor, not an estimate.

So the free filters are the right first move and the wrong last one. They cover the hours. What they cannot do is read a comment they were not told about, which is what shows up while everybody sleeps.

When it does not work

• Why did nothing get caught overnight when my comments are clearly spam?

  Check the list is saved on the Page itself rather than in Meta Business Suite, where most people type it and lose it. Then compare your list to what is genuinely under your posts. General bad word lists catch nothing, because real spam is polite.

• Why do I only find ad comments days later?

  Because comments on ads do not reliably show on your Page timeline, so no amount of checking your Page finds them. Look in Ads Manager for the ad itself, or use a tool that puts ad and organic comments in one place.

• Why does my rota keep failing even though it is fully staffed on paper?

  Because the share of the week is fiction. Nobody does comments full time, they also post, report, and sit in meetings. If comments are 40 percent of somebody's week, that person gives you 16 hours of cover, not 40.

• Why does the filter hide good comments while I am asleep?

  Usually the profanity filter set to strong, which reaches into words that were not swearing in context. Drop it to medium and check your activity log. If it was your own list, look for a short word living inside longer innocent words.