After a deluge of negative comments flooded President Noynoy Aquino’s Facebook Page, the Communications Team decided to temporarily censor the Page by removing the commenting feature on the page. Instead of helping though this resulted in a media backlash with several local and international media outfits reporting the incident in a negative way. This prompted the President to answer the issue in a Press Conference asking the people to “stop the Facebook bashing”. What’s wrong with this scenario?
Facebook Page Policies
There was a big lapse on the part of the new media team of the President. It’s common practice already by a lot of digital marketers to post “Commenting Policies” or guidelines on the page of the brand/product/personality to make sure that the administrators can defend themselves or properly censure negative comments with basis. Due to the lack of foresight by the New Media Team, the policy was only drafted and posted 11 hours from this writing.
The policy of the page states:
This page was created for the consumption of the general public. Through this page, we envision a harmonious and mature exchange of ideas where people can air their comments and grievances at the same time receive news and other information.
To maintain healthy online community, we reserve the right to do the following:
- delete slanderous and defamatory posts, offensive comments, cuss words and racial insults;
- delete below the belt attacks and allegations against anyone or any company;
- delete advertisements or links to any person, group or company;We reserve the right to block anyone who fails to follow these rules and report them as spammers to Facebook.
Now that they have policies it boils down to having the proper manpower and resources to actually implement them. I hope that they work on the social media channels of the President, especially his Facebook page. It’s definitely lackluster. It doesn’t have any apps at all, even the usual Static FBML (landing page). It looks like some sort of failed experiment at this point that has no deliberate strategy our purpose. Hopefully they can fix this soon.
Well what shall we do, if the facebook of the President P/Noy was censored, anyway your group already mention, those foul languages should be deleted, that is fair enough.
A lot of comments are not good sometimes, but of course there are many praises of good deeds, we Filipino are only looking for a Good Authority, who can understand us, to address our grievances and complains, just give us a guidelines where we can post our complains?
So that we know, thanks and more power…