Before the arrival of the kebab van on Town Street, Thaxted’s community Facebook group was a relatively quiet place. Established by 44-year-old Ben Allen, the page was a space for the 3,000 residents of the small Essex town to discuss local issues, recommend tradesmen and share memories. “It’s quite beautiful, it’s quite unique, and it’s a very passionate community,” Allen says of his hometown.
After Allen set up the group last September, its 1,276 members started joining forces in extraordinary ways, such as crowdfunding £2,000 for a local man’s funeral and helping an 80-year-old woman reunite with a friend she had last seen 50 years ago. Then, in October – one month after Allen set up the group – the kebab van arrived.
“It was almost like lighting the touch paper,” Allen says. “It led to some vocal uproar… You were getting a thousand comments on posts.” Some residents supported the van – “Just had a chicken kebab and have to say it was delicious!!!” wrote one mum – but others questioned its hygiene rating and complained that it destroyed the aesthetic of the historic town centre. “Let’s hope the quaint streets of Thaxted remain clean,” wrote one man. Another woman complained: “They started cooking at 4pm, 2 hours before I shut my shop… by which time the shop smelt strongly of onions.”
“It was a rough start,” Allen says. Residents began to fear that the Facebook page encouraged negativity. Since then, however, things have calmed down. “I would say that probably 75 per cent of it is very positive now. Occasionally you get people moaning about rubbish, but it does seem to be fulfilling a local need.” As for the kebab van, within three days it had temporarily stopped trading; the parish council later moved it to a nearby coach park, where it now operates successfully.
Village and town Facebook groups are exceedingly popular; type the name of any town in England into the Facebook search bar, and it’s likely to have its own page or group. While many city communities tend to have neighbourhood groups too, village and towns are different because of the older average age of members, and the specific issues that affect them – preserving traditional ways of life, or historic settings. In essence, these Facebook groups become a digital town hall: a place where people can come together, have a chat and sort things out. And yet, problems arise that would never occur in a brick-and-mortar community hub.
“You’ve got a generation of people that have just got into computing, not really aware of some of the protocols or the dangers in many ways, and they’ll sit at home on the sofa, drink half a bottle of wine and just start shouting at people,” says Duggs Carre, a 53-year-old moderator of the Facebook group for Holmfirth, a town in West Yorkshire.
Carre and his fellow moderators avoid altercations by setting strict rules for the group. There are to be no profanities, no graphic videos and no political canvassing. Rule nine states: “When writing negative comments about any business, please ensure these can be fully justified, otherwise you could be liable for litigation for defamation.” Rule five is arguably the most important: the page discourages vigilantism by declaring there should be “no naming and shaming” of individuals.
People have posted about car break-ins, scrap metal collectors or doorstop sellers, and speed cameras. “People use it to give a heads up to people – a community safety thing – but that often crosses a line into witch-hunts,” Carre says.
He cites a Facebook group – which he does not moderate – that has thread after thread thread of posts accusing a man of being a paedophile. “We wouldn’t have allowed that, we wouldn’t even let those things start really,” he says. He also frequently deletes photos of vehicle number plates, which residents post to accuse drivers of scratching their car or cutting them up.
Every Facebook group’s moderators are different, and everyone who manages a town or village page has different ideas about how much moderating should occur. (The cover photo for a Barnsley group reads: “NOT FOR THE EASILY OFFENDED, SNOWFLAKES OR PC BRIGADE – LEAVE NOW”.) Carre and his colleagues approve every post before it goes up, while Allen takes a “deliberately lighter touch” in Thaxted, removing only posts that are reported by the public.
As the lone moderator for Surrey’s Walton and Tadworth online community hub, 49-year-old Andrew Rawlins can struggle to keep on top of everything. “I kind of created a monster really,” he says. “I’ve got a full-time job, and I don’t tend to look at it much in the daytime.” Rawlins relies on members to message him when things are “kicking off”.
Unlike some village groups, Walton and Tadworth permits users to buy and sell directly on the page. Rawlins has banned people from selling booze, cigarettes and pets, and has to inform users he isn’t responsible for any fraudulent sellers. “Obviously I’m not eBay,” he says. “There’s no protection there. People have bought a couple of things and they’ve brought them back and they’re broken, and they can’t get hold of the seller.”
When asked about other recurring issues, his answer is easy. “Dog poo,” he says. “Massive, massive – that comes up every couple of months. There’s been dogs out with the owners letting them poop all over the pavement, so that’s been a real hot, hot potato. You have people putting posters up and going out trying to catch them.”
Like Allen and Carre, Rawlins also has issues with group members turning vigilante – to the extent that a newsagent caught a thief on CCTV and posted the screenshot on the Facebook page rather than going to the police. Yet all three men love the time they spend moderating. “We’ve had some lovely stories recently,” Carre says. “There was a mum who moved to the town and wasn’t sure how her child could walk to school. She posted to the page, and within an hour there were numerous offers to pick her up, take her there, walk with her child… That’s why I like Facebook, not because I want to argue with people about dog shit.”
Each group has its own success story. Thaxted’s page helped drum up support to save the library, while Walton and Tadworth’s members went out in force to help a landlady look for her lost dog. Carre’s group also inspired people to take more pride in their town. After hundreds of people posted about a bike that had been thrown into the river, Carre fished it out with a rope and a hook. He then set up a new “Home Pride” group, where people encourage each other to clean street signs and pick up rubbish.
“I really like being involved with it to the point where I’m on it far too often,” says Allen. “My wife says to me ‘Can you get off your phones now?’” He has only banned a user once – “purely for being annoying”. It was a woman who commented negatively on every single post, complaining, for example, about brightly painted houses. “After a couple of warnings, enough was enough.”
No one can really predict the issues that will arise in a village or town Facebook group. Carre – who says he is a “natural facilitator”, but also “troublesome” if not put in charge – moderates a handful of Facebook pages, public, private and secret. Holmfirth’s Facebook group is nothing, he says, compared with his Facebook group for chicken breeders. “We’ve had huge, huge problems on those sites,” he says. “People will post pictures of their chickens and other people will just slate them.”
“They’ll say ‘Why’ve you let the beak grow that long’ and ‘Look at the feather quality on that’,” he explains. “I think is very similar with Holmfirth. People say things they wouldn’t say to each other’s faces, so when they see each other in the flesh, it just starts to escalate.”
In the end, Carre says, it’s a “constant judgement call” to find the line between free speech and abuse. “Nobody wants anybody to be upset, but equally we don’t want to stop there being a conversation. Usually the most interesting conversations are the most contentious.”
The Moderators is a new, semi-regular series in which we speak to the gatekeepers of different online communities to find out how they approach being the arbiter of what is and isn't allowed on the internet. Read how the moderators of wedding-shaming Facebook groups deal with dodgy dresses and bridezillas.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
