About Using Facebook Messenger for our Community Chat

I’ve been pretty quiet in the Messenger Community chat lately. It’s a new thing and not all of you who receive this message via email are even a part of it, because Facebook Messenger has been rolling the feature out slowly, and so I’ve not been able to invite everyone I wanted. My understanding is they will roll it out globally soon, but that’s not why I’m sending out this message.

Meta (parent company of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp) changed their policies around hate speech recently. In short, they’ve carved out exceptions that allow for the dehumanizing and harassment of non-white, transgender, gay, women, and more folks.

This has caused a lot of people to dial back or delete their accounts entirely from Meta apps. Mark Zuckerberg said anyone who does so is “virtue signaling” — in case you wondered how he felt about that. I myself have dialed back my usage some. I set my Threads and Instagram accounts to private and are barely using them. Namely, I just don’t know what I’m doing yet.

But this isn’t about my personal usage either.

I have thoroughly enjoyed using the Messenger Community chat and I would like to keep doing something like this moving forward. I had some fun ideas I was stewing over for the upcoming year before the content moderation changes Meta made. Now, I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be better if we all moved to a different chat.

The way I see it is that I have a responsibility as an admin/moderator to any community I run. I’ve worked in moderation for years in different platforms or communities. And protecting users from bad actors is one of the most important and fundamental items of moderation. These new policies that explicitly allow and encourage hate speech means there is a potential for danger in our community. A potential for bad actors to join and start slinging slurs. And for it to become the norm. That said, I’m not sure I or our community is important enough to warrant that. But it’s a real possibility. And Meta won’t have our backs, because those bad actors won’t be breaking their shit policies.

Before putting this out, I reached out to a few members in our little community who are most likely going to be on the receiving end of the hate speech Meta now allows under its revised guidelines. I wanted to hear from them first since they are the ones who are most impacted. Some are leaving, some are staying for now. All have their personal reasons and I respect them in their choices.

So my questions to the rest of you are as follows (please answer in the comments below):

  1. What are your plans for Facebook/Messenger?

  2. How do you feel about moving our community chat to another service?

  3. Do you have any suggestions for an alternative to Messenger?

Thank you so much for your time. I try to be supportive of those who follow my newsletter. It’s always important to me to provide a safe environment.

Be good to each other,

Nat ✌️

Here are a few options I think are decent for our needs. Vote on the ones you like.