Facebook Admin Assist
Giving group admins a way to moderate at scale, automatically taking action on the criteria they set, and summing up everything it did in a clear daily digest.
Announced at the Facebook Communities Summit 2022. Image via Meta Newsroom.
Overview
Groups are where communities live on Facebook, and the admins who run them carry a real moderation load. Admin Assist lets an admin set criteria once and have Facebook automatically take action on posts and comments that match, so they can spend less time policing and more time building culture.
I prototyped the experience behind the 2022 updates, including the new Daily Digest, a clear daily summary of every action Admin Assist took on the admin's behalf, so the team could feel how automated moderation should communicate what it's doing and keep admins in control.
What we prototyped
Admins define criteria, keywords, member history, post conditions, and Admin Assist acts automatically as content comes in.
A daily summary of every action taken, so admins can review at a glance how their rules are working and adjust.
New treatments automatically move posts rated false by fact-checkers into pending, for the admin to review before deleting.
Automation with a human in the loop, the system does the heavy lifting, the admin keeps the final say.
Designing trust into automation
The hard part of automated moderation isn't the rules, it's trust. An admin needs to believe the system is doing the right thing on their behalf, and see exactly what it did. Prototyping the Daily Digest let us tune how those actions are summarised, grouped and surfaced so the tool feels transparent rather than opaque.
Get that right and a single admin can confidently run a community of hundreds of thousands.
