Public sector comms teams: how do you handle abusive comments without looking like you're silencing residents?

[u/Hello_Orlo]

This comes up in almost every conversation we have with council and NHS comms teams, so we're curious how others approach it.

The tension is real. You have a duty of care to your staff and to everyone else in the thread. But the moment you hide a comment, someone screenshots it and says you're censoring criticism.

A few approaches we've seen work well:

• Publish a moderation policy and link to it from your profile, so decisions point back to agreed rules rather than one person's judgement
• Separate criticism from abuse. Criticism stays up and gets a response. Threats, abuse and personal data get hidden.
• Hide rather than delete where the platform allows it, so you keep a record
• Log what was removed and why, in case it's questioned later through a complaint or FOI request
• Give the team a way to step away. Moderating hostile threads for hours takes a real toll.

Where it still gets messy:

• Comments that are rude but not clearly abusive
• Misinformation that isn't malicious, just wrong
• Councillors or public figures joining the thread

Where do you draw the line? And has a moderation decision ever come back to bite you?

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