Telling your followers and community about Arwen

It's important to explain to your community why you've made this change, from the usual 'free-for-all' of social media, to a rules-based situation where you have AI scanning and removing content. This article explains how to do it.

Up until recently social media has been a free-for-all, where everyone can say what they want whenever they want. This has led to growing toxicity and hate becoming normalised. By picking Arwen you've demonstrated that you don't agree with that, and we thank you for being part of this positive change.

Our experience is that it's important to 'bring your community with you' through clear communications and education. You want to give everyone the chance to be a part of your new community - to understand all the positive reasons why you're doing this, and, if necessary, to adjust their behaviour as a result.

Create a Community Social Media Policy

Most organisations have internal Social Media Policies that cover how employees use social media, involving various guidelines and restrictions. These have been in place for a number of years and become a common feature of employment law. However a common equivalent doesn't exist for communities outside of your organisation.

This is where your Community Social Media Policy comes in. It works as follows:

• Clearly sets out your right to actively manage the content and membership of your social community
• Sets out the content and behaviour that you won't accept from members of your community
• Explains how you enforce this policy

We highly recommend having this policy in place when you go live with Arwen.

How to create your Community Social Media Policy

Given this is a relatively new area of policy for most individuals and organisations, it needs a bit of preparation.

1. Draft your policy document based on the guidance below
2. Create a small review group to input into the policy
3. Plan to review and refine it over the first few week

What to include in your Community Social Media Policy

1. The purpose of social media for you or your organisation, and the various things you and your community value about it. 
2. What you mean by "social media", naming the various social networks that you operate on.
3. Why you need this policy and the specific things it is seeking to tackle. Try to be as specific as possible, making it relevant to your particular community. So if your community has a particular issue with racism or profanity, then reference that.
4. The anticipated benefits of having this policy. Draw attention to the valued diversity within the community that you want to foster, protect and support.
5. What reasonable conduct is, such as positive engagement and open and inclusive dialogue. 
6. What conduct you won't tolerate, ranging from illegal content to 'awful but lawful' content and behaviour.
7. How you will identify breaches of this policy by using Arwen.
8. The ways you will tackle users who breach policy, ranging from engagement with the user, blocking the user from the community, reporting them to the relevant network, and in certain circumstances where content is illegal, reporting them to the authorities.
   
   

How to describe Arwen in your Policy

Arwen is a sophisticated bit of technology, but explaining it doesn't have to be complicated. We recommend saying something like this:

"Arwen uses artificial intelligence to automatically find and remove hate, toxic and unwanted content from social media. Arwen is fully authorised by Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, where it continually scans our specified accounts for 25+ different types of unwanted content in 30+ languages, which it then removes in sub-second time. Arwen also provides us with reports and records of messages that have been hidden and by which accounts, so that we can take follow up actions. Find out more at Arwen.ai."

How to announce your policy

Once you've got your policy in hand, we recommend a staged approach to communicating it to your community.

1. Soft launch with reactive communications, whilst you refine your policy and process

• Post your Community Social Media Policy to your website, where it can be easily referred to.
• Refer individual toxic users to your policy when engaging with them about their behaviour.
• Learn from your interactions with them, using insights to refine your policy document. This phase is all about 'road testing' your policy with your community and tweaking it.
• This phase usually lasts between two and four weeks.

2. Full launch with proactive communications

• Once you have a Policy that has been 'road tested' you can then choose to formally communicate it to your community.
• This can be done at different levels of volume, from a discrete message to a campaign celebrating your approach to community diversity and inclusion. See below for more on how to communicate it.
• Expect this event to generate as much support as it does toxicity. So time it to happen when you can manage that response. Ensure Arwen is active across all relevant social accounts.

Crafting your announcement message

• A positive opening
  I love social media. I love how it connects me to you, and how you all connect as a warm and supportive community.
• Explain the problem, the impact it's having on yourself and the wider community, and the need for a solution
  However, as many of you know, I’ve experienced some unpleasant moments of abuse and hatred recently. Rather than leave social media, like others have felt compelled to, I’ve decided to stay and take control of the problem.
• When covering the impact, be sure to cover the impact on the community as a whole, rather than just you or your organisation
  Not only that, but many of you have told me the negative impact this content also have on you, of all different ages, beliefs and cultures. So I also want to make this community better for all of us!
• Introduce your Policy 
  So I’m introducing some changes from today. First up I'm adopting some new rules about what is acceptable and what isn't. Specifically I won't tolerate any of the following:
  • Any defamatory, abusive, or threatening content
  • Harassment, trolling, hate speech, or discrimination
• Explain how you will manage your policy
  I'm now using Arwen to monitor all my social media channels 24:7. Arwen.ai is a tool that scans my social media for all the toxic and unwanted content and removes it from view. It also helps me to identify and report really toxic individuals to the networks. 
• Set out the benefits you expect
  Doing this puts me back in control of my social media, and helps me protect my wonderful community from those who are out to be toxic and hateful. My hope is this will give me the protection I need, whilst also ensuring our positive community isn’t disrupted by a few hateful individuals.

Arwen is dedicated to making Social Media social again. We want to help all of our customers generate positive and engaging communities. We are confident that creating your Community Social Media Policy will be a great step towards that for you.