8 Book Opinions Too Controversial for Facebook

As an Associate Editor at Book Riot, one of my job duties is to manage social media. We share all our posts on Facebook and Twitter, and we often share back content on Facebook as well. As you can imagine, sometimes monitoring comment sections is…not ideal. While the majority of the engagement we have is positive or constructive, the minority of angry, bigoted, and/or baffling commenters sure can be loud.

Sometimes, it’s easy to tell when a post will attract angry commenters. Sometimes, though, the reactions take us completely by surprise. The proliferation of comments agreeing and disagreeing boosts the post in the algorithm, showing it to more people, who in turn add their comments — a runaway snowball effect. If the disagreements are minor, it’s usually worth keeping the post up. If the comments become heated or hateful, though, we might take the Facebook post down — it’s not worth spending all day moderating one post’s comments.