How do you handle safeguarding issues?

Community Building

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around handling safeguarding issues in online communities. phi shares their experience with managing a community with a younger audience, where moderators have been trained to handle situations involving self-harm threats, harassment, and bullying. They have a clear playbook and a special group for notification, but wonder when it’s acceptable to terminate a conversation after pointing the individual to resources.

downey suggests implementing custom flag types, similar to Reddit’s system, which could send a message of concern to moderators and provide crisis resources. phi appreciates the input and mentions that they have a similar mechanism in place, a private “safeguarding” group for reporting concerns. They also found the provided Reddit resource helpful.

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We manage a fairly active community with an audience on the younger side. Over the years we have had a few safeguarding issues (suicide threats) and while we are treating every occurrence seriously (as we should), it seems to always be a cry for attention that requires a lot of time and effort from our moderators to defuse; needless to say, this can take a toll on our staff who would prefer not having to deal with this.

Our community managers have been trained for this type of issues (through a 3rd party program) and we have a clear playbook for those situations with a special group that can be notified anytime there is suspicion of potential self harm, harassment or bullying.

I am wondering how other communities are handling those situations. When is it ok to terminate a conversation with someone who made self harm threats (after pointing him to the appropriate resources of course)?

Thank you in advance for any insight.

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Interesting. Once upon a time, there was talk of:

… which if it were done like on Reddit, could send a special message to mods and automatically send a “message of concern” from the system account with referrals to admin-specified crisis resources, e.g.:

https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043513931-What-do-I-do-if-someone-talks-about-seriously-hurting-themselves-or-is-considering-suicide-

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Thank you for your input.

In a way we already implemented the “message of concern” mechanism you describe; we have a private “safeguarding” discourse group where anyone can send issues (or simply tag the group in a worrying conversation)

The reddit help is a great resource; not sure we thought about looking there before.

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