Neigbourly Guidelines from the Team

Helen Neighbourly Lead from Levin

How does the Neighbourly Team Moderate?

Lila from Neighbourly Neighbourly Team from Catlins Forest Park

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a wonderful time over the holidays, lounging in the sun and spending time with loved ones (I am trying very hard to not itch sandfly bites from a road trip to the West Coast - any tips welcome!).

Am getting in touch today to give you a bit of an insight into how our team moderates content on Neighbourly. We've seen some uncertainty surrounding what our processes are, so I wanted to share some of the common questions we see. If you have any questions about specific parts of moderation please add a comment below and I will be happy to shed some more light on the process!

1) Does the Neighbourly team simply pick what they dislike and take it down?
No! Our team is fully trained and follows a protocol on how to determine what is acceptable for the platform or not. This is mainly based on our Guidelines, as well as policies which you can find in our Help Section.

2) What about Free Speech? Aren't we supposed to be able to say whatever we like?
We want Neighbourly to be a space for important discussions and varied opinions, however it's important to remember it is a private platform. You could liken Neighbourly to being a house and our members being guests - everyone is welcome to speak freely, but if their thoughts go against our values (here being our Guidelines), we do reserve the right to respectfully ask them to refrain from saying these things and/or leave our home.

3) Why has my content has been removed? I can't find an explanation!
When our team moderates a post or comment, we always send an email to the poster explaining which Guidelines they breached and why their post/comment was removed. While the explanation is not made public on the platform, the poster will always have that information at arm's reach alongside a link to contact us [we recommend members check their email Spam folder if they cannot locate the email].

4) How do you find what posts to moderate? Do you scroll through the feeds?
Neighbourly has short of a million users dotted all over Aotearoa, so we unfortunately don't have the time to manually scroll through all the feeds. However, our system automatically picks up content that contains inappropriate wording or is likely to cause disharmony. This is why, although we moderate hundreds of posts a day, we might miss some. If you see a post you feel should have been moderated, please report it (by using the three dots next to a post) so we can take a look.

5) Who picks what appears in my Morning Digest emails?
Morning digest emails are automatically generated by our system which picks the most popular posts in your area and what you're likely to be most interested in. It is unique to each member. We try our best to remove any inappropriate content before the emails are sent out, but we may exceptionally miss problematic content (which explains why a post featured in your morning digest might be unavailable later in the day).

I will finish by saying, on behalf of the whole team, that moderation is a tricky job and truly we do it with the best of intentions: so everyone can feel welcome & included on Neighbourly and to keep our communities safe.

I'm also glad to announce that Ash is back from her maternity leave and will become your first point of contact as she once was! I will pop in from time to time to share some Member Experience news with you, but otherwise you can reach me by heading to neighbourly.co.nz/contact-us. It's been lovely sharing this time with you all.

Bonne journee!

Lila