Every municipality has a Bob. He comments on every post. He shows up in the same three Facebook groups with the same three complaints. He is loud, persistent and convinced he speaks for the whole community.
He is also, usually, one person. His name and profile picture might actually be aliases—and he might not live in your community.
Comms staff spend a lot of energy managing Bob: whether to delete his comments, whether to respond, whether to let it ride. Meanwhile, the bigger risk often goes unnoticed. Council reads the comment section, decides public opinion has shifted and starts asking staff to change direction based on what one angry resident wrote at 11 p.m. Yes, there may have been 25 negative comments on that post but 8 of them were Bob and 6 of them were responding to Bob.
Here’s how to handle the Bobs, and keep your read on public sentiment honest.
How one loud voice distorts a leader’s read of public opinion
This is the real risk, and it’s not really about Bob. It’s about what Bob does to the people reading the comments.
A mayor or councillor who scrolls through a contentious thread sees the same handful of names again and again and can start to believe those voices represent the community. This is a known distortion: the loudest, most active commenters on any platform are rarely representative of the wider public, but they’re the most visible, so they carry outsized weight with anyone reading along.
Part of your job is managing that perception internally, not just the comments externally. When leadership raises concern based on a comment thread, it’s worth gently separating volume from prevalence: how many distinct people are actually saying this, versus how many times has it been said. A council briefing that includes both numbers is more useful than one that just says “people are upset online.”
Strategies for staying calm, factual and consistent
The tactical part is simpler than it feels in the moment.
Have a documented comment policy, and apply it evenly. Your policy should say what gets removed (abusive language, personal attacks, off-topic spam) and what doesn’t (criticism, disagreement, unhappy residents). If Bob’s comment technically violates the policy, delete it. If it doesn’t, however much you’d like to, leave it. Criticism is perfectly ok. We know we won’t please everyone. If you are deleting make sure you take a screen shot first since those comments are a record and we don’t delete records.
Respond to the substance, not the tone. If there’s a factual question buried in an angry comment, answer the factual question, in plain language, once. You’re not writing for Bob. You’re writing for the hundred people reading the thread who haven’t commented.
Don’t argue in the comments. One clear, factual response is a resource. A back-and-forth is content for the very account you’re trying not to feed. Don’t bicker. It looks bad on you.
Keep a record. If a commenter becomes a pattern, not just a post, document it: what they said, when, where. This matters if the behaviour escalates and you need to explain a decision later, whether that’s to your own leadership or, in rarer cases, to a platform or the police.
Give staff permission to disengage. The person monitoring your accounts should never feel obligated to win an argument with an anonymous commenter. That’s not the job.
Why misinformation monitoring needs to go beyond counting comments
If your monitoring approach is “how many negative comments did we get,” you’re tracking volume, not truth or reach.
A better approach looks at three things: How many distinct people are engaging, not just how many comments there are. One person leaving 12 comments is not 12 people. Where the conversation is happening. A rumour circulating in a closed Facebook group with 3,000 local members is a bigger problem than the same rumour on a post with 40,000 views. And whether the claim is spreading beyond the usual commenters. If people outside your regular thread of critics start repeating something, that’s the signal to respond publicly and directly, not just in a reply.
This is also where the advice on community pages comes in. Comms staff often want to jump into every misinformation-laden thread on the community Facebook group. Resist that. Wading in too often makes the municipality look like it’s monitoring everything (which invites more scrutiny of when it doesn’t show up) and it moves the conversation off the one channel where you actually control the record.
The better move is occasional and deliberate: post a short, factual comment when misinformation is spreading widely, and use it to redirect people back to the municipal page, where the full information lives and where you can monitor and moderate properly. You’re not trying to win the community page. You’re trying to get people to the place where the facts are.
Five things you can do right now
- Write down your comment moderation policy, if you haven’t already, and make sure whoever’s on the account has it in front of them.
- Build a simple log for tracking repeat commenters, separate from your regular engagement metrics.
- When briefing leadership on a contentious thread, report the number of distinct commenters, not just the comment count.
- Draft one or two short, factual holding statements you can adapt and drop into community page threads when misinformation is circulating.
- Give your social media staff explicit permission, in writing, to disengage from arguments they can’t win.
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