Star Mail
By Oliver Winn 21/03/2026
While Facebook community groups can be chaotic spaces, well moderated groups can contribute vastly to a township’s ability to connect, a content moderation expert said.
In the Star Mail’s second article exploring the roles of admins in Facebook community groups, it shares the story of Mooroolbark Community.
Regina Atkinson is one of the admins for Mooroolbark Community, which is run by the Mooroolbark Traders and Community Group.
She said pride for her township was what sparked her moderation journey.
“I put my hand up just because I’ve lived here since 1980. So you know, I’m a proud Mooroolbarkian.
The Mooroolbark Traders and Community Group established the facebook group in 2018, to help locals connect and support local businesses.
The group saw significant growth during the Covid-19 lockdowns, as people increasingly turned to local networks to remain connected and engaged within their community.
But, Facebook community groups can be rogue spaces when not managed correctly.
Dr Timothy Koskie is a media communications postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sydney.
He said moderators have a large impact on the health of an online forum, such as a Facebook community group.
“What moderators do operates on a kind of dualistic level. On the one hand, they do exist as somebody is watching.
“And we know… that spaces where we feel like someone is watching operate very, very differently to spaces where we don’t feel like that,” Dr Koskie said.
He said groups that have active admins and moderators stay clean as the quality and relevance of posts are maintained.
Ms Atkinson said for the Mooroolbark Community group, measures such as restricting users from posting for 24 hours after they join gives admins time to perform background checks.
“It gives us time to do a little bit more of a background search, making sure that they’re affiliated either with Mooroolbark or even in the country because it does waste a lot of time when we have someone from overseas posting stuff that’s just not relevant.
“So we make sure it’s very clean because if you look at some of the other sites, they get diluted,” Ms Atkinson said.
A charter establishes the rules of the group which helps guide enforcement actions.
“So the rules are about making sure that you engage in the forum in a really clear and kind manner. So there’s to be no hate speech, no racism. It has to be for us to keep a clean Facebook group.”
Dr Koskie said in any environment where power is concentrated in the hands of a few people (such as group admins), that power can be used for good or ill.
“But if you’ve got a moderator that’s particularly active… that’s going to change how the document looks at the end of the day. That’s going to change the attitudes it represents and the values that it represents.
“Any time you’ve got somebody who’s in a position to make decisions in what we might call a democratic environment in that case, any person who has the ability to push things or pull things back and they don’t have accountability… you’re going to start to see some damage coming from that lack of accountability in terms of how the group operates,” Dr Koskie said.
Therefore it was crucial to have a way to keep admins accountable.
Ms Atkinson said group’s moderators hold each other accountable to ensure the group doesn’t get affected by one person’s personal views or opinions.
“Definitely having a lot of moderators on there or admins certainly helps, but also it keeps us accountable too. So if I’m having a bad day I can’t go and delete multiple things,” she said.
Ultimately, Ms Atkinson and the others involved with moderating the Mooroolbark Community group are held accountable by their pride for Mooroolbark.
“We’ve all got the common goal of making sure that the page stays clean and moving forward and a benefit. We’re quite protective of what goes up there.
“It’s a great way of just keeping the community together as a whole and having pride.”
To read the full article click here
