A few weeks ago, I sat down and watched The Matter of Facts, the ABC documentary series where Hamish Macdonald goes looking for an answer to a fairly unsettling question: what happens when society can’t agree on basic facts anymore. 

It’s a good watch for those in Community Engagement, but also a bit of a gut punch. Because a lot of what he’s describing isn’t happening somewhere far away, in some abstract online ecosystem. It’s happening on the Facebook post I put up on Tuesday about a road upgrade. 

The unglamorous bit of the job 

Here’s what a community engagement specialist spends a lot of time on. We build project pages. We write easy-to-understand fact sheets. We map out timelines, draft FAQs, run drop-in sessions, answer enquiries, and try to make sure that if someone genuinely wants to understand a project, they can. With real information, in one click. 

Then we post about it on social media, and within minutes there are comments. Some are about a roundabout from three suburbs over. Some are genuinely useful feedback that would have landed a lot better in the feedback tool on the clickthrough link. A few are just people having a go at each other. 

The comments section is not a source 

This is the part that struck me watching the show. Macdonald spends three episodes essentially proving that people are forming their view of what’s true from whatever is loudest and closest, not from whatever is most accurate. And the comments section on a council or agency project post is a perfect little demonstration of that in action. 

The actual facts about the project are sitting right there. One click away. On the page. With the maps, the dates, the “have your say” link, the lot. 

But the comments are right there too, no click required, and they’re funnier, angrier, and likely a lot more entertaining than a project fact sheet. So that’s where people camp. That’s where “facts” can get built. Somebody says the project will demolish 40 houses, somebody else says it’s already been cancelled, and three days later that’s what half the suburb believes, even though neither is true and never was. 

The project likely didn’t fail to communicate. It may have been communicated very well. It’s just that the comments section acted like static on the signal, close enough to drown it out. 

So, comments off? 

I’ve genuinely been sitting with the idea of recommending turning comments off on engagement posts. Not because I think people shouldn’t be able to say what they think about a project, they absolutely should, that’s the entire point of engagement. But there’s a difference between a place designed to hear people out and a place designed to generate reactions and reach, often by leaning on more extreme or emotive language. 

A “have your say” page is built to actually listen. It’s structured, it goes somewhere, someone reads it and it shapes the project. A comments thread under a social post is built by an algorithm to keep people scrolling. Those are not the same tool, even though they can look similar from the outside. 

Turning comments off on the post isn’t turning off engagement. It’s an attempt to stop a platform built for outrage from standing in for a process built for actual input, and pointing people, gently but firmly, toward the version of “having your say” that was designed to do something with what they say. 

The earnest bit 

This isn’t a complaint about the public. People are curious and they care about their communities. That’s a good thing and not a problem to manage. 
 
The problem is a design one. We’ve built genuinely good spaces for people to engage with a project properly, and then we hand them over to platforms that reward the opposite of that.  

So maybe the fix isn’t more comment moderation, or a stronger community manager, or another polite reply asking people to “check the project page for accurate information” (RIP to whoever has had to type that sentence for the hundredth time). 

Maybe the fix is simpler. Drive the community to engage effectively, in the places built for it. And on the social post that’s just there to let people know it exists, switch the comments off, and let the one click to the real information be the loudest thing on the page.