If your salon has a Facebook page, there’s a good chance you’ve received comments on your posts you’d rather not have. And if they happen to slip through your radar, they can stay up and on display for longer than you realise.
Business owners have been campaigning for change, and Facebook has listened, introducing a new tool that allows salon owners more control over who can comment on their public posts.
Like Twitter has done for some time, the new Facebook tool will allow salon owners to control who comments, choosing whether to let anyone who can see the post comment, or whether to restrict commenting to either friends only, or the people and pages tagged.
The setting can be applied either to every public post on your profile, or to individual posts.
In a statement, Facebook said the change is designed to help offer users and organisations more control of the conversation around their posts, and to “limit potentially unwanted interactions”.
Currently, the publishers of Facebook posts — including salons — can be held liable for defamatory comments on their posts.
That responsibility was upheld by the New South Wales Court of Appeal last year.
The change has started to be rolled out, but it could reportedly take up to two weeks before every profile and page has the ability to turn off comments on their posts.
Reactions to the news on Twitter have been largely celebratory. One user noted that it will now be easier for businesses to protect themselves from legal action if they don’t delete problematic comments quickly enough.
Others noted that Twitter has had this functionality for some time, and that Facebook is “finally catching up”.
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