What is it like to manage a Facebook Group of 24,000?

By Jordan Winters

This week we chose to revisit a story that we started to explore earlier in the semester about the role of Facebook groups in the social media ecosystem.

I jumped on the phone with Christina Forrester, the creator of Christians Against Hate, a Facebook group that exclusively discusses and posts about politics.

Sounds like a pretty niché group, right? Not so. Currently, the group has 24,041 members, (and is growing every day). Over 4,000 have joined since I spoke with Forrester just a couple weeks ago.

But the most interesting aspect of the group is not its size but the combination of memes, articles from mainstream sites and “fake” articles that are posted hundreds of times a day.

Listen to our short podcast to hear Forrester talk about some of the challenges involved in moderating a group of this size and with this amount of activity. The detail that stuck out to me most from Forrester’s comments was how it may be necessary to have a full time staff to manage this Facebook group.

My question, then: Is this the future, where our social circles need to be regulated and everyday people like Forrester become the guardians of information?

It’s also essential to ask: what’s so egregious about that? Isn’t this actually the ultimate democratization of news?