Improving our moderation process

Today the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been explaining how it has been working with various online review sites to encourage good practice in publishing reviews online.

You might be surprised to see that Care Opinion, our feedback site for stories about social care services, is one of the sites the CMA was concerned about. So it seems only right that we should explain how our moderation process operates, why they were worried and how we have changed things for the better. (Note: it’s quite complicated.)

To be clear, our aims have always been (and still are):

• To publish all the feedback from users and carers that we can, after moderation, and make clear when we can’t
• To encourage care providers to act transparently, respond openly to feedback, and show change when needed
• And to reduce the risk to feedback authors, and to ourselves, from threats of legal action.

The CMA’s view is that a site like Care Opinion should “publish all reviews, even negative ones, provided they are genuine and lawful”. That’s easy to say and good to have. In practice, it isn’t always simple to achieve.

We know from our early experience with care home feedback that while we might think a story you post on Care Opinion is genuine and lawful, the care home provider might not agree. And then they might threaten us, and you, with legal action for defamation.

And if they are big and strong, and you are small and vulnerable (perhaps you are the elderly and disabled relative of a care home resident?), what are you going to do? The likelihood is that you, or we, will agree to remove the story to avoid a costly and stressful legal battle.

We don’t think that is good for transparency, because negative feedback about some providers would then disappear without trace from Care Opinion. Exactly what neither we, nor the CMA, want.

To avoid this problem we came up with a different approach which we apply to providers which have the right to take action for defamation. After we moderate a story, we email the care provider and ask them to choose between:

• Publishing the story, after which they can post a response to it and engage with the author to address concerns
• Restricting the story, which means that instead of being able to read the story, site users will see a notice saying “this story has been restricted by a service provider”. We also show the reason the provider gave for doing this.

To make sure that important concerns are not simply swept under the carpet, if a story is restricted we email the relevant “public interest bodies” (care regulators and local authorities) to let them know, and we ensure they can see restricted stories.

We also show clearly where providers take this option, so everyone can assess their transparency and motivations. We’ve always been open about the process.

We think this is an innovative solution which creates clear incentives for transparency, reduces legal risk to us and the author, and gives everyone using the site clear information on what has happened.

We also think it is working fairly well so far. In the past two years only a small proportion of stories have been restricted, and we have had no legal threats. Because you can clearly see if a story was restricted, nor do we think any “consumers” have been misled as a result.

But the CMA was concerned about the provider having the final word, so we have made a small but important change. Now, if a provider chooses to restrict, we will treat this as a request and we will assess it on its merits. Some stories may still be restricted, but fewer than before. And of course, you will still be able to see if that happens, and our other safeguards remain in place.

The CMA was also concerned about what happened if the provider didn’t reply to us. If the story was very serious, we would err on the side of restricting to keep things safe. Given the CMA's concerns, if the provider doesn’t reply, we now simply publish.

We think these are both good improvements to our process. We hope we can continue to balance the risks of online feedback so that authors still feel safe telling their story, providers want to listen to their users, and the public can see that the care sector is open, transparent and responsive to feedback.

Only time will tell whether we succeed.