Social media threat monitoring for an election campaign
A campaign's social media is a different animal from an electorate office's. The volume spikes the week the candidate is announced, the people reading the comments are volunteers, the candidate's family is in the photos, and the first threat arrives before anyone has agreed what to do with it. This guide is the week-one setup for social media threat monitoring on a campaign page, what to log from day one, and how to carry the evidence into the electorate office after polling day. With the Victorian state election on 28 November 2026, a lot of teams are doing this right now.
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Trolls, threats and fake accounts on a campaign page
- The spike is sudden. A page that got ten comments a week gets four hundred the day the candidate is preselected, and the ratio of hostile to genuine flips overnight.
- Volunteers are reading it. Keen, part-time, on their own phones, with no process and no idea what to do with a threat.
- The family is in the photos. So the comments about the kids' school are not hypothetical.
- Evidence gets lost in the chaos. By the time someone decides the pattern matters, the early comments have been deleted and nobody kept the screenshots.
Week one
Connect the pages and set the page type
Connect the campaign's Facebook Page, Instagram professional account, TikTok and Threads. Set the page type to politician, so the AI judges comments against the context of a political page: a heated comment about a policy is treated as politics, a comment about where the candidate's children go to school is not. If the candidate's personal page is public and gets campaign traffic, connect it too.
Decide who is on duty
Add the campaign manager and whoever handles comms as team members, and make one of them the duty contact. Turn their email alerts on for threats and leave everyone else on the in-app bell. One person reads the alert at 11pm, not five.
Switch on auto-hide for the categories with nothing to decide
Slurs and spam at high confidence can be hidden the moment they land, reversibly, so volunteers never see them. Leave threats, abuse and misinformation to a person. Every automatic hide sits in a review queue with one-click undo.
Write the one-page process
What counts as a threat, who gets told, when to call 000, when to call the Police Assistance Line, and the rule that nobody replies to abuse. Put it where the volunteers can find it. The guide to reporting a threatening comment in Australia is the long version.
Link to the party's HQ, if it runs one
If the party or the campaign's state office runs Clarify HQ, link the workspace. HQ gets a read-only view of the threats, coordinated groups and cases, so the same account hitting six candidates is visible to someone, and the campaign can refer a case upward with the evidence attached. The candidate can unlink at any time.
What to log from day one
Every threat, with the account, the post, the time and the text, even the ones that seem too silly to matter. Pile-ons as single events: the time window, the post, the accounts. Repeat offenders, so the tenth comment from the same account is seen as the tenth. And anything about the candidate's family, home or movements, which should open a case immediately regardless of how it is worded.
Clarify does the first three automatically from the moment the page is connected: every threat goes to the log with its evidence, coordination detection proposes groups, and the account tracker keeps each account's history across all of your pages. The fourth is a judgement call, which is why Raise case is one click.
After polling day
If the candidate wins, the campaign workspace becomes the electorate office's. The pages carry over, the threat log and every case come with them, and the staff who knew the repeat offenders in October still know them in February. Add the new office staff as team members and remove the volunteers. If the candidate loses, keep the workspace on the trial or the lowest plan until the abuse subsides, which it does, and export the case reports for anything still open with police.
Either way, the record is the point. A campaign that logged everything from week one hands over a file. A campaign that did not hands over a group chat.
The honest limits
Clarify monitors the comments on the pages you connect. It does not watch the whole of social media, private messages, or pages it is not connected to, and it never reports anyone to a platform or the police on its own. Its AI can miss a threat or flag something that is not one, so whoever is on duty still reads the comments on a bad night, and a threat they spot that Clarify did not should be captured and reported all the same. Clarify is software, not a lawyer, and nothing on this page is legal advice; if anyone is in immediate danger, call 000. What Clarify does is make sure that when a person on the campaign decides to act, the evidence is complete, in order, and ready. The social media threat monitoring page describes exactly what is and is not covered.
Frequently asked questions
Can an election campaign use Clarify on the free trial?
Yes. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, and any Facebook Page, Instagram professional account, TikTok account or Threads profile can be connected. Many campaigns start on the trial the week the abuse begins and move to Pro, which has five team seats, once the volunteer roster settles.
Can campaign volunteers moderate the page in Clarify?
Yes, as team members with roles. Starter has one seat and Pro has five, so a campaign manager, a comms lead and three volunteers is the usual shape. Permissions control who can hide, reply and raise cases, and the activity log records who did what, which matters when the team changes every week.
Should we connect the candidate's personal page or only the campaign page?
Both, if the personal page is a public Facebook Page or Instagram professional account and gets campaign traffic. Personal profiles cannot be connected (the platforms do not allow it), and threats often land on the personal page first because it has the family photos.
What happens to the workspace after the election?
It carries over. If the candidate wins, the same workspace, pages, threat log and cases become the electorate office's, and the new staff are added as team members. If the candidate loses, keep it on the lowest plan until the abuse subsides and export any case reports still open with police.
Can the party see across all of its candidates' pages?
Only through Clarify HQ, and only if each campaign chooses to link. HQ gets a read-only view of the flagged accounts, coordinated groups and cases in each linked workspace, so the same account targeting several candidates is visible to someone. HQ can never post, reply, hide or change anything, and a campaign can unlink at any time. HQ organisation accounts are free.
Does Clarify report threats against a candidate to the police or the AEC?
No. Clarify records the threat, preserves the evidence, alerts the team and generates the report. A person on the campaign decides whether to report it and to whom, usually state police, or the AFP for a federal candidate. Clarify never contacts a platform, the police, the AEC or the eSafety Commissioner on its own.
Read how it works, step by step
- The setup wizardThe first time you sign in to a brand-new workspace, Clarify walks you through five quick steps. You can skip most of them and come back later through Settings.
- Connecting your social accountsClarify syncs comments and replies from your social accounts so your team can moderate them in one place. It works with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Threads.
- The Threat LogThe Threat Log is the permanent record of every comment classified as a threat, organised by the account that made it.
- Team members and permissionsClarify workspaces are built for teams. The Owner controls who's in and what each person can do, so a volunteer can triage comments without being able to post…
- Auto-hiding commentsAuto-hide lets Clarify hide the worst comments for you, the moment they're found, so a slur or a spam link isn't sitting on your Page waiting for someone to…
- What are organisationsAn organisation in Clarify is a party, network, or authority (for example a party head office, a peak body, or a regulator) that needs to see threats and bad…
- Plans, trials and billingEvery plan includes the full moderation toolkit: AI classification tuned to your page type (politician, business, creator or community organisation), reply…
Pricing
The threat log, alerts, cases and auto-hide are in every plan. Starter has one team seat; Pro has five, which is the usual campaign shape. Prices in Australian dollars; every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, and paying yearly gives two months free.
More from Clarify
- Threat monitoring and reportingSocial media threat monitoring for Australian MPs, councils and public figures. Clarify watches your own pages for threats, preserves the evidence, and builds police and eSafety-ready reports.
- Replies in your voiceClarify drafts replies to the comments on your Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Threads pages in your own voice, checks the facts on the web, and posts nothing until a person approves it.
- Comment moderationClarify sorts every comment on your pages as a threat, abuse, spam, misinformation, a question or fine, hides the clear-cut cases if you switch that on, and keeps every decision reversible.
- Media monitoringClarify watches Google News, GDELT and the outlets you add for mentions of you about once an hour, confirms each story is really about you, summarises it and scores its tone.
- Publishing with approvalsClarify schedules posts to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Threads from one calendar with your diary beside it, drafts them in your voice, and routes every post through an approval queue.
- MPs and candidatesSocial media threat monitoring and comment moderation for MPs, candidates and electorate offices. Clarify logs threats as evidence for police, hides abuse, and drafts replies staff approve.
- Councils and community groupsSocial media threat monitoring and comment moderation for local councils. Clarify keeps abuse and threats out of the feed with the evidence a police report needs, and drafts replies staff approve.
- Small businessClarify reads and sorts the comments on a small business's pages, drafts replies in the owner's voice, hides scams and spam, and schedules posts to every platform from one calendar.
- Sporting clubs, parties and peak bodiesClarify HQ lets a club, party or peak body see when one account is targeting several of its members across their own pages, and work referred cases together. Free for organisations.
- AthletesSocial media threat monitoring for athletes. Clarify reads the comments before they do, hides abuse the moment it lands, logs threats with evidence, and puts a real supporter in every morning brief.
- Creators and influencersClarify sorts a creator's Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Facebook comments, hides spam and abuse, mutes fake accounts, logs threats, and drafts replies to real questions in the creator's voice.
- Threatened on Facebook? How to report itSomeone threatened you on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok: when it is a police matter, how the eSafety Commissioner's adult cyber abuse scheme works, and what evidence to keep.
- Bot network detectionBot network detection by hand: the five signals that separate a bot network, troll farm or brigade from an organic backlash, what to record, and how to show the pattern to a platform or the police.
- Protecting staff from online abuseProtecting the staff who read your social media comments: the psychosocial risk of moderating abuse, what work health and safety law expects, and the practical steps that cut their exposure.
- Everything Clarify does, on one pageSocial media threat monitoring for Australian public pages: Clarify flags threats and coordinated accounts, keeps the evidence for police or eSafety, and drafts replies you approve.