Facebook Inc. said today it’s bringing a number of new tools to the platform that will help administrators keep things civil in Groups.

The platform right now has close to 2.85 billion monthly users, with more than 1.8 billion of them participating in Groups. That can be a headache for the 70 million-plus people who run and administer those Groups.

To lessen the stress, Facebook will soon introduce an artificial intelligence-powered feature called “Conflict Alerts.” This will detect when “contentious or unhealthy conversations” take place and then notify admins, the company said in a blog post.

It’s still a work in progress, so it’s not clear when it will be available to all admins. Facebook is still in the testing stage, tinkering with machine learning technology that’s more advanced than current AI that can identify certain keywords.

When it’s ready and in use, admins will receive a notification that a conflict has arisen between members, and they can then decide to ban the transgressors or limit what they can do in the Group. It seems there could be a “Minority Report” aspect to this, with the company saying the AI will spot potential conflicts. That will no doubt create chaos and confusion as members get flagged for nothing, so it will be interesting to see what happens.

At the same time, admins can now choose to “slow down” conversations on a certain topic if they think things are getting out of hand. They can limit all posts or just pick out one Group member. It will easier now to spot a troublesome member since admins will receive a “member summary” for each of them. To remind users not to break the rules in the first place, another tool is giving admins the ability to “tag group rules” to posts.

These features will become part of a new admin page, which Facebook said will be “a simpler, more intuitive destination” where admins can more easily see what’s going down in their Groups. The page will also offer a smart education system that will help with management issues by giving advice to admins.

On top of that, Facebook will now give admins the ability to restrict certain people from commenting on posts, based on past violations or even if they haven’t had a Facebook account for long. In short, it’s a troll-buster tool. Spammers and self-promoters will also be easier to weed out with these new tools.

Photo: JT/Flickr