Guide · For local-government communicators

Should your city turn off Facebook comments?

It’s one of the hardest calls in local-government communications, and it usually gets made in a bad week — after a thread turns ugly, after a staff member takes it home with them, after a council member forwards you a screenshot. Most of the advice you’ll find is somebody’s opinion. Here is what the data actually shows, including the part that argues for keeping them on and the part that doesn’t.

First: you are not the only one considering it

We measured this across 4,539 city and county Facebook pages over six months (685,000 public posts, January–June 2026). Of the 23,549 active page-months we could classify, 12.1% ran with comments off — roughly one in eight.

It is far more common in smaller communities: 17.5% of small towns (under 10,000 residents) versus 6.4% of large governments (50,000+). By state, rates run from under 4% to over 36% — and that spread is mostly a story about how small a given state’s municipalities are, not about regional culture.

Two things follow. If you are a small town weighing this, a meaningful share of your peers have already made the same call and the sky did not fall. And if someone tells you that turning comments off is unheard of, they are wrong.

What it costs, measured

Here is the part that usually surprises people. Pages running with comments off earn dramatically less engagement of every kind — not just fewer comments, which would be obvious, but fewer likes and fewer shares:

• Likes per post: 67% lower for small towns, 68% for mid-size, 77% for large governments.
• Shares per post: 40–55% lower, depending on size band.

The gap holds within every population band, so it isn’t simply that smaller places both turn comments off more often and get less engagement anyway. Comparing like with like, the difference persists.

The likely mechanism is reach. Facebook’s ranking rewards conversation; a post that can’t be commented on generates a weaker signal and gets shown to fewer people, which in turn costs you likes and shares. That matters most for the posts where reach is the whole point — a boil-water advisory, a road closure, a missing person.

The legitimate reasons to restrict

Plenty of governments turn comments off for good reasons, and any honest guide has to say so:

• Coordinated harassment. When a small group is targeting staff or residents, the comment section stops being a public square and becomes a liability.
• Health and election misinformation. On some topics, an unmoderated thread actively undermines the announcement it’s attached to.
• Staff capacity. Moderation is real work. A one-person shop that cannot monitor a thread over a weekend is making a defensible call, not a lazy one.
• Public-records obligations. In many states comments are records, with retention and deletion rules that carry legal exposure most PIOs were never trained on.

None of those are excuses. The point of the data above isn’t that comments should always be on — it’s that the decision has a measurable price, so it’s worth paying deliberately rather than by default.

Four middle paths

The choice is rarely all-or-nothing, and most of the reach benefit survives these:

1. Publish a comment policy and enforce it visibly. A short, content-neutral policy pinned to your page gives you a consistent basis for acting, and gives residents a standard to point to. It is also your best defense if a removal is ever challenged.
2. Hide rather than delete. Hiding a comment removes it from public view while preserving the record, which usually sits better with retention rules than deletion does. Check your state’s guidance.
3. Restrict selectively, not permanently. Turn comments off on the specific post that’s drawing coordinated abuse, and leave the rest of the page open. Most of your posts are not the problem.
4. Use the quiet hours. If moderation capacity is the real constraint, publish contentious items when someone is actually available to watch the thread, rather than at 4:45 on a Friday.

What to tell your manager or council

If you’re being pushed to switch comments off — or defending a decision to keep them on — three sentences usually carry the conversation:

• “About one in eight comparable governments run with comments off, so this is a normal thing to consider.”
• “In measured data across 4,539 pages, restricting comments tracks with roughly two-thirds fewer likes and 40–55% fewer shares per post, even versus governments our size — so it costs us reach on the emergency posts too.”
• “Here are the middle paths that address the harassment problem without paying the full reach price.”

The full research

Every figure on this page comes from our own analysis, published in full with methodology and caveats: When Local Governments Turn Off Facebook Comments: How Common It Is, and What It Costs. It explains how we infer the comment setting (Facebook doesn’t publish it), the page-month unit of analysis, and where the limits of the data are.