How can I kick a spammer out of my Facebook group?

Try as we might, it seems to be one of the great inevitabilities of the online world, where people flock, spammers and weirdos follow. In your case, it definitely sounds more like they're what we online folk called "trolls" than spammers, though. The difference? A spammer is generally just interested in advertising his site, be it a porn site, gambling, or something equally unpopular. A troll, on the other hand, has nothing to sell but instead feeds off the disagreement and hostility of others. In a Facebook group for a church, they might post screeds about how bad the church is, how your religious beliefs are bogus, etc.

In the real world, dissenters and nay-sayers are at least generally respectful enough to stand outside your church with picket signs during Sunday service, but in the digital world, there's no reason not to just jump into the middle of your discussions and post their vitriol, hoping to get a passionate response from the community. Do they care that the response is hostile? Nope. In fact, they seem to enjoy it, from what I have seen. And, yes, it can be incredibly frustrating.

The good news is that you can both mark individual Facebook wall postings as spam and have them removed for everyone and actually block a specific user from participating in the group and posting things in the future.

To accomplish this, let's use a spammer that appeared in one of the Facebook groups I help manage, the Front Range Blogger Meetup Facebook Group. The picture of the nice lady? Pretty darn sure that's not the person whose account it is, so don't be surprised...

Here's a post that showed up on our announcements board:

To get rid of this particular posting, I simply move my cursor to the top right of the comment where an "X" shows up. A click of it and the mini-menu shows up with "Mark as Spam". That's what I want. Done.

Now, to take the next step and kick this member out of the group itself, I'll need to go to the group page and look for the list of members:

As I have highlighted, click on "See All", then type in a few letters of their name to find this particular person in your own Facebook group list. It'll look fairly low-key:

Same thing again, click on the "X" and this time you won't be marking their posting as spam, you'll be given the option of actually kicking them out:

Choose "Ban Permanently" and "Confirm" and they will not only be booted from the group, they won't be able to sign up for it again down the road.

Problem solved. Hope that helps you gain back control of your group and discussion!

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