📖 Content moderation glossary
What is brigading?
In short
Brigading is a coordinated action in which a group of users, often organised from another community, descends on a page or post to flood it with comments, votes or reports in order to impose a view or target someone.
Brigading is usually organised elsewhere, in a forum, a group chat or by an influencer pointing followers to a target. The participants may be real people, which distinguishes it from bot spam, but their behaviour is coordinated rather than spontaneous.
Example: a brand publishes a post supporting a social cause. A community hostile to that cause shares the link, and within two hours the post receives a thousand comments, many of them insulting, plus mass reports against the brand's replies.
The warning signs are a sudden spike in volume, many accounts that have never interacted with the page, and repeated slogans. Automated moderation helps absorb the spike by hiding clear violations immediately, while leaving genuine disagreement visible and sending borderline comments to a person.