Media Releases

RNZ to introduce social media monitoring tool to allow for more conversation

Released at 2:25 pm on 17 September 2025

With more than 850,000 followers of RNZ social media accounts and hundreds of thousands of comments a month, the task of monitoring them is increasingly time consuming and difficult to do effectively 24/7.

To help RNZ manage the task of monitoring comments, RNZ is trying a new way to keep our sites safe from hate speech, spam and threats; using an Artificial Intelligence (AI) comment moderation tool called Sence.

Sence, a New Zealand-based company, uses AI to identify and categorise harmful content within social media sections. For RNZ social media sites, the tool will be tailored to make moderation decisions in line with RNZ’s Charter and Harmful Communications policy, as well as applicable legislation.

The tool offers options to hide comments rather than deleting them, allowing moderation decisions to be reviewed by an RNZ staff member and checked for fairness. This ensures, in keeping with RNZ’s AI Principles, there is appropriate oversight of this assistive use of AI. 

RNZ Interim Head of Content John Hartevelt said the introduction of the monitoring tool would allow for more public debate.

“RNZ, as a public media organisation, has a responsibility under its Charter to foster critical thought and promote informed and wide-ranging debate. This requires us to ensure the conversation and debate happening on our social media sites is constructive and respectful.

“Because Sence can monitor 24/7 and is able to do so faster than manual monitoring we expect its introduction to reduce the instances where comments need to be turned off on posts.”

Hartevelt said while RNZ’s social media team would still need to maintain oversight of the comments section and some threads would still need to be manually turned off, the introduction of the tool would greatly reduce the amount of time spent by RNZ staff monitoring comments.

“It means our people won’t be as directly exposed to harmful communication. It also means they can spend more time on producing and distributing content to our audience rather than monitoring comments."

Sence Co-Founder and CEO Theo Taylor said the company was thrilled to be partnering with RNZ.

"Sence’s purpose is to foster safe & active online engagement by empowering organisations such as RNZ with the tools required to navigate an ever-evolving digital landscape."
 
The service will take effect on RNZ’s social media pages from tomorrow (Thursday 18 September). There will be a period of testing processes and team training before active monitoring of the accounts can take place.

Sence is only able to observe and monitor publicly available information and comments posted on RNZ’s third party platforms. It can only access this information for the purposes of enforcing RNZ’s community guidelines. 

RNZ is updating its policies to reflect the introduction of the Sence monitoring tool and will make the introduction of the tool clear on all its social media sites.