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47% of Consumers Hold Brands Responsible for Toxic and Spammy Comments, Respondology Report Finds

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META The article mentions Meta Ads and Threads as platforms analyzed in the report, indicating Meta's presence in the social media comment landscape but not providing specific sentiment about the company's performance.

Analysis of 169 million comments exposes the gap between where brands are and where they need to be on social in the age of AI discovery.

BOULDER, Colo., April 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Respondology, the pioneering leader in social media comment moderation and intelligence and creator of the industry's first completely AI-powered platform for social comments, published the 2026 Business of Comments Report. Drawing on data from 168.8 million social media comments across 7.6 million social media posts in 2025, the report reveals that one in five (20%) comments contain some form of spam, bot activity, or abuse, revealing both the scale of the challenge and the size of the opportunity.

"The data is unambiguous. Toxic and spammy comments are a brand problem," said Erik Swain, CEO and Co-founder of Respondology. "But the opportunity is just as significant. With LLMs now drawing from social comment sections for AI search results, a healthy community is both a trust signal and discoverability driver. Brands that act on this will turn their comment sections into their most underrated competitive advantage."

The comments analyzed in the report represent seven leading platforms — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta Ads, TikTok Ads, and Threads — and include a mix of paid and organic social posts from sports teams, retail brands, technology companies, non-profit organizations, and others.

Findings from the 2026 Business of Comments Report include:

The 2026 Business of Comments Report is available today.

Research Methodology

This report draws on data generated through Respondology's comment moderation and engagement platform across the 2025 calendar year. Respondology's internal research group, Respondology Labs, analyzed 168.8 million comments across 7.6 million social media posts, spanning seven major platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta Ads, and TikTok Ads, with early representation from Threads. The dataset includes approximately 3,400 social accounts across both organic and paid environments.

About Respondology:

Respondology is the AI platform for social comments that modernizes how social marketers moderate, listen to, and respond to comments at scale. The world's top brands rely on Respondology to transform comment sections into community, commerce, and competitive intelligence. Fast to deploy and easy to use, our customers engage with over 2 billion collective followers every month. Learn more at respondology.com.

Media Contact:

Mark Dunphy

[email protected]

SOURCE Respondology