Pick a winner from Facebook comments, fairly

Facebook doesn’t list comments newest first. The data service we use returns them in Facebook’s own relevance order, ten to a check, and that order puts some comments ahead of others. Imagine a post with 900 comments where only the first 200 are read. The other 700 never had a chance, and the 200 were chosen by Facebook, not by you.

So a link read here stops at 200 comments. If the post has more, the draw is switched off and you are asked to paste all the comments instead, where everyone is in. We can’t see how many comments a post has until they have been read, so the only way to know a post has too many is to find that comments are still left after check number 20.

• Reading a long post from a link can use up to 20 of your free checks before it stops. If you already know the post has hundreds of comments, go straight to pasting.
• A stopped or partial read is never drawn from, because a certificate made from it would look fair when it wasn’t.

Tip: To copy every comment from facebook.com, load all of them first, then select the whole comment area and copy. The tool ignores Like and Reply buttons, ages and badges such as Top fan.

Facebook shows display names, and different people can share one. By default each name counts as one entry, so two people called Maria Silva would be one entry between them. Switch that off to count every comment instead, and a person who comments three times then has three chances in the draw, though they can still only win once.

Names are compared after tidying spaces and capitals, but spelling still matters: Ana María and Ana Maria are two different names to the tool. The comments carry no profile links, so winners are shown by name, along with the words they commented. Search the post for that comment to find them. Add your Page’s name to the “leave out” box so it can’t win its own giveaway.

The person running the draw is responsible for Meta’s rules. On 7 October 2026 we read the Promotions section of Meta’s policy for Pages, groups and events. If you use a Page, group or event to announce or run a promotion, it says you must make sure it complies with the law. Its examples are giving entrants the official rules, stating the offer terms and who can enter, and registering the promotion with the relevant authorities. You must require entrants to release Meta from liability and to acknowledge that the promotion isn’t sponsored, endorsed, administered by or associated with Meta. Meta says it will not help you run one.

The same section says a promotion must not require or incentivise people to share, repost, tag others or otherwise publicise it. A separate gambling section covers games where something of monetary value is needed to play and something of monetary value is the prize, so read it before you ask anyone to pay or buy to enter. Meta’s monetisation promotion guidelines, written for promotions on its monetisation products, add that personal timelines and friend connections must not be used to run them. Meta’s Community Standards on spam list giveaways of cash or cash equivalents in exchange for engagement among the things Facebook doesn’t allow.

These pages change and we have paraphrased them, so read the current versions before you launch. This is not legal advice, and laws on prize draws differ from country to country.

Reading from a link uses one of your free checks for every ten comments, and the tool shows a running count while it works. There is a Stop button, and a limit message tells you when to come back if the daily allowance runs out. Only comments on public posts can be read. For a private group or any post you can’t open while logged out, copy the comments yourself and paste them.

Pasted comments never leave your browser tab. A link is sent to our server, which asks our data provider for the public comments and passes them straight to you; they aren’t stored. The page lists only the winners and the counts. DMFast can also reply to everyone who comments a word on a Page post, under the comment and in Messenger, if you want entries answered automatically next time.