User-generated content is a powerful propeller of the constantly changing digital world. Today, people tend to search online to verify anything they hear from others and are more likely to trust the opinions shared by people online rather than information provided by businesses and institutions.
Content is being created and shared every minute in large quantities in the form of text, images, and video – and host platforms need to monitor this unimaginable amount of content. It is critical to protect users from harmful, misleading, and inappropriate content; monitor how the content is affecting the brand’s public image; and comply with legal requirements.
Content moderation is the most effective way to meet these requirements and help online businesses deliver a safe user experience.
What is Content Moderation
Content moderation is the process of screening harmful and inappropriate user-generated content on online platforms, such as text posts, images, videos, and live streams. To ensure a safe and healthy online environment, content moderation aims to make sure the content adheres to specific guidelines and terms of service set by the platform. Content moderators are tasked with identifying and removing content that is against community guidelines, such as racist content, hate speech, threats, or violent content.
Additionally, content moderators review incoming messages, comments, and other public-facing content for slurs, nudity, profanity, and other offensive material. Social media websites, dating apps and websites, forums, and other similar platforms employ content moderation.
How Content Moderation Works?
A platform must first define clear rules and terms of services about inappropriate content for effective content moderation. It helps content moderators flag and remove content that violates guidelines. Content can be reviewed for standards and guidelines by moderators either before it is published or after it goes live. The content moderation process can be in an automated, manual, or hybrid style.
- Automated Moderation: Any user-generated content uploaded online is automatically accepted, rejected, or sent to human moderators based on predefined criteria. Machine learning algorithms analyze content on the platform and flag certain types of content or specific words that might violate guidelines. Automated moderation is the ideal approach for platforms that host a large volume of user-generated content, allowing them to ensure user safety when interacting on their websites and apps.
- Human Moderation: AI models rely on the data they are trained on, meaning they are only as good as the input we empower them with. However, granting AI full control over content moderation can be risky. AI algorithms may make mistakes in flagging inappropriate content, such as missing content using clever words to bypass filters. Moreover, data used to train the algorithm might contain biases, consequently, leading to biased predictions.
Involving humans in the process can mitigate these risks. Humans manually monitor and screen user-generated content uploaded on an online platform and are responsible for catching and removing content that doesn’t comply with platform-specific rules and guidelines to protect users.
- Community-based Moderation: Community members on a platform can monitor and moderate content themselves through their feedback. For example, they can vote the content up or down to flag potentially inappropriate content, helping the platform identify areas that might need further review.
- Hybrid Moderation: In hybrid moderation, human moderators review content flagged by AI algorithms for inappropriateness and then decide to remove or retain it.
Types of Content Need to be Moderated
While all types of content can impact a brand’s image, here are the most common types of content that need moderation:
Text
With the widespread presence of text content online, the constant need for content moderation has amplified to maintain safe and civil environments for users. Text also appears alongside other types of user-generated content, further underscoring the importance of effective moderation. A variety of texts is published online all the time, including articles, social media posts, messages, comments, job descriptions, case studies, and forum posts.
Moderating text content is an uphill task. Effective text moderation goes beyond filtering offensive keywords because inappropriate content can be cleverly disguised with a sequence of perfectly appropriate words. Moderators need to consider nuances and cultural specificity when screening content.
Images
Screening image content can sometimes be more straightforward than text, as inappropriate elements in an image or video are visually identifiable. However, it is essential to have clear rules and guidelines about what constitutes inappropriate content. This helps moderators make consistent decisions. Content moderation guidelines need to take cultural sensitivities and differences into account.
What one culture considers respectful might be seen as unimportant or disrespectful in another, for example, clothing or body language that have negative connotations in one geographical area might be normal in another.
Be that as it may, monitoring and screening large amounts of images is not an easy feat, given the volume of pictures uploaded daily on visual-based platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., and the requirement for real-time moderation.
Video
The prevalence of online videos these days created a constant need for content review. Without effective moderation, offensive content may hurt the overall image of a brand. However, moderating video content presents unique challenges, such as the need to screen the whole video file because a single disturbing scene can warrant removal.
Text elements, such as titles and subtitles, within a video, pose another layer of complexity in video moderation. Moderators are required to review different types of text too before the video is approved.
Audio
Online audio content consumption has increased rapidly, with billions of hours dedicated to both audio and video content. Audio includes music and podcasts on different platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and many more. This surge has posed unique challenges for host platforms to ensure the audio content is safe and legal. It requires specialized moderators who can identify whether the audio has been deepfaked or otherwise altered and understand copyright laws to ensure the content is authentic.
Why Content Moderation is Important
The vast amount of content uploaded every second on UGC platforms makes it difficult to strike a balance between the freedom of user-generated content and the need for platforms to offer a safe and healthy environment for users. Content moderation is the only way to ensure a piece of content matches the platform’s guidelines. Here are some of the top reasons why content moderation is important.
- Protects Brand and Users: Content moderation ensures nothing offensive or upsetting is uploaded on a UGC platform. It also protects the users from possible bullying or trolling.
- Safeguards Online Spaces: Content moderation safeguards websites, social media platforms, and online communities by minimizing exposure to harmful content.
- Enforces Trust & Safety: Content moderators ensure that content uploaded meets applicable standards by enforcing trust and safety policies set by online platforms.
- Builds Brand Reputation: It plays an essential role in building brand reputation and trust among online communities.
- Enhances Customer Relations: Well-moderated content is key to making a brand authentic, relatable, and user-friendly.
Content Moderation and Free Speech
Often mistaken for censorship, content moderation is not censorship, nor is it policing. They’re two different concepts. Although leading social media platforms, like Facebook and X (formerly called Twitter) have frequently taken actions against specific users, this doesn’t necessarily grant them an inalienable right to censor content. Content moderation by privately-owned platforms raises concerns about the potential violation of citizens’ rights to freedom of expression.
However, these platforms bear the responsibility to balance between offering a safe online environment for users and upholding the principles of freedom of expression. They can take various actions to moderate content based on their community standards.
- Blocking content that incites violence, hate speech, or harmful material that could endanger users.
- Fact-checking content to verify the accuracy of the information uploaded on their platform.
- Labeling material that might be misleading or lack context.
- Removing false or misleading information that potentially has negative consequences.
- Demonetizing pages or users for violating platform policies.
Moderating every single type of content is essential to maintaining a healthy online environment that benefits both users and platforms. In this digital world content is king and it can make or break your brand reputation among users and partners. Effective content moderation safeguards websites, social media platforms, and end-users from harmful content. This ensures host platforms operate legally and fosters growth by attracting users and businesses.
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