Content moderation is vital in this fast-paced world to maintain the transparency of a platform and ensure positive usage. Generally, this term is famous for social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. It involves different steps to monitor, review, and control the user-generated content, like comments, and make sure that they are according to the standard of the community and platforms’ regulations. It could be of many types. If you are looking for a comprehensive guide on the types and associated aspects of content moderation, you are at the right place.
What is Content Moderation?
Content moderation is a complex process that enables you to control user-generated content on different platforms and sites, including social media platforms. Generally, people on these platforms are well-educated. However, some black sheep spoil the whole charm and entertainment by posting explicit comments and content. Thus., it is necessary to moderate or remove them to ensure their safe use. Moderation involves multiple steps to identify the potentially damaging or harmful content and filter or remove it appropriately. With the help of a comprehensive strategy, you can maintain the reputation and protect user safety while complying with legal regulations.
Types of Content Moderation
Content moderation could be of numerous types, and you must understand them all to take immediate action when required. In the under-section, we have detailed all of them.
Pre-Moderation
It is the most strict form of content moderation. Generally, this moderation occurs before your content is posted on social media or websites. Previously, only a few platforms followed this type. But, with increased damage and incidences of harmful content, everyone, especially WordPress and Reddit, is following this technique. It involves the reviewers and moderators who review your content before making it public. Anything harmful is removed effectively and precisely to make sure that the damage is eliminated. Although this process is slow, it is the most effective moderation type.
Post-Moderation
Post-moderation is also a good and functional type of moderation, but it may allow inappropriate content to be visible for only a shorter period. In this type of moderation, the content is published immediately. Thus, everyone can see the newly posted comments and posts. The reviewers, later on, come across the content and review it. If he finds it harmful or damaging to the reputation of the brand or company, he readily removes it to guarantee transparency.
Reactive Moderation
This type of moderation is not system-generated. The moderators or reviewers won’t take any kind of action until the users report them as flagged or problematic. After getting the indications, the reviewers manipulate the comments or posts to make sure that the content is actually spam. Hence, they can remove it quickly. With the rise in the number of users, platforms are now more biased toward this strategy as it removes a lot of burden from the moderation team. Also, it makes sure that only that content is removed, which is causing disturbance for the general public.
Automated Moderation
Automated moderation leverages the power of artificial intelligence to identify the content that needs to be treated immediately before or after the posting. Furthermore, machine learning algorithms bring exceptional efficiency to this step to enable you to detect and filter out false content. However, you need to train the AI model and algorithms. In this way, they can label only that content as spam or flagged which meets the criteria. This strategy not only helps you speed up the moderation task but also removes hate speech and explicit material effectively. Further, you must focus on proper training of the model to eliminate the incorrect results.
Importance of Content Moderation
After understanding the types of content moderation, you can easily remove the harmful content. The following section will help you understand the importance of this strategy in this competitive world.
User Safety
The most dominant use of harmful user-generated content is to spread hate or bully someone online. Content moderation helps you prevent both of them. It maintains the well-being of this site as well as ensures the safety of the users. You only have to identify the content and remove it effectively to prevent it from causing emotional or psychological harm.
Brand Reputation
A platform’s reputation is widely associated with the content present on it. If you own a site and allow your users to publish hate speeches and spam content over it, the other users won’t find it interesting. Thus, you will face severe negative consequences. That’s why you must moderate the content repeatedly and actively to ensure the positive image of your brand. Also, it can help you to make your company a welcoming space for users that will lead you to grab more outstanding outcomes.
Legal Compliance
As mentioned earlier, the increased incidence of online spam and cyberbullying has caused the strengthening of policies and privacy terms of different sites, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Pinterest. Therefore, you must moderate the content as much as possible to remove all the unwanted ones from your profile. It not only saves your reputation at a global level but also enables you to comply with the legal compliances.
Community Guidelines
Generally, social media works in the form of a community, and resonating with their policies is quite essential for sustained profile. You must remain stick to these guidelines and terms of service. Content moderation can help you to do so by enabling you to create a consistent and respectful environment for all users. Hence, you can deliver fairness and equity to all users.
Final Verdicts
Content moderation is a critical component of online platforms to ensure user safety and maintain brand reputation by ensuring legal compliance. By understanding different types, including pre-post, automated, and reactive moderation, you can follow effective tactics to remove harmful content from your sites. Also, you can make your way to maintain the reputation of your brand and build its positive image across the globe. In this way, you can have advanced experience and can take your outcomes and advantages ahead of your competitors.
