The Essential Guide to Content Moderation in 2022

Marketplaces and online forums that became game changers after Covid-19 have become a big part of the internet in the last 21 years since the first billboards on the internet. Today, user-generated content not only dominates our digital world; With the number of comments or reviews posted online, it has simultaneously become an indispensable part of business strategy and growth. For this reason, content moderation has become a huge game player in any online community or brand, providing a safe space for users and brands. Let's take a look at what content moderation is exactly.

What is Content Moderation?

Content moderation briefly is viewing and monitoring user-generated content on an online platform based on platform-specific rules and guidelines to determine whether the generated content will be published or not on the online platform. In other words, it is a method used to ensure that content submitted by a user to the website complies with the regulations and rules of the website.

If we give an example of content that harms brands and does not comply with the regulations of the website, in the images, videos, gifs, or texts sent to the website; It detects explicit nudity, suggestive, violence, visually disturbing, rude gestures, drug, gambling, hate symbols, weapon, extremism, scammers, etc. Moreover, it helps to solve NSFW troubles on websites or brands with digital channels quickly. It is widely used on online platforms that mainly rely on user-generated content, such as social media platforms, online marketplaces, dating sites, communities, forums, etc. Long story short, it's a process that organizes and monitors user-generated content by having it create pre-arranged guidelines and rules. These rules are then mainly enforced through AI content moderation. 

Why is Content Moderation Important?

User-generated content is a crucial tool for increasing brand awareness and building trust. Today's consumers believe that user-generated content is 50% more reliable and 35% more memorable than other media types. On the other hand, publishing user-generated content carries risks. Choosing Content Moderation is the right strategy to ensure that users accurately reflect your brand and protect visitors from offensive or harmful content. Using a scalable content moderation tool protects the brand's reputation, customers, and profitability and allows the publishing of high volumes of user-generated content.

Let's examine the three significant benefits together.

1. Content moderation protects your brand and allows you to build trust: There is always a risk that user-generated content will deviate from your brand's regulations and policies. Integrating an AI-based content moderation tool into your company greatly reduces the risk of visitors seeing content they think is upsetting or offensive. Content moderation instills trust in your customers by preventing bullies or trolls from harming your brand online.
2. Content moderation assists you in better understanding your users: Pattern recognition is another advantage of content moderation, particularly for high-volume campaigns. This way, people on your team can get your moderators to tag their content with crucial attributes, gaining valuable, actionable insights into your users' and customers' behavior and opinions. By moderating your content with intent, you can protect your brand and users while making data-driven decisions about new products and marketing campaigns.
3. Content moderation boosts traffic and searches engine rankings: User-generated content feeds your website, product reviews, and social channels, which drives more traffic to your brand. Customers are more inclined to interact with others and positively impact search engines. In other words, implementing a scalable content moderation strategy can result in increased user engagement and improved search engine rankings, leading to increased website traffic.

What types of content can you moderate?

• Text: Almost any type of text can require assessment, from comments and forum threads to full-length articles hosted on your site. For this reason, moderators and moderation algorithms must be adept at scanning texts of varying lengths and styles for unwanted content. For example, consider a marketplace; when a comment violates the community rules, the content moderation tool can quickly detect and protect your brand.
• Image: While detecting inappropriate images may seem simple when you think about it, many critical points to consider when managing them. Content that creates an indecent image in the US is very different from an offensive image in Pakistan when we imagine the community rules of countries. When we consider Marketplaces, some companies may also set limits on different points depending on their products, such as underwear brands. As a result, image moderators should also consider the target audience, market, and brand values of the company in question when moderating a site.
• Video: Video is one of the most challenging content types to moderate content. While images and text can usually be reviewed quickly, the video can be extremely time-consuming and force moderators to watch the video to the end. If only a few video frames are suggestive, it can drastically change the viewers' perception of your brand or website.

How to practice content moderation?

Before implementing content moderation, the method of content moderation that is right for you will vary depending on your website goals. It is essential to decide whether it is more important for users to bring their content to life and communicate quickly or if it is more important always to keep your site completely free of sensitive content. Several content controls fall at different points between these two goals. 
Let's take a look at the most common types; 
Pre-Moderation: Pre-moderation involves assigning moderators to check your viewers' content submissions before making them public. If the same user has tried to post a comment before and its posting has been restricted, this is a case of pre-moderation. 
This method can be applied to any type of media post or comment about products and services. This method aims to ensure that content meets specific criteria to protect the online community from harm or regulatory and legal threats that could adversely affect both customers and the business. 
Well, I hear you ask who prefers this method. Pre-moderation is a preferred method of content moderation, especially for businesses concerned about their online reputation and brand. When using this method, it is necessary to be aware that pre-moderation can delay critical discussions.‍
Among your online community members, the approval and filtering process eliminates the option for real-time interaction. 

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Post-Moderation: By using this method, you allow users to post content in real-time, and users have the right to report content deemed harmful after the event. After submitting the reports, either a human or a content moderation AI solution will review the flagged content and, if necessary, delete it. The AI review process is similar to pre-moderation in that harmful content is automatically deleted based on pre-moderation criteria. 
As we mentioned above, given that content forms are so diverse today and images, text, and videos are all used online, a variety of AI content moderation solutions can be used according to the needs of your business and brand. We will discuss them further in the following topic. 

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Reactive Moderation: Reactive moderation is a possible solution for a scalable program that relies on community members. This type of moderation requests that users flag any content they find offensive or violates community guidelines. 

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Supervisor Moderation: Supervisor moderation, like reactive moderation, entails selecting a group of moderators from the online community. This system, also known as unilateral moderation, grants certain users special permissions to edit or delete submissions as they navigate the site. 

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Commercial Content Moderation (CCM): CCM is primarily concerned with content monitoring for social media platforms. It is frequently outsourced to specialists who ensure that the content on a platform complies with community guidelines, user agreements, and legal frameworks specific to that site and market. 

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Distributed Moderation: Distributed moderation, as one of the most hands-off moderation systems, places a great deal of trust and control in the hands of the community. It usually entails allowing users to rate or vote on submissions they see and flagging content violating any policies. 

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AutomatedModeration: Automated moderation is becoming more popular as a moderation method. As the name implies, it entails using various tools to filter, flag, and reject user submissions. These tools range from simple filters that look for forbidden words or block specific IP addresses to machine learning algorithms that detect inappropriate content in images and videos. Many of these tools are used in conjunction with human moderation.

Why Automate Content Moderation with Cameralyze? 

Automated solutions integrate very quickly into your user experience so that you can detect unwanted content in real-time by artificial intelligence or a human and take action. Integrating content moderation with Cameralyze into your business gives you the following significant benefits: 
Real-Time Analysis: Automated solutions integrate quickly into your user experience, so you can detect unwanted content in real-time by artificial intelligence or a human and take action. 
Easily Scalable: Thanks to this feature, you can simultaneously moderate content for many channels and detect unwanted content in less than a minute as the system works at the same speed according to every demand. 
Cost-Effectiveness: The entire team manually reviewing the content causes great effort and employee cost. Automating content moderation based on AI saves both time and effort.‍
High accuracy & Quality: Compared to humans reviewing content, an AI-based solution minimizes human error. This way, it protects your brand's image and allows you to obtain high quality by reducing the error rate and eliminating the effort. 

Want to talk? 

Eliminate the need for people to view content that can be highly offensive by allowing analysis of images, videos, or text and blocking and/or flagging offensive content for an AI-based automated content moderation solution. Quickly solve your content NSFW troubles with an AI-based solution. 
If you want to learn more about Cameralyze's AI-based content moderation solution, just send an e-mail!

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