User-generated content moderation is an integral part of running an online community or website. This can be handled by human moderators, automated tools, or a combination of both.
Toxic UGC, such as hate speech, graphic images and videos, nudity, spam, and scams interrupt the user experience and erode trust within the community. Learn how to identify the different types of sensitive content that require moderation.
Identifying Inappropriate Content
User-generated content is a powerful marketing tool for brands. It can build brand exposure and engagement, attract new customers, and improve search engine rankings. But UGC moderation is a complex process that requires a team of skilled professionals to ensure safe and appropriate online engagement.
Harmful multi-media content, such as sex and violence, hate speech, nudity, spam, scams, and doxing, can disrupt your trust and safety program, derail user experience, and damage your reputation. To avoid these pitfalls, you must implement a comprehensive content moderation strategy that includes a combination of human and automated tools.
One popular method is reactive moderation, which relies on community members to flag UGC that violates website guidelines. This approach allows members to report content as soon as they see it, but it can be time consuming and ineffective. A more scalable approach is proactive moderation, which uses ML algorithms to identify and filter inappropriate content before it goes live.
Detecting Inappropriate Images
When brands post UGC on their social media, websites, or any other platform where they host user content (like community forums), it’s critical to moderate that content. This includes images and video, as well as text and commentary.
Toxic, fake or harmful content can damage a brand’s reputation and lead to costly lawsuits. It’s also impossible for companies to rely on post moderation alone.
Using a pre-moderation approach ensures that content goes live after being screened by moderators familiar with a company’s unique criteria. This type of UGC moderation eliminates the risk of missing or ignoring harmful content, as well as safeguarding against legal ramifications in real time.
It’s also far more cost effective than a staffed team of human content moderators or relying on AI alone, which may struggle to understand context and can miss important details such as privacy violations. The right solution can provide the highest levels of care and moderation — with high efficiency that keeps content flowing in real time.
Identifying Sensitive Content
Billions of people share text, image, and video content online every day, helping to grow businesses and raise funds for charity. But this free access also creates tons of “digital garbage”, including hate speech, violence, obscene material, and child nudity exposure.
The first step in UGC moderation is to determine what types of content are unacceptable and develop a set of guidelines. These should be posted publicly and in easy-to-find locations on your website or community platform. Translate these guidelines if necessary, and be sure to include relevant internet slang.
UGC moderation is a complex, multi-faceted process, but it can help you prevent negative publicity, lawsuits and brand damage. It can also reduce the risk of toxic content leaking offline, leading to real-world harm, like harassment, stalking and even insurrection. With careful preparation and a dedicated team, you can reap the rewards of user-generated content without the risks.
Identifying Harmful Content
Billions of people share text, image and video content online on a daily basis. This has grown businesses, raised funds for charity and brought about political change. However, it has also resulted in tons of “digital garbage” that could cause harm such as terrorism propaganda, child nudity exposure and hate speech.
Harmful content can not only impact a brand’s reputation but it can also damage the health of its moderators. Research has found that many moderators suffer from mental health problems such as insomnia and nightmares, anxiety, depression and stress as a result of their work (Barrett 2020).
Moderation is essential to any online community. However, the type of moderation a business chooses can vary depending on its demands and online community standards. Some brands opt for post moderation where a person or tool reviews UGC after it goes live, while others use proactive UGC pre-scanning to catch inappropriate content before it can go live. WebPurify uses a hybrid approach of human review and AI to scrub content for clients.