Did you know that around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are uploaded to the Internet every single day? That is A LOT of data comprising good and bad content. This makes content moderation a growing necessity to make this huge volume of content appropriate for all.
As a leading AI company in North America, Opporture has been at the forefront of cutting-edge content moderation services to ensure that the digital world is a much safe and secure place.
Now, let’s dive deeper into the world of content moderation and why it is a necessity in the current digital scenario.
Content Moderation: What is it & Why is it So Important?
As we know, digital media content can be broadly classified into informative, useful, user-friendly, age-appropriate content and harmful, misleading, and negatively-impactful content.
Essentially, content moderation is regulating digital content and keeping it well within the standards and guidelines issued by online platforms. The process involves:
- Reviewing and monitoring of user-generated content
- Removing inappropriate and offensive content
- Enforcing community guidelines and terms of service
Today, all online platforms that thrive on user-generated content consider content moderation a mandatory lifeline. They include:
- Social media platforms
- Dating sites
- Communities
- Online forums
- Sharing economy
- E-commerce marketplaces
Generally, content moderation is done using a team of human moderators, automated tools, or AI-powered technologies. Irrespective of the method, all user-generated content will require effective moderation to remove illegal, harmful, or copyrighted content. It goes without saying that AI-driven moderation is the most potent option to speed up the review process and scale the overall operation.
What is AI-powered content moderation?
As we have seen already, with the growing amount of content generated every day, human moderators can just simply not handle the volume. On the other hand, AI-assisted content moderation can help optimize the moderation procedures and can bring scalability and efficiency to the overall process.
Content moderation driven by Artificial Intelligence uses Machine Learning models trained on online-platform specific data to identify and remove unwanted content with accuracy. The AI moderation decisions are highly precise enough to automatically refuse, approve, or prioritize unwanted content.
Generally, moderation can happen at 2 stages:
- Pre-moderation – before content is published
- Post-moderation – after the content has been published.
AI models can impact the moderation process in the following ways:
- AI can help improve the accuracy of moderation at the pre-moderation stage by flagging inappropriate content for review by human moderators.
- The user-generated content and other content being moderated can be fed back as training data for improving the contextual understanding and accuracy of the model.
- Once done, AI can assist the human moderation teams in processing content at scale and flagging off or rejecting inappropriate content.
Why is there so much buzz around content moderation? Well, if content is king, content moderators are kingmakers. The content on your online platform can elevate your business by several levels or completely obliterate it. What better reasons do businesses need to create high-quality content appreciated by all types of users?
However, content moderation serves more purposes than you know.
4 Reasons Why Content Moderation is Important
1. It ensures your content remains pure and unadulterated.
Ironically, freedom of thought and expression makes it impossible to dodge user-generated content that does not violate your platform’s guidelines. However, consistent moderation with AI-powered technology and human moderators effectively curbs the presence of unsavory and inappropriate content created by online miscreants.
2. It helps you understand pattern recognition and user behavior.
Tagging content with key properties gives you better insights into user behavior and pattern recognition, especially for high-volume campaigns. The more intent you show in moderating your content, the better you can protect your brand and users. These insights also help you make better product and marketing decisions.
3. It takes your campaigns to the next level.
If you are looking to drive marketing and sales campaigns, all you need is an effective content moderation strategy to dispel any negativity about your brand and make the campaign work in your favor. Using content moderation, you can scale the campaign by hosting contests, crowdsourcing ideas, garnering reviews, etc.
4. It attracts organic traffic & boosts conversions.
Moderation creates a safe and reliable online environment, encouraging people to engage and spend more time on your platform. This also increases the chances of them clicking on ads and making purchases. Content moderation also curtails spam, improving user experience on your company’s website or social media page. The higher the quality of content you own, the better your chances of attracting organic traffic with greater engagement rates.
Now that you know what you gain with content moderation, you may want to use it to its full potential. However, you need to have a basic understanding of how it works.
Content moderation works in different ways for different data types. Moreover, there are various techniques too. AI-driven content moderation significantly reduces the risk of damaging content being posted by mistake. However, such errors are highly possible when you rely on human moderators.
Here are some ways AI can help you optimize your content moderation.
AI-driven Content Moderation Services: What It Moderates & How it Works
Text moderation with AI
Natural Language Processing is one of the key methods for text moderation because the volume of texts is usually much higher than that of images or videos. In text moderation, keyword filtering and topic analysis helps identify relevant content and remove it if it is inappropriate. For example:
- Linking keywords to sentiments and categorizing them under positive, neutral, and hostile.
- Using keywords to alert negativity such as crises, age-inappropriate content, or brutality.
Entity recognition
Entity recognition uses AI to extract names, locations, and companies to indicate the number of times your brand was mentioned on a particular platform. It also tells you how users from a specific location post reviews of your company or brand. In entity recognition, AI tools trained to detect emotions can predict the message tone and classify it.
Image & video moderation
Text moderation and vision-based search techniques enable moderation for images and videos. These techniques use:
- Varying algorithms are trained to detect malicious images and trace the location of the content on the image.
- Image processing algorithms also identify areas within the image and create categories based on the selected criteria.
- Object Character Recognition (OCR) detects texts within the image and moderates the entire content piece.
Such AI-powered image moderation processes allow you to:
- Detect offensive language
- Detect objectionable body parts within unstructured images
- Publish the approved content
- Forward flag content to human moderators for manual moderation.
In addition, AI video content moderation uses text, image, and voice analysis.
Audio or voice moderation
Audio moderation uses voice analysis technology which combines several AI-driven content moderation tools. During the process, voice analysis transcribes voice recordings into texts. Next, it deploys Natural Language Processing to identify the content’s intent and tone. This procedure considerably lightens the load for your moderation team, giving them more time to focus on your marketing campaign.
Computer Vision (CV)
A subcategory of AI, computer vision trains computers to understand, analyze, and identify harmful images. It is also designed to understand tags and send notifications when it detects offensive and sensitive content.
AI-powered content moderation is more accurate, time-saving, and efficient than most moderation processes. However, it needs to be handled with care. These guidelines will help you understand how to optimize AI content moderation.
The Do’s & Dont’s Of AI-Powered Content Moderation
The Do’s
- Select the moderation method that best aligns with your needs, the type of content on your site, and your users. These criteria will simplify your content moderation process selection and setup requirements.
- Understand the nature of the business, the service the brand offers, and the reputation you have to protect. These aspects dictate what content you should and should not allow.
- Draft rules and regulations for your online content moderation team, such as data scientists and human moderators. Everyone involved, from the AI moderation to manual content reviewing, should be aware of the rules.
- Understand your target audience and their specific preferences to prevent content from being mistakenly banned or flagged. It also helps evaluate which content is appropriate for that audience and which isn’t.
- Subject all types of content to moderation irrespective of its importance on the website. You can rest assured that your website hosts only high-quality content and nothing else.
The Dont’s
- Do not rely entirely on content moderation software and applications. As much as they are smart, all these technologies work best only when there’s a human touch to render them completely effective.
- Do not misinterpret good content. You may end up rejecting user-generated content simply because it contains some negativity.
- Do not wait until your online platform is properly established to start with moderation. It is best to plan how to handle user-generated content right from the beginning so the process becomes more manageable as you scale.
Bidding Adieu
The kind of quality and consistency AI brings to content moderation is unachievable with manual moderation. ML-trained AI models are smart, quick, and accurate. However, AI-powered content moderation works best only with human moderation.
Leveraging both approaches to create an operational framework will allow you to achieve the best results in online moderation.
Opporture offers content moderation services combining the best of both worlds: AI’s power and human moderators’ intelligence. As one of the top AI model training companies in North America, our services extend across diverse industry verticals all over the country.
If you are a USA-based business looking for AI content moderation, you’ve come to the right place. Get in touch with us, and let’s discuss your moderation requirements.
