What Is Content Moderation?

Social media, discussion boards, online forums and private groups have made it easier and seamless for virtually anyone to share their opinions and experiences to the world. Customers can air their frustrations or share favorable experiences with a restaurant or a brand using their personal social media profiles.

The accessibility of the internet and most social apps make it easy for brands to lose their credibility within minutes.

While that specific reality in present-day society proves terrifying for startups and SMEs, moderating what people post on their website and platform is a surefire way to guarantee that brands will attain a steady success in the market and retain the trust of their customers.

What is content moderation, you ask?

Content moderation definition is the process of determining whether user-generated material adheres to platform-specific norms and regulations and assessing if it is suitable for posting or sharing on public groups or online communities. Moderating what followers and community members post helps businesses in increasing the quality of user experience while also maintaining their online reputation.

Content Moderation: How Does it Work?

The first thing you need to do to put content moderation into action is to establish clear guidelines on what constitutes acceptable versus inappropriate material on your page or website. This will serve as a reference for moderators to determine what material needs to be moderated, what kind of content they will allow to go live when screening UGCs.

It would be best to create guidelines for specific types of posts, such as text, photos, video, and audio to make the screening process more tailored and accurate. The next step is to determine if certain pieces of material must be removed or if some users have to be banned.

What Kind of Content Can You Moderate?

Here’s a simple way to define content moderation: If the content can potentially offend or violate someone in some way, it should either be scrutinized and reviewed further or taken down. Several aspects must be taken into account when selecting how to effectively check what people post and share on your platforms. These include the kind of user-generated material and the specifics of your user base while making this decision. While you’re at it, take the time to learn every type of content moderation there is.

Here are the different types of content that you can moderate:

1. Text

Users may post comments on news sites, blogs, social media platforms, and even on video streaming websites like YouTube. Profanities, racial slurs, and hurtful comments that directly or indirectly discriminate against other users could affect the peace and overall vibe of an online group or community. It might lead to verbal altercations or worse, threaten the security of other users and community members.

2. Video

YouTube and TikTok have been notorious for various types of inappropriate content including disturbing videos targeting young children along with hateful and misogynistic content.

Video content is more challenging to moderate than text because it combines spoken language, visual and text. For instance, in a typical 3 or 5-minute YouTube video, moderators have to consider the context of the video itself, and that includes the language, text and visual data incorporated in the video.

At the same time, the title, tags, and video description needs checking as well. Some violators use a harmless or wholesome photo as the video’s thumbnail so that unsuspecting viewers will click on the video without thinking that they are in for a completely different type of content.

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3. Images

When it comes to images, moderation largely entails eliminating inappropriate and explicit photos to prevent objectionable information from being published in the feed of a brand's social media and online community. Depending on the purpose of the organization's online community, images of varying dimensions and categories may be subject to moderation. The process of filtering user-generated images on social networks is fraught with enormous difficulties.

4. Live Streaming

Live streaming can be exciting, but it also has the potential to be abused by online trolls. It is the transmission of a video that is being streamed live and in real time to an audience through the internet. Additionally, live streaming has been used by misbehaving online users to broadcast harmful and abusive conduct, which means that children may unintentionally encounter inappropriate live streamed video. Such content poses a risk to the safety of young audiences.

How exactly do moderators help during live streams?

To begin, live stream moderation is quite challenging because the video or content itself cannot be edited in real-time. However, the comments section may be turned off and moderators may screen ongoing discussions during the stream. They may shadowban users violating the platform’s guidelines to prevent them from causing further harm to other viewers. Moderators will also keep spammers from disrupting the flow of conversation during a live stream. Also, content moderators aid in monitoring the messages that participants exchange while taking part in a live chat conversation in the middle of watching a broadcast.

Why Content Moderation is Important for Your Business?

It's no secret that content moderation is beneficial for your business and your customers. Maintaining your brand's reputation is dependent on the quality of the material you provide. Your brand's reputation is just as important as what people think. That is why your business's success depends on how well you manage your content.

Here are the top three advantages that content moderation can bring to your company.

1. Protect Brand Reputation

All the content that goes through your sites needs monitoring. Maintaining an excellent brand reputation while limiting the amount of spam and trolls can be challenging. The good news is there are several ways to manage your online business reputation while keeping visitors from seeing spam or information that may be rude or disturbing.

How?

Companies at present are increasingly relying on third-party providers or content moderation agencies to monitor their social networking sites, forums, and websites. A brand's online reputation may be preserved by monitoring negative customer feedback using content moderation services, which are checked by individuals who research products before making a purchase. The truth is you have no control over what people may post about your brand, but you can always edit and control it through moderation.

2. Help you Gain Insights about your Users

One of the benefits that come with content moderation is that you can gain insights through pattern recognition. By equipping your moderator's tag material with key attributes, your team may be able to get useful insights into the actions and perspectives of your users and customers. You will have the opportunity to better understand your community with these insights, and it will also provide you an idea of what your customers are thinking, as well as help you in building marketing campaigns.

3. Impacts Search Engine Ranking

In digging deeper into what is moderating content, it is safe to say that it may also help organizations in driving higher traffic to their website, which in turn improves the website's overall rating. When companies implement content moderation and reduce the amount of content that violates the rules imposed by search engines, they develop authority over their brand, which ultimately has a positive influence on the results that search engines provide.

4. Protect Your Community

When you moderate the material that is shared on your platform, you are enhancing your brand while also enticing more people to become your followers. Otherwise, allowing spam and abusive content to propagate on your page or platform will only drive away potential customers and put the security of your existing followers at risk.

Bottom line

Protecting your online brand reputation is the simplest way to define content moderated meaning and effect on a business. If you want to preserve your online reputation, safeguard your customers and keep potentially harmful content and online trolls at bay, outsourcing content moderation is the best option.

When you have the power to prevent your brand from being associated with dangerous material, you transform your platform into a place where your devoted customers and supporters proactively connect with you.

When you have the power to prevent your brand from being associated with dangerous material, you transform your platform into a place where your devoted customers and supporters proactively reach out to you.

Chekkee's lineup of content moderation services are tailored to suit different client demands and business requirements. We moderate images, videos, texts, and profiles so online communities, business websites, and digital platforms remain a safe venue conducive to building favorable connections among your users. We also cater to different types of industries, namely e-commerce, gaming sites, children sites, and dating sites.

Milliscent Lucio