Wondering what content moderation is! It is the most useful method for achieving the honor of your brand. Facebook content moderation, online content moderation, digital content moderation, and virtual content moderation all belong to this.

The digital world is evolving, and the number of content makers on digital platforms is also increasing. More than 4.26 billion people were social media users in 2021. It could reach 6 billion by 2027. That means there is a huge number of data to moderate every day.

However, controlling content is a complex task. This guide will give you a depth idea of online content moderation and how to carry it out on social media.

Let’s dive in!

What is Content Moderation?

Content Moderation means monitoring and screening users’ content through online platforms. It is an act of applying guidelines to text, images, and videos on websites and social media. That content will remove if the guidelines don’t match the content.

Community moderation can ensure that your platform or brand can stay safe from a bad vibe. Community moderation is mostly used on social media platforms, marketplaces, forums and websites. The Facebook company increased the number of content moderators from 4,500 to 7,500 in 2017. Source: Wikipedia

However, content like these are under the control of online content moderation:

• Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM)

• Bullying

• Drugs & Weapons

• Terrorism

• Hate Speech

• Sex Solicitation

• Underage Users

• Self-Harm

• Graphic Violence

• Radicalization

• Misogyny

• Harassment

• Insults

• Scams/Fraud

• Abuse

Today all types of platforms rely on UGC (user-generated content). UGC relies on virtual, online and digital content moderation.

So you must maintain the digital content moderation guidelines. And you have to do this before publishing or uploading content. Otherwise, your content will be removed from the platform.

I hope this content moderation guide will help you understand the whole concept. Let’s read the full article.

Summary of Content Moderation

Content Moderation and community moderation are the same things. The aim of community moderation is to remove inappropriate content from the website. This social media content moderation guide will help you to secure your website. 

I am giving you a summary of Facebook content moderation, community moderation, online content moderation, and digital content moderation. The summary is given below:

Human Content Moderation VS AI Content Moderation

You can do digital content moderation in two different ways. One is human moderation other-one AI moderation. Before diving into the virtual content moderation guide, you need to know the differences between human and AI content moderation. 

The differences between human and AI content moderation are given below:

Benefits of Digital Content Moderation

Now that you know what content moderation is, I will discuss its benefits.

The Digital content moderation process lets you determine the unsafe content. It would help you classify whether or not the content should be turned off. Virtual content moderation has many advantages, which I will discuss in this guide.

Here are the benefits of virtual content moderation or community moderation: 

• Increase Brand Loyalty and Engagement

• Protect Your Brand and Users

• Enhance Customer Relations 

• Improve Online Visibility 

• Understand Your Users

• Scale Campaigns

Increase Brand Loyalty and Engagement

Online Content moderation can bring safety and engage the community. Because of moderation, your brand will not have any negative vide on the website. 

Sometimes customers can write a bad comment or image that can decrease your reputation. But with online content moderation, there is no possibility of that. It helps to reduce the stir rate and generates more revenue with less spending.

Protect Your Brand and Users

You cannot rule out what people think about your company, but you can always edit their content on your site. A team of digital content moderation should be there to monitor it. It will also protect your client from bullying or trolling by irrational users. 

If you can maintain the monitoring system of your website, then you can protect your brand and user at the same time. With the help of live content moderation, a platform or website can understand the user deeply.

Enhance Customer Relations 

Some people don’t want to see you in a good position. They will continuously post something bad on your website but don’t worry; you have control. You just need to apply it.

You need well-moderated content on your website to make your company authentic, relatable, approachable, and friendly. No matter what people think about you, you must have a positive vibe on your website. People who see the positive vibe on your website will simply feel interested in your company. And that will enhance the relationships between you and your customer.

Improve Online Visibility 

Statistics show that 25% of search results come from some of the largest companies that drive from UGC links. That means you cannot delete the bad content of your user. So what! You can modify the content. Source: Statista

An online content moderation team must be necessary for your brand. You need to allow users to post as much content as possible. But make sure your digital content moderators are in action to review the content before publishing it on your website. It can improve a company’s online visibility. 

Understand Your Users

You can get a valuable opportunity for pattern recognition by monitoring user-generated content. It is the reason for high-volume campaigns. 

The live content moderation team should design or publish insights into the behavior and opinions of users. It can also help you determine if there are any areas of your brand that need improvement. 

Scale Campaigns

Your sales and digital marketing team need UGC more effectively. Social media content moderation tools can detect any risk or negativity in your user’s content. You can use content moderator tools if you don’t have enough people to monitor them. In that case, you do not need to hire extra people. But most of the time, companies hire people to do virtual content moderation. Since AI tools are not capable enough to understand your culture.

The Main Content Moderation Types

Methods will help you to set your website’s goal. You have to consider whether you want people to communicate with you or whether your website would be free of sensitive content at all times. 

Different types of content moderation depend on your platforms or website’s goal. Each has its own benefits and risks, and each suits particular platform types. The most common types are given below: 

• Commercial-content-moderation (CCM)

• Supervisor moderation

• Distributed moderation

• Automated moderation

• Reactive moderation

• Post-moderation

• Pre-moderation

Commercial Content Moderation (CCM)

It mainly monitors the content of social media platforms. Facebook content moderation is a type of CCM. Companies or industry websites also use it to guard against brand and reputation damage. 

Facebook content moderators secure the page or platform from harmful content like pornography or violence. A digital content moderation team of a company takes care of their site from any bad comments. It maintains the law of community guidelines or general social norms.

Supervisor Moderation

It’s also known as unilateral moderation. A group of moderators is selected by supervisor moderation from the online community. The supervisor moderation system gives certain users the special right to edit or delete content based on the guidelines. 

If supervisors do their jobs carefully, then the website can easily grow its community. However, this also can bring the risk of negative effects if moderators miss any offensive text, images or videos. 

Distributed Moderation

One of the most hand-off moderation systems is Distributed moderation. It requires user moderation and voluntary moderation. User moderation can moderate another’s content up or down by a point. And in voluntary moderation, users can randomly moderate one another’s content. This type of moderation is rarely used because it relies simply on the online community. 

Automated Moderation

The most popular moderation method is automated moderation. With no human effort, it can control rejected content from showing on online platforms. Sometimes, Facebook content moderators follow this automated moderation method. Such tools as filters, and Natural Language Processing which ban certain words and expressions, are used. Many of these tools are used besides human moderation.

Reactive Moderation

It relies on members of online community moderation. Supervisor moderators find out whether flagged content is actually inappropriate for the community. Once it finalizes, the particular post is removed manually. However, there’s also the risk that abusive content will remain on the website for long periods. It can damage the reputation of the brand. So there should be a button that will alert the administrators.

Post Moderation

You know user engagement is important, but that doesn’t mean you will continuously allow the offensive post. For this situation, you need pre-moderation. However, it allows users to publish their submissions immediately but adds them to a queue for moderation. 

For this role, moderators should be able to decide whether to delete or maintain content quickly. So, a digital content moderator team is very important in this field, especially when it is a large audience in a live interaction. Social media content moderation or Facebook content moderation is under the control of post moderation.

Pre Moderation

This method thoroughly assesses comments or posts before being allowed to be posted. Digital content moderators are assigned to this task. Pre moderation method is used to pause negative impact on consumers and the business itself. Once the content meets the community guidelines, it goes to approval immediately. Pre-moderation is popular for online child communities for detecting bullies.

Which Content Types Can You Moderate?

As you already know the types of community moderation, now it’s important to know which content should be moderated. Digital content moderators will usually have to deal with all content types. The social media content moderation process can be fruitful for all kinds of content, depending on the platform.

Here is a list of the content type that you can moderate:

• Text Content

• Image Content

• Video Content

• Live Streaming 

Text Content

Text content is tough to scan from all types of content, but you still have to do it for your company’s reputation. There are different lengths and styles of text content. Moreover, text content is a difficult task because of different languages and cultures. 

For your understanding, I give you a list of a variety of text content on social media and websites:

• Articles

• Social media discussions

• Comments 

• Job board postings 

• Forum posts

Context-based text filter the harmful content before users sees it. Digital content moderators scan the words and sensitive content, like threats and hate speech and remove them. 

Image Content

Digital content moderators track images that show nudity, violence, weapons, drugs or gore and remove them from the website. Image moderation is much easier than others. 

Although it might seem simple to moderate images, there are many challenges to figure out when moderating them. People have different types of cultures and identities, so sometimes, it’s hard to go through the content guidelines. For example, What instates a modest image in the United States is very different from what constitutes an immodest image in Saudi Arabia.

Video Content

It takes time to do video content monitoring. Video content monitoring tools detect videos that contain violence, gory images, drugs, weapons or nudity. A digital content moderator must watch the full video before approving it on the timeline. 

Video digital content moderators are also required to perform several tasks at a time. They also check the plagiarism of users’ video content.

Live Streaming 

There is live streaming too, which is a totally different thing from others. It is the most challenging content to moderate. Because moderators need to monitor video, text and body language at the same time. 

What Skills Should a Content Moderator Have?

Digital content moderators are responsible for monitoring and approving the content. It may seem easy for you, but monitoring your user’s content for 24 hours takes a lot of work. If you’re interested in becoming a content moderator, you need the necessary skills. The skills are listed below:

• Web Content Management

• Project Management

• Customer Services

• Time Management

• Critical Thinking

• Copywriting 

• Flexibility

• Editing

Web Content Management

If you want to monitor a website’s content, this skill is mandatory for you. A web content moderator should be able to create and update web pages. Content moderators often use this skill when reviewing websites for the accuracy of the content. Because of this skill, a moderator can monitor social media accounts and where they post etc.

Project Management

One of the most important skills is project management. As a content moderator, you must review all incoming messages on social media and determine whether they violate the company’s reputation. And you have to do this task quickly before anyone watches them. 

Customer Services

While you need to understand your audience and what they need based on their content, customer service skill is necessary. These skills require empathy, active listening, patience, and knowledge about company policies and procedures.

Time Management

Managing your time and meeting deadlines is necessary as a digital content moderator. You must review all incoming messages, posts, and videos within the required time. It also helps to know how long each task takes so you can prioritize them accordingly.

Critical Thinking

Without critical thinking skills, you cannot be a digital content moderator. Critical thinking is the capability of analyzing a situation and making logical decisions. It will help you to handle offensive content. 

Copywriting 

Copywriting is creating, editing, or modifying written content. Digital content moderators use their copywriting skills to create informative messages for website visitors and social media followers. Strong copywriters can write an engaging text that keeps readers more interested in reading.

Flexibility

Digital content moderators must be flexible in their work, as they may have to adjust their schedule or workload at any time. They have to perform multiple tasks. They also need to be able to moderate online conversations. For example, suppose a user is being abusive. In that case, the content moderator might need to change how they normally moderate that conversation.

Editing

If your audience posts toxic content, you cannot delete it because your user’s engagement is important. In that case, you need to edit that post. Along with engagement, it is also necessary to maintain your company’s reputation.

Market Research of Content Moderation

In Facebook content moderation, moderators remove posts and ban users from that platform. Elon Musk is also taking the same way to moderate the content on Twitter. 

America holds 41% market share based on content moderate solutions. On the other hand, the U.S. alone has 36% of the market share of the global market. The US is the mother to the leading social media and IT service providers. Therefore, digital traffic is high because of creating a high volume market share. Because of Facebook content moderation and google content moderation USA is top in the market of community moderation. 

The online content moderation solutions market is expected to reach USA $ 17.59 Bn by 2029 during the predicted time at a CAGR of 10.25%. This report analysis assumes the impact of COVID-19 on the revenue of market leaders. The Market report is based on product type, content type, moderation type etc.

A report also shows that the market size of the google content moderation solution Market by 2029 is US $ 17.59 Bn. In 2021, the global moderation solution market’s market size was US $ 8.06 Bn. Source: MMR

How Does Content Moderation Work?

Firstly, you must set clear guidelines about which type of content is appropriate for you. Next, you need to choose who will do facebook content moderation. They will know what to remove and what to modify.

Besides, the content should be reviewed before removing, modifying or approving it. This is the sensitive part when digital content moderators review the content. They have to stay focused on that time. You need to set the thresholds based on your business type and users’ expectations.

As the previous section explains, It can take a few different forms. Pre-moderation before publication is usually too slow for today’s user-generated content volume. Because of this, most platforms choose to review the content after it’s gone live, and it gets immediately placed on the moderation rank.

Post-moderation is often paired with AI moderation to achieve the quickest results.

Why is Content Moderation Important?

UGC (user-generated content) is a big business. It helps brands convey authenticity, establish brand loyalty, and grow communities. It acts as a trust signal. 

Research says that 50% of user-generated content is more trustworthy. So it is important to have UGC on your company website to earn the trust. This guide will show you why it’s important for your business. So keep reading!

There is a list of why virtual content moderation is important given below:

• Impacts on Search Engine Ranking

• Scaling Marketing Campaigns

• Encourages Buying Behavior

• Protect from Scam Content

• Protect Brand Reputation

• Improve Online Visibility

Impacts on Search Engine Ranking

When a user does UGC on your website related to your product review on social media, that can bring traffic to the brand’s website. It will engage the customer to visit your site. So, when people search for other content related to the products of that particular brand, it increases the website traffic. 

Scaling Marketing Campaigns

The goal is not limited to reviewing a brand’s social media platforms. It also has a major role in running online campaigns. Companies can increase their campaigns while publishing a new product. It will encourage users to give a review on that. And one by one, they will give thousands of comments that will help you to increase the campaigns.

Encourages Buying Behavior

Digital Ads play an essential role in diving customers’ attention. It will create an outcome of bringing profit and brand reputation. Buyers generally target UGC-like product reviews through digital Ads. And with the help of virtual content moderators, you can do live content moderation of that reviews.

Protect from Scam Content

Many users post offensive content on various companies’ social media sites just to get attention and likes. As a result, companies reputation gets ruined, and it doesn’t follow the community moderation guidelines. If you do online content moderation or live content moderation, you can edit those scam-type posts before approving them. So, you can protect your brand from scam content.

Protect Brand Reputation

It may create a huge risk to the brand’s reputation when users post something offensive on social media or do hateful comments. Therefore, online content moderation is the ultimate solution to prevent bullies and trolls from taking advantage of the brand.

Improve Online Visibility

Statistics show that 25% of the search results come from user-generated content that directly takes users to the website. Therefore, companies should check the content through community moderation. This is how social media content moderation can increase online visibility. 

Choosing The Right Approach to Content Moderation

Community moderation looks difficult. Digital content moderators must focus on every platform, making decisions and others. So, it looks like challenging work. Once platforms set the guidelines, virtual content moderators can work on a community moderation strategy. The following analysis should be taken when determining the right approach:

• Content volume

• User expectations

• User demographics

• Community guidelines

• Priority of banned behaviors

• Platform audience: age, geographic location, interests

• Platform forms of content, such as text, audio, video, and images

• Whether platforms are for one-to-one communications or public communications

• Need to focus on illegal content based on laws, user interests, and general risks; which threats should be handled first?

Once you’ve set how to modify the activities, you can build a community moderation strategy. A combination of digital content moderators and AI solutions is generally the most flexible and efficient method of managing online content moderation.

Challenges for Online Content Moderation

Day by day, people are getting involved in social media. Some people follow the rules, and some are not. So, social media content moderation is becoming challenging day by day. 

When Virtual content moderators monitor the various types of content they face, these challenges are described below:

Challenge 1: Acceptable Behavior

Digital content moderators must have a clear set of rules that acceptable bound behavior for UGC. It may differ from project to project; still, references are included into:

• Name of organizational staff, particularly in a negative light
• Comments on moderation policies and processes
• Bullying, hectoring and insulting
• Posting personal information
• Acceptable language
• Defamatory content
• External links
• Advertising
• Intolerance

Challenge 2: Breaching Moderation

Your virtual content moderator team also has a clear set of permission for breaching the moderation rules. For example:

• Temporary suspension of access privileges
• Permanent blocking of access privileges
• Content removal
• Content editing

Challenge 3: Automated and Human Filters

Your community moderation should include automated filtering and human systems. Automated filters are good at quickly picking up black-listed words and spam. They are unfit to pick up other poor behaviors. So you need human moderation also.

Challenge 4: Backup Processes

The online content moderation system should have a backup for every instruction. For example, your moderators may not be familiar with all the variations of the issues under consideration and may not pick up all of the issues.

How to Become a Content Moderator?

You may want to be a content moderator at this point in the article. But you don’t know how. That is why I am bringing up how you can be a digital content moderator. 

To become a content moderator, you need the following:

• Contextual knowledge

• Strong analytical skills

• Detail-oriented approach to reviewing sensitive content.

• Need to be able to adapt decision-making of different situations and layouts.

• A flexible approach to the Facebook content moderation process, depending on outgoing formats, trends and technology. 

Moderators can work for a specific brand or an online content moderation company that provides services for different businesses. It is the essential difference between in-house and external live content moderation. 

Software for Content Moderation

The software detects and blocks post that violates copyright law, such as images, music, videos, and other media. It can also detect any offensive content on the platform. However, it is important to mention that community moderation software is not always safe. It can miss inappropriate or incorrectly flag content as we have different cultures.

There is a list of software given below: 

• ModerateContent

• Sightengine

• EasyCMT

• Preamble

• Anolytics

• Tisane

ModerateContent

It can analyze animated images, and based on the concept; it can detect the type of audience, like adults or children. ModerateContent can tag images with detected labels. It can also detect copyright claims on image content. 

Sightengine

It is a perfect tool for automatically detecting the content. Sightengine can filter any unwanted content in photos, videos and live streams. It can easily grow your moderation channel to millions of images per month.

EasyCMT

One of the most popular automated software for detecting your content. It detects nudity, harmful content, weapons and others that go against your policy. It can automatically mute the content for some days if it finds any copyrighted music or videos.

Preamble

The preamble is an AI-based content detector. It applied to social networks, chatbots, language models, online forums, comment sections, web 3.0, gaming networks, NFTs, and Metaverses. 

Anolytics

Anolytics provides data for images, videos & text for machine learning and AI-based computer vision. It offers a low cost for machine learning and artificial intelligence model developments.

Tisane

It can focus on abusive content and law enforcement needs. Tisane can detect hate speech, cyber-bullying, criminal activity, sexual advances, attempts to establish external contact and more. This software can support 30 languages.

Features of Content Moderation Tools

Online content moderation software can detect and remove offensive, inappropriate, or illegal communities. Each software has some common features. I am discussing some features in this part of digital content moderation guidelines. The list of features of virtual content moderation is given below: 

• Automated Moderation

• Customizable Rules

• Manual Moderation

• User Reporting

• Auditing

Automated Moderation

This feature can quickly analyze and filter large volumes of content to detect and remove unwanted material. It can identify inappropriate language, images, or videos and flag or delete them from the platform.

Customizable Rules

With this features, you can customize rules for what is and isn’t allowed on the platform. It allows for tailored moderation that can be changed as needed to fit the needs of the platform.

Manual Moderation

Manual moderation allows users to review post manually and approve or reject it. By manual moderation, administrators can ensure that all content posted to a platform is appropriate and of a certain quality.

User Reporting

This feature can help you to provide a way for users to flag inappropriate content for review by moderators. Moderators can quickly identify and address issues.

Auditing

Digital content moderators can review past posts and already accepted content to ensure that all posted content is appropriate with this features. Virtual content moderators stay on top of changing trends and ensure that all content follows the platform’s guidelines. 

Social Media Content Moderation Process

When you moderate users’ posts on social media, it’s called social media content moderation. Facebook content moderation is a part of social media content moderation.

To maintain an online brand reputation, it’s mandatory to do online content moderation or social content moderation. You can learn about the social media content moderation process in the content moderation guide. There are the successful community moderation strategies given below: 

Step 1: Establishing Social Media Policies

Community moderation guideline is important to state which post is acceptable and which is not. This guideline can be different based on the type of company. As well as, there would be some social media policies like offensive, adult, hateful speech, bullying, brand bashing, violence, and other sensitive content. However, you must ensure that any negative comment is also controlled. 

Step 2: Designate Who Can Submit

In this part, you have to consider your users, like who can post on your site. So you have to set the rules on the brand’s social media platform. Most social media accounts are real, but a few fake accounts spread spam and troll others’ accounts. Hence, brands need to focus while approving users’ account requests on social media platforms. Also, virtual content moderators should consider sharing and tagging your posts from those users who have used your product or liked your social media page.

Step 3: Create Content Strategy

A brand must formulate a strong content policy that fits its overall marketing goal. That policy should include where and what content will be shared and created to promote the brand. A clear guideline is compulsory so that the social media content fits the brand message and reputation. It can include a logo, banner, brand photos, color schemes, hashtags, tone, style, voice, and guide. It helps users to recognize the brand and its message.

Step 4: Make Submission Process

This is the main part of the digital content moderation process. The online content moderation process can be smooth through pre-moderation, post-moderation, and reactive moderation. You can review the content before submission, monitor it simultaneously, or review only when flagged by other users. It is totally up to the digital content moderators to ensure that the brand follows the strategy. Before approving any post and comment on the brand page, virtual content moderators must need to monitor the content.

Step 5: Monitor Content Regularly

This step is essential, and a digital content moderator team should be there to monitor the regular’s content to remove spam. AI can also do it, but it’s safe to do by a human. Many tools and software available in the market can be used for regularly monitoring the content posted by users on brands’ social media pages. It can help you to know your users so that you can improve your product services.

How Much Does Online Content Moderation Cost?

Some BPO companies provide content moderation services. You can take services from them or hire virtual content moderation directly. The cost of digital content moderation depends on the firm, types of moderation, software etc. It can also depend on the period of the contract. 

Depending on the type of reviewing services, the standard costs of digital content moderation are given below:

• Web content range between $400 to $600

• Video moderation costs between $0.05 and $1.00 per minute

• Text moderation costs between $60 and $70

• AI-powered moderation costs between $500 to $600

Conclusion

In this content moderation guide, you may understand by this now that UGC is so important for your social media platforms and brand popularity. But you cannot allow all of your user content that may harm your reputation. So for that reason, you need to do digital content moderation.

You should have a team of digital content moderators or virtual content moderators to maintain your business platform. They will do social media content moderation to review the user’s post. You can hire virtual content moderators from other companies if you don’t have any. So you can get remote support from them. 

So, increase your brand’s visibility while maintaining a safe community. 

Content Moderation FAQs

Usually, the company does content moderation for branding, so they have some common questions to ask. Here are these frequently asked questions about the online content moderation guide included with the answers:

The post Content Moderation – Guide to Censor Digital Content appeared first on Riseup Labs.