By Estela Viñarás, on 15 August 2023
Social networks serve as a platform for users to share content, convey values, and express opinions. However, they can also raise concerns for companies since the opinions expressed on various platforms can vary greatly as can the language that people use. To address this, content moderation becomes crucial in safeguarding both users and brand reputation.
What Is Content Moderation on Social Networks?
Content moderation in social networks consists of supervising, filtering, and controlling user-generated content on social media to protect users and the brand. This process ensures compliance with platform regulations by preventing offensive, inappropriate, illegal, or harmful content.
Content moderation is necessary for social networks because they are spaces where users have total freedom to publish the content they want.
How to Develop Content Moderation on Social Networks
- Pre-moderation: Reviewing content before it gets published to maintain total control and prevent harmful content from appearing on the website, blog, or social network.
- Post-moderation: Content is published and enters a moderation queue for review within the next few hours. This method has a certain drawback: inappropriate content could be published for a while on the website, just until the moderator detects it and proceeds to remove it.
- Reactive moderation: Users moderate the content of others through complaints. This option should not be confused with distributed moderation, which is another type of moderation that falls into the hands of the users. In this case, it is the users themselves who can review and remove content they consider inappropriate.
- Automated moderation: In this case, the content generated by users goes through several AI tools capable of detecting inappropriate words or phrases, nudity, blood, and elements that may be offensive, hurtful, or unpleasant for other users.
The most important thing when it comes to content moderation on social networks is to establish good policies and rules, train a good team of moderators, and have good automatic detection tools.
The Importance of Moderating Content on Social Networks
Modifying content on social networks is very important if you want a good digital marketing strategy. It can be a way for a brand to identify urgent problems.
By avoiding hateful, discriminatory, and threatening content, brands foster a comfortable environment for users to express their opinions. Content moderation also helps combat spam, scams, and misinformation that can adversely impact the company.
Good content moderation can also be helpful in controlling the marketing of false products or services and spreading any information that may directly or indirectly affect the company.
Human vs. Automated Content Moderation
One of the most common questions is whether human or automated content moderation is better.
Manual moderation allows is based on a cultural, social, and linguistic context, making it much more nuanced than software. When moderators are human, they can adapt quickly to new trends, adjust to new forms of content, and assess the true intention behind a comment.
Automated moderation, on the other hand, makes it possible to analyze large amounts of content quickly, which is helpful for platforms with many users and interactions. The tools are usually equipped with AI and can detect patterns and inappropriate content based on words and phrases in an objective manner.
Both options have pros and cons, as manual moderation can be more accurate and subjective than automated, but applying it on platforms with large amounts of daily content is not feasible. However, automation can analyze large amounts of content quickly but lacks that subjective part. This means that combining the two is the perfect option. There are companies where content is first filtered through tools, and then a human does a second filtering, ensuring that everything goes through a fair and proper review.
