Key Content Moderation Trends You Should Know About

Maintaining a postitive brand reputation requires more than just designing and promoting your brand properly. Now that almost every person has access to information online and can post content, it’s important that brands keep their name protected from content that can damage their reputation in any manner or form. This is why content moderation is essential.

If content moderation services are something you are considering for your business, here are some important trends you should know about.

1. The demand for content moderation is on the rise

With various companies now realizing the importance of building a strong online presence, the need for content moderators has grown. To keep a brand’s name and community protected and free from unwanted content, moderators handle the task of screening and removing them. In fact, according to a recent study, there is a huge opportunity for businesses in the content moderation market as it is expected to reach a value of about US$11.8 B by the end of 2027. This is due to the fact that more and more people are gaining access to the Internet. Everyone, even spammers, phishers, and internet trolls can post content that other people or businesses may find harmful or unnecessary.

2. Content moderation strategies should involve both humans and technology

More and more organizations are discovering better content moderation solutions that involve the power of both humans and technology. Given the need for better human judgement, the task of content moderation will still largely rely on humans. But to improve a moderation team’s efficiency and accuracy in reviewing large amounts of user-generated content to protect a brand’s online community,  AI tools can help protect moderators from content that may affect their mental welfare.

3. Content moderators should be multi-skilled

Content moderation involves more than just basic knowledge of a certain brand. This job requires a team of people who are ready to handle work that may become monotonous and filter through hundreds to thousands of content pieces that may sometimes be disturbing. And for companies to optimize their content moderation team, it’s important to hire people that are ready to take on the role in spite of its challenges. Here are some considerations when looking for content moderators to hire for your team:

• Proficient with language, region-specific slang and local context
• Adherence to global policies
• Ability to accept concepts that may differ from their own beliefs and opinion
• Maturity and ability to review content that may be explicit in nature
• Driven to protect the users’ freedom to express while keeping others in the community safe from harmful content
• Exposed to diverse culture and beliefs
• Ability to follow a brand’s quality guidelines and content regulations

These key trends can help you have a better understanding of how essential content moderation is in the online community. With this in mind, you may want to look into acquiring a reliable content moderation solution that is suited for your own business.

5 Types of Content Moderation You Should Know About

Before starting your own content moderation strategy, here are five types of content moderation processes that you should be aware of.

1. Pre-moderation

This type of moderation is for brands who want to make sure that all undesirable, violent, spam, or hurtful user-generated content is filtered so that only relevant comments are published. This gives brands better control of the content appears on their pages, but it has a number of downsides:

• Eliminates instant gratification on the part of the user
• Affects the timeliness and relevance of content
• Requires more manpower publish content as quickly as possible

2. Post-moderation

This moderation type is applicable for forums or social media pages that have active moderators handling all user-generated content. If you want to make the most of the interactions happening in your online community, post-moderation is the right approach for your brand. Most social media pages use this type of moderation to give their users and followers a way to express their opinions in real time. But just like pre-moderation, post-moderation has its draw backs:

• Once the community grows, moderating real-time may consume more time and resources.
• Moderators have to be available in real-time, all of the time to go through all user-generated content and remove inappropriate content from remaining published .
• If moderation is not available all the time, there is a risk of spam, unwanted, violent, or hurtful content remaining published, which may affect some people in the online community.

3. Reactive moderation

Reactive moderation is when a website or platform gives its users the power to flag any content that may be against their community guidelines. This type of moderation can help you maintain your moderation needs, even when the community grows bigger. Reactive moderation is applied to some private Facebook groups where other community members are given the option to report any user-generated content that they deem inappropriate. The only downside with this type of moderation is that you cannot solely rely on it. Reactive moderation can only be paired with either post- or pre-moderation and can serve as a safety net in case any inappropriate content gets past the moderators.

4. Automated moderation

Another type of moderation that you can pair with pre- or post-moderation is automated moderation. This can help you scale your moderation efforts and improve your team’s productivity in terms of reviewing large content amounts. It does have limitations since automated moderation cannot be relied on when it comes to making decisions about flagging sensitive content. For such content, human intervention will still be necessary.

5. Distributed moderation

This type of moderation is not commonly implemented but is still present across a number of online forums. Distributed moderation is a form of self-moderation. It requires the participation of all members of a community where the members vote or rate content submissions to determine if they should be published.

Implementing content moderation will take a lot of your manpower, money, and resources, but it can also add value to your online communities. If you want to keep your business protected but are worried about proper execution, there is always the option to outsource your content moderation. If you need more information on how you can proceed with an outsourced content moderation service, our team at Assivo can help you learn more about what to expect from this type of business solution.