The Internet may be a joyful place when you’re getting positive reviews and organic word-of-mouth. But what happens when you get reputation-damaging fake reviews or your branded hashtags are hijacked to spread disrespectful and inappropriate content? The rise of AI-generated content, including deep fakes and synthetic media, presents unique challenges in filtering harmful material online.

This happened to McDonald’s in 2012 during their #McDStories campaign on Meta (formerly Twitter).

Instead of sharing heartwarming anecdotes about Happy Meals, as the brand intended, people used the hashtag to share their horrible food experiences with the brand.

It was a marketing failure, to say the least. But here’s where content moderation, a process to moderate user-generated content, could’ve saved the day.

By filtering out negative tweets and promoting a positive narrative, McDonald’s could’ve overshadowed the bad comments and salvaged the campaign.

If you’re wondering how, keep reading to learn more about content moderation and how you can use AI to achieve this at scale.

What is content moderation

Content moderation is the process of reviewing and removing user-generated content, which can be in the form of text, image, video or audio if it’s problematic, insulting, illegal, controversial or inappropriate instead of being helpful and informative. Effective content moderation processes involve various approaches tailored to address different content types while ensuring safety and effectiveness.

Example: Instagram

Instagram is prone to content in various forms. To flag and weed out “harmful” content, the social media company uses a combination of human and content moderation AI.

This is how the moderation process works.

• AI models analyze the content to understand what’s in the photo or text and check for compliance. It is then either removed from Instagram or restricted for distribution.

• If a piece of content violates the Community Guidelines and is questionable, the AI models send the content to a human review team for further analysis. They also make the final decision.

This is how most brands (e.g., Etsy, Amazon, and Netflix) implement AI content moderation.

You may not be a social media giant with 500 million daily active users like Instagram.

But say you’re a university, a sports team, or a government body, then you know the importance of having content moderation practices in places, especially if you’re running a brand campaign that invites participation from public or your users. If you’re in a consumer-facing business on the other hand (e.g., say you run a Shopify store) and work with UGC frequently then you need to prioritize content moderation, to weed out spam or inflammatory content and AI goes a long way in solving for this.

What content moderation isn’t

Content moderation isn’t censorship, quality control, or a way to remove “negative” customer reviews. It is simply a brand protection strategy. A well-defined content moderation strategy is crucial for managing user-generated content effectively, blending AI and human judgment to enhance online safety and create a healthier digital space.

Content moderation helps you actively manage user-generated content and safeguard your image to promote a safe and consistent environment for customers. While, yes, content moderation helps you identify and amplify high-quality content. However, its main purpose is filtering out inappropriate and harmful content.

Challenges of Manual Content Moderation

Manual content moderation is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process that poses several challenges. One of the primary challenges is the sheer volume of user-generated content that needs to be reviewed. Human moderators struggle to keep up with the pace of content creation, leading to delays in moderation and potential oversights. Additionally, manual moderation is prone to human error, as moderators may misinterpret or miss context, leading to inconsistent moderation decisions.

Furthermore, manual moderation can be emotionally taxing for human moderators, who are exposed to disturbing and harmful content on a daily basis. This can lead to burnout and decreased productivity, ultimately affecting the overall quality of moderation.

What is the role of AI content moderation

AI content moderation, is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to systematically detect, review, and filter out “inappropriate” content based on a predefined set of rules or flag content that violates policy for human review. This entire process involves AI systems managing the complete workflow from content submission to review, optimizing moderation by thoroughly scanning content against platform guidelines.

For example, you can deploy AI to moderate comments on your social media posts to screen and flag problematic and controversial comments in an automated manner. Below is one way to visualize the AI content moderation process.

It works the same way content moderation does. But instead of humans only, AI algorithms screen and flag the content while helping human moderators avoid oversight.

How Does AI Content Moderation Work

AI content moderation uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to analyze and moderate user-generated content. The process typically involves training machine learning models on large datasets of labeled content, which enables the AI to learn patterns and characteristics of different types of content.

Once trained, the AI can analyze new content and make moderation decisions based on predefined rules and guidelines. AI moderation tools can be integrated into social media platforms, websites, and other online applications to automate the moderation process. AI content moderation can be used to detect and remove inappropriate content, including hate speech, harassment, and explicit material.

Benefits of content moderation using AI

AI content moderation gives you the benefit of scale and speed. Your human moderators are surely efficient at identifying and flagging content violating platform or community guidelines. But they’re also prone to subjective bias, oversight, and error in judgment.

This is where AI content moderation shines the brightest. It can protect your brand and promote the well-being of your human moderators.Here’s how.

Scale content moderation

If you’re dealing with large volumes of user-generated content, AI can help you scale content moderation without losing efficiency. It can quickly and accurately analyze text, images, videos, and other forms of content created by users to ensure compliance with legal regulations and community guidelines. You will not only reduce the workload for human moderators but also limit their exposure to psychologically harmful materials.

Moreover, since AI algorithms use adaptive learning, they improve over time and moderate with more accuracy.

Automate content filtering and removing

AI systems can screen content in real time. They can automatically detect, analyze, understand, and filter out content based on specific guidelines. For example, they can identify and distinguish content propagating violence from content reporting about a violent incident.

Based on the AI algorithm, overtly harmful content is removed, and questionable content is sent to human moderators for further action. This maintains a consistent and efficient cycle of content moderation and saves time for your team.

Improve response time

Where human moderators take minutes, AI systems take only seconds to analyze and categorize a piece of content as acceptable or questionable. This improves your response time to act. You can take faster action against negative and harmful content without compromising on efficiency.

Save costs

Hiring and training human moderators takes up significant time and money. In contrast, AI systems can learn multiple guidelines and execute moderation practices at a much lower cost.

You get quality content moderation services and increase savings in terms of money and time. Your operational costs and staffing needs become predictable, allowing you to allocate resources better.

Collect insights on moderation

With AI systems in place, you can track the effectiveness of your moderation policy and collect deeper insights into the process. It also allows you to identify content patterns and trends in user behavior to refine your moderation policies and improve marketing efforts.

Free-up human moderators for meaningful tasks

When you have an AI moderating content 24x7, this frees up your content team, especially your editors and moderators from having to sift through rows of content manually to publish only the ones are 'good to go' on your social walls. By outsourcing this task to a tool that comes with AI-powered moderation, you save hours on the week and free up your team for more meaningful, strategic work.

Limitations of AI in Contextual Understanding and Nuance Detection

While AI content moderation has made significant progress in recent years, it still has limitations when it comes to contextual understanding and nuance detection. AI algorithms may struggle to understand the nuances of human language, including sarcasm, irony, and humor. Additionally, AI may not be able to fully understand the context of a piece of content, leading to misinterpretation or misclassification.

Furthermore, AI may not be able to detect subtle forms of harassment or hate speech, which can be particularly challenging to identify. Human moderators are essential in these cases, as they can provide nuance and context to AI-driven moderation decisions.

The Role of Human Moderators in AI-Driven Content Moderation

Human moderators play a crucial role in AI-driven content moderation, as they provide nuance and context to AI-driven moderation decisions. Human moderators can review and correct AI-driven moderation decisions, ensuring that content is accurately classified and moderated. Additionally, human moderators can provide feedback to AI algorithms, helping to improve their accuracy and effectiveness over time.

Human moderators are also essential in cases where AI algorithms struggle to understand context or nuance, as they can provide a human perspective and make more informed moderation decisions. By combining human and machine-based approaches to moderation, social media platforms and online applications can create a safer and more trustworthy online environment.

Why is content moderation important

According to a survey by MarketingCharts, consumers typically deem the following content inappropriate.

Now, imagine you’re running a UGC campaign for a health drink. And a creator makes a bold (but untrue) claim in a video about the drink's benefits—saying, “It can help you lose up to 5 kgs in two weeks”. If you reshare the video content without screening the content first, you’ll end up misinforming the audience.

On the other hand, if you analyze and flag the content as problematic early on, you can ask the creator to make changes and then reshare without worry. This is where content moderation saves the day and your reputation by large. You avoid making a misstep while strengthening the bond with the UGC creator.

As Zig Ziglar, revered salesman and author, once said about trust:

“If people like you, they'll listen to you, but if they trust you, they'll do business with you.”

Here are five other reasons (+ bonus) why content moderation is so important for brands. Especially if you’re a marketplace, social media platform, gaming platform, D2C, community-led or eCommerce business.

• Protection against fake reviews, spam, or sabotage attempts from internet trolls. Content moderation allows you to detect and eliminate link spam, bot-generated comments or negative reviews left to tarnish your reputation.

• Create a safe environment for user discussion and participation. A well-moderated community is not only putting a polished brand image outside, but also helps setting up a safe and welcoming community where users want to participate and not be driven away by unmanned public content via a hashtag used by your brand.

• Prevent misinformation disguised as content. Some internet folks may unintentionally inflate and share partial or false information about your business. This can negatively impact your brand credibility. Moderating content helps you avoid such pitfalls.

• Main quality in the content you reshare. Screening content can help you discover high-quality content and conversations to spotlight and highlight in your promotional campaigns.

What type of inappropriate content to moderate

Here are some content types you should proactively moderate.

User-generated Content (UGC)

You need to moderate UGC created by influencers, fans, and customers with the purpose of promoting your product. This is because, often, they may use words or depict the product in a way that doesn’t align with your brand values or messaging.

They could unintentionally inflate the product value, use biased language, or violate community guidelines. Reviewing and revising the content, if needed, before sharing the UGC is key to preventative brand protection.

Customer reviews and ratings

Reviews left on a public domain like Google Business are often double-edged swords. While they’re great for attracting customers (95% of people check online reviews before making a purchase), you also have zero control over what a customer writes about you.

You may get negative reviews and ratings from some customers, which is fine. It becomes a problem when trolls leave such reviews with foul language or expletives to deliberately to tarnish and ruin your image. Timely detection can help you remove or report such comments if necessary.

Comments under social media posts

The comment section on social media is usually the place most susceptible to spam, malicious links, profanities, and problematic comments from bots and irrational users. Regularly reviewing and removing such comments will ensure your social media, which is a key touchpoint for customer interactions, remains a safe and positive space for customers.

Social media mentions

Social media mentions happen when people mention your product and services or tag your brand on social media platforms. You will likely encounter four types of social media mentions:

• Negative mentions: You may receive criticism, complaints or customer bashing for various reasons. They can negatively impact your brand reputation, so addressing such mentions quickly is important.

• Spam mentions: They’re usually irrelevant to your brand and should be removed to keep your feed clutter-free.

• Misinformation: If a mention is claiming false information to be true about your product or service, then you must flag and prevent the spread of misinformation. It may cause misunderstandings among your (potential) customers.

• Inappropriate content: This could include hate speech, explicit images, or foul language. It should be flagged and reported immediately to maintain a respectful online presence.

Promotional content

You also need to moderate content created by your own team to avoid oversight—or worse—a misfire. For example, the #RaceTogether campaign by Starbucks in 2015, which backfired massively. They wanted people to discuss “race” as they grabbed their coffee, and well, they didn’t realize how ignorant they seemed.

Actively reviewing and analyzing your promotional campaigns, especially if they touch upon a sensitive topic, is a sound way to mitigate such risks.

Moreover, if your promotional content stack includes UGC or customer testimonials, you can moderate and ensure you’ve got the UGC rights and permission to share them freely.

Content moderation using AI: Best practices

The last thing you’d want as a brand is to get associated with disrespectful or offensive content.

A suitable content moderation solution can take a lot off your plate. But to make sure everything goes smoothly, follow the best practices below.

• Define the content guidelines clearly, especially for hashtag contests and UGC creation. Outline content quality standards and brand values you want to spotlight using examples of acceptable and problematic content on your socials, while running a UGC campaign for users to know what's okay and what's not.

• Keep training your AI systems on diverse data and feedback from human moderators. Provide some contextual training to improve your AI moderation tool's understanding of what could be offensive for your brand. Establish keyword filters and communication styles to categorize content as safe or questionable.

• Explain your process to your community. Make sure your users understand how the content is moderated. Do you review before publication or after? Do you use human moderators or AI systems? Clearly outline the process to maintain transparency.

• Combine AI moderation with human wisdom. As we’ve discussed earlier, using a combination of human and AI content moderation is the key to efficiently moderating. It can help you speed up the process and avoid human oversight while allowing human moderators to make more nuanced decisions.

• Regularly look into AI performance and refine the process accordingly. Pay attention to how effectively it’s filtering out negative content or wrongfully flagging acceptable content. Doing so will help you adjust and improve the training data you feed the AI tool for better accuracy.

• Choose the right content moderation solution. Consider content volume, language support, content support (image, text or others), and integrations available. For example, if you’re looking for a content moderation solution to screen UGC and social media posts, a tool like Flockler’s Garde AI can help.

Introducing Garde AI by Flockler

If you’re new to Flockler, we help brands gather, moderate and display social media feeds on websites, webshops, and other digital screens. Now, earlier, you could generate automated feeds, but the moderation happened manually. To strengthen content moderation and lower human effort, we're launching Garde AI, your very own content moderation assistant. 

It allows you to automatically moderate and filter content that goes on your digital screens, intranet, or website's social walls. It can help you scan for offensive, inappropriate or irrelevant content before embedding your feed on your chosen platform

This feature will not only help you adapt quickly to the nuances and needs of moderation but also save you at least 6-10 hours of hands-on-keyboard task if you've a sizable social feed. It also overcomes human oversight, making the process way more efficient.