AI Content Moderation: How AI Can Moderate Content + Protect Your Brand

By esantiago@hubspot.com (Erica Santiago)

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Every minute, 240,000 images are shared on Facebook, 65,000 images are uploaded on Instagram, and 575,000 tweets are posted on Twitter.

Simply put, tons of user-generated content are posted in various forms daily, and moderating what finds its way to your brand’s online platform can be overwhelming and tedious — unless you leverage AI content moderation.

AI can optimize the moderation process by automatically classifying, flagging, and removing harmful content.

To help you determine how your brand should leverage AI content moderation, let’s walk through what content moderation is and the different AI technology available.

What is content moderation?

Types of content moderation

How AI Content Moderation Can Help Your Brand

It’s common for AI content moderation to implement these guidelines.

Now that you know what content moderation is, let’s explore the different types of content moderation and how AI can play a role in scaling the process.

Types of Content Moderation

To understand how best to use AI to moderate content, you first need to know the different types of content moderation.

Pre-Moderation

Pre-moderation assigns moderators to evaluate your audience’s content submissions before making them public.

If you’ve ever posted a comment somewhere and it was restricted or delayed following approval, then you saw pre-moderation at work.

Pre-moderation aims to protect your users from harmful content that can negatively impact their experience and your brand’s reputation.

However, a downside to pre-moderation is that it can delay conversations and feedback from your community members due to the approval process.

Post-Moderation

With post-moderation, user-generated content is posted in real-time and can be reported as harmful after they are public. After the report is made, a human moderator or content moderation AI will flag and delete the content if it violates established rules.

Reactive Moderation

Some communities rely solely on their members to flag any content that violates community guidelines or is disliked by most users. This is called reactive moderation, a common process in small, tight-knit communities.

With reactive moderation, community members are responsible for reporting inappropriate content to the platform’s administration, consisting of community leaders or whoever runs the site.

Administrators will then check the flagged content to see if it violates any rules. If the administrators confirm the content violates the rules, they will manually remove it.

Distributed Moderation

Distributed moderation consists of community members voting on user-generated content submissions to determine if the content can successfully be submitted. The voting is often done alongside the supervision of senior moderators.

A positive takeaway from distributed moderation is that the process encourages higher participation and engagement from the community. However, it can be risky for brands to trust users to moderate content appropriately.