User-generated content has transformed the internet — and online platforms where people can share text, visuals, videos and live streams are growing by the minute.
This unseen scale of content creation in the last decade is impressive. It certainly brings new ways for self-expression for users, as well as new opportunities for businesses. At the same time, digital platforms can easily — and unwillingly — become hosts of certain users’ malicious intentions. From pornography and violence to weapons and drugs, harmful and illegal content gets published online all the time.
This brings numerous challenges for online businesses relying on user-generated content, making moderation a requirement for ensuring a safe online environment. Platforms have to protect users and uphold their reputation — while making growth possible and complying with legal regulations. In this article we’ll go over the benefits of using AI content moderation compared to manual moderation.
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Benefits Of AI Content Moderation
The complex task of managing content moderation at scale and in the rapidly evolving digital environment is made easier by moderation platforms powered by Artificial Intelligence. Solutions based on machine learning algorithms help businesses handle many of the challenges for which manual content review simply won’t do the job.
Here are the most notable benefits of AI content moderation for your platform.
1. Enabling Content Moderation at Scale
The biggest challenge for digital platforms based on user-generated content — from travel booking and dating websites to e-commerce and social media — is how to stay on top of all that content without automatic censoring and delays in publishing.
The need for review of content is undoubtful, and platforms of all types and sizes are looking for viable solutions to execute it. However, manual moderation comes with a high price tag — both in terms of financial investment, as well as for human moderators’ well-being. It’s also quite challenging to enforce for certain types of content, such as live streaming, where moderation has to occur in real time and should include video, audio and text.
Automatic content moderation complements the manual review approach and can increase its accuracy. It makes the process faster, saving tens and thousands of work hours. What’s more, AI-powered systems can go through massive amounts of information in record time, ensuring the speed and agility that modern digital platforms require. As algorithms learn from every new project — when human moderators take final decisions on dubious items and from the processing of huge volumes of content — AI can truly enable effective scaling for digital businesses.
2. AI Handles What People Shouldn’t
It’s not only expensive to hire and sustain a large moderation team when the amounts of posted content grow. It’s also a great risk for moderators who sift through the sheer volumes of posts and get exposed to the most disturbing and harmful content out there.
The reports on the harm of content moderation on the psychological well-being of people are numerous. Stress, post-traumatic disorders, and desensitization are just some of the dire effects that moderators suffer from. The most popular social media like Facebook and Instagram have been criticized a lot about this in recent years.
AI-powered moderation solutions don’t fully replace humans. Instead, they just take care of the hardest part of the job — the first round of screening. Moderation platforms can automatically remove content that is immediately recognized as illegal, graphic, noncompliant with a platform’s rules, or harmful in any other way. Only items that are questionable remain for manual moderation. This reduces the workload for content moderators and makes their job more manageable. This is probably one of the biggest benefits of using AI for content moderation.
3. Automatic CM Ensures Legal Compliance
Providing high-quality and timely content moderation is not only a matter of protecting users and your platform’s reputation as a secure online place. More and more legal requirements are enforced to safeguard people from exposure to harmful content.
There are specific regulatory frameworks that digital platforms have to comply with, depending on where a business entity is based. The European Union’s Digital Services Act is setting the tone on the Old Continent, as are some individual states too. The US is also moving forward with requirements for effective content moderation that protects users.
Automating big chunks of your moderation makes legal compliance easier. You can set automatic thresholds for removal of illegal content, which means it will be taken down in no time. The AI can also sift through content which would otherwise raise privacy issues if processed by people. Blurring of sensitive information can also be done to ensure private data protection. The whole content review process becomes faster, which minimizes the chances of non-compliance for your business and of unregulated exposure for users.
4. Multilingual Moderation with AI Is Easier
Content moderation needs to be executed in different languages to meet the needs of global platforms and local websites alike. This applies to all types of content, including visual materials that contain words.
The traditional moderation approach would be to hire or outsource to a team of moderators who have the necessary linguistic knowledge. This can be both difficult and expensive. It may also be quite slow — especially if multilingual moderators have to handle a couple of projects in different languages at the same time.
With machine translation, moderation in languages other than English can be automated to a certain extent. Even when the process is handled by people, they can get immense support from the automatic translations and flagging.
5. Automatic Moderation Allows On-the-Go Adjustments
Manual moderation can be somewhat slow to adjust to novel situations. When there is a new screening policy to apply, or new types of inappropriate content to include, this requires creating new procedures for content moderators. Often, introducing changes to the moderation process also requires re-training to help moderating staff stay on top of the most recent trends.
AI-powered moderation can help with the flexibility challenge by allowing easy adjustments to content screening thresholds, project moderation rules, and many more variables. Automatic platforms can be tweaked in various ways to accommodate the current needs of the moderation process.
In addition, when the automatic review is paired with human moderation, the process can become truly flexible. Batch sizes and priority levels for projects can be changed across the systems, making the accommodation process for moderators easier and faster. Assigning projects to the right team members is also enabled, leading to higher productivity and improved satisfaction among moderators with specific skill sets.
How Imagga Can Help Your Online Platform?
Artificial Intelligence has fueled the creation of powerful content moderation platforms. Imagga’s CM solution is here to make the moderation challenge easier to handle.
Imagga processes all types of content — from text and visuals to video and live streaming. You can manually set the types of inappropriate content you want to filter, as well as the thresholds for removal and referral to human moderators. In fact, you can control the whole process — and automate the parts that you want, while keeping the control you need.
With Imagga, you can adjust content retention policies to comply with legal requirements. The platform also makes the moderators’ jobs easier by allowing different project priority levels and batches, as well as custom moderation rules and easy flagging process.
Ready to give it a go? Take a look at our extensive how-to guide and get in touch to see how Imagga’s solution can solve your challenges related to content moderation.