The rise of digital communities and online marketplaces has brought immense changes in the ways we interact with each other, purchase goods, and seek various professional services.
On one hand, all the different social platforms with user-generated content allow us to communicate with peers and larger social circles and share our experiences through text, audio and visuals. This has expanded and moulded our social lives dramatically.
At the same time, the digital world has taken over the ways in which we look for and buy products and services. Many of us have embraced online shopping, as well as the sharing economy — from cab rides to apartments.
While many of these advancements are undoubtedly making our lives easier and often more enjoyable, the shift to digital brings about some challenges too. Among the most significant ones is ensuring the safety of online users. Protecting people from fraud, scam and misuse, inappropriate and harmful content, and other types of digital risks has thus become essential for digital platforms of different kinds.
The mass adoption and success of a social community or marketplace today is directly linked to the level of trust that people have in it. As users get more and more tech-savvy and gain experience online, they need to feel that their privacy and security are in good hands.
This is where Content Moderation Trust and Safety programs become essential, and solid content moderation is a key element in them. In the following sections, you can find an overview of Trust and Safety principles for today’s dynamic digital landscape — and the role of moderation in ensuring their efficacy.
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What Is a Trust and Safety Program?
Trust and Safety programs are not simply tools to meet legal standards and regulatory requirements. They are company plans which aim at positioning a digital platform as a trustworthy place which can offer a high level of protection to its users.
In essence, a Trust and Safety program consists of precise guidelines on how to bring down the risks from using a platform to a minimum. The major threats include exposure to disturbing, inappropriate or offensive content, scams, fraud, bullying, harassment, insults, and similar.
1. The Importance of Trust and Safety Programs
Putting in practice an effective Trust and Safety program is essential for the reputation and positioning of digital platforms today — from social media and online marketplaces to dating platforms and booking websites. People are increasingly more aware of the risks they can face online and prefer to opt in for websites and apps that have a solid track record.
For digital platforms, complying with solid Trust and Safety requirements is the key to increasing user base, minimizing churn, and boosting the loyalty of current users. In business terms, Trust and Safety practices ultimately have a strong impact on the bottomline. Online businesses based on social communities and user-generated content rely heavily on the level of trust for the growth of their revenue, scaling, and global expansion.
Protecting users on digital platforms is not only a smart business decision, though. It’s also a question of moral obligations towards vulnerable groups and the community as a whole. In more and more places around the world, safety and privacy are legal requirements that online businesses have to observe rigorously.
2. Essentials for Trust and Safety Programs
When it comes to crafting working Trust and Safety programs that truly deliver on their promises, there are a number of considerations to keep in mind.
First and foremost, a functional program should be able to address the wide variety and the growing amount of potential violations. They’re not only abundant, but keep changing, as violators seek innovative ways to fulfill their goals and go around protection mechanisms. It’s also important to note that risks vary depending on the communication channels — which means different strategies may be necessary to address the growingly diverse safety and privacy threats.
Additional considerations include the variety of languages that your digital platform boasts. With multilingual support, the challenges grow. In addition, even in a common language like English, inappropriate behavior and content can take many different shapes and forms. There are also cultural differences that can affect how trust and safety should be upheld.
Content Moderation in the Context of Trust and Safety
One of the most powerful tools that Trust and Safety managers of digital platforms have in their hands is content moderation.
The process of moderation entails the monitoring of content — text, images, video, and audio — with the aim of removing illegal and harmful items that pose risks to different groups and jeopardize the reputation of an online brand. Through these functions, content review is essential to ensuring the trust of users in and the required level of safety for guaranteeing protection from illegal and harmful items and actions.
With effective content moderation, digital platforms can protect their users from:
- The sale of unlawful and dangerous goods
- Dissemination of hateful and discriminative ideas
- Radical and criminal behavior of other users
- Exposure to gruesome visuals
How to Boost Your Content Moderation Efforts
With the rapid growth of digital platforms and the immense amounts of content that need to be reviewed to ensure Trust and Safety, relying on manual content moderation can be daunting. In fact, it may prove practically impossible to ensure on-the-go moderation when the volume of content that goes online grows exponentially.
Automatic content moderation powered by Artificial Intelligence is proving as the most appropriate and effective solution to this conundrum. It doesn’t mean fully replacing moderation teams with machines — but involves the use of powerful platforms to minimize and simplify the work for human moderators.
The automatic algorithms can remove items that are in direct contradiction with the rules and standards of a digital platform. This saves a ton of time and effort that otherwise a moderation team has to invest in sifting through the piles of content. When there are items that are contentious and the thresholds for removal are not reached, the moderation platform directs them for manual review.
In addition to dramatically increasing the productivity and speed of the moderation process, automatic content moderation spares content moderators from having to look at the most disturbing and gruesome content. This contributes positively to the parameters of the job which is known for being high-risk and traumatizing for many.
Imagga Helps You Deliver on Trust and Safety
Crafting and enacting a Trust and Safety program for your digital platform gets easier with effective content moderation. Imagga’s CM solution provides you with the right tools to protect your users from harmful and illegal content.
With Imagga, you can handle all types of content, including text, images, video and even live streaming. The platform will monitor all posted content and will automatically remove items that are not compatible with your community guidelines. You can set thresholds for content flagging for items that need to be processed by human moderators.
Our content moderation solution allows you to set content retention policies that further assist you in meeting Trust and Safety requirements, as well as official regulations.
Want to get started? You can refer to our in-depth how-to guide or get in touch straight away to check out how Imagga can boost your Trust and Safety efforts.