The ubiquitous creation of different types of content — from text and audio to images, video, and live streaming — is driving the development of online platforms across locations and industries.
This makes content moderation a top priority for a wide variety of online businesses, including marketplaces with user-generated content, dating websites, online communication platforms, and gaming websites, among many others.
As Trust and Safety programs are steadily becoming the basis of building a safe digital environment, you just can’t skip on adequate content screening if you want to grow a successful online business.
Detecting problematic content is important for a variety of reasons: protecting the users, meeting national and international digital safety regulations, and building up your reputation as a safe online platform.
Here’s why you should take care of content moderation skillfully — and how you can go about doing that with ease.
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Why Bad Content Is Bad for Business
The unimaginable amounts of content created online every day is both a blessing and a curse for online businesses.
Platforms want to give space to their users to express themselves — yet this comes at the price of having to monitor tons of user-generated content and removing the ‘digital garbage’. The content that has to be flagged and removed for safety reasons includes illegal, obscene, insulting, and inappropriate materials, as well as any other content that doesn’t meet the platform’s guidelines.
If left unsupervised, problematic content can get out of control and jeopardize the very existence of a platform.
It’s Harmful to Your Users
Unsafe content is a direct threat for the very people you want to have on your website, whether you’re running a travel platform, a marketplace, or a dating platform.
As the owner of the platform, you have a moral responsibility towards users to ensure a safe and secure environment. It’s especially important to protect vulnerable groups and to prevent discrimination, insults, and threats as much as possible.
With content moderation, you can prevent bullies, trolls, and other people with harmful intentions to reach the rest of your user base and taking advantage of them and of your brand.
It’s an Issue with Legal Compliance
Beyond the ethical duties, your online business may be liable for the content you publish. There are various national and international regulations regarding safe content that you may need to comply with to stay in business. While previously social media platforms, for example, were exempt from liability for illegal content, this is changing.
The UK is moving towards such regulations, having its communications regulator screen for illegal content and fine platforms that expose their users to this. Similar steps have been taken in France, Germany, U.S., Brazil, and many other countries.
While there is a pushback to content moderation legislation because of censorship considerations, such regulations are steadily gaining ground, including the EU’s Digital Services Act.
It’s a Challenge to Your Brand Reputation
Last but not least, leaving harmful content published by ill-willing users on your platform is a risk for your brand reputation.
If your regular users get exposed to violence, propaganda, child nudity, weapons, drugs, hate symbols, and a long list of other unsafe content, they’re very likely to stop using your services.
The word of mouth about the permissibility of a platform towards problematic content spreads around fast — especially in a world as digitally connected as ours. This makes it difficult to protect your reputation if you have allowed unsafe content to circulate freely. You may also face legal problems if the case is brought to the attention of state and international authorities.
The Key to Successful Content Moderation: Imagga
Content moderation is undoubtedly crucial for online platforms — but it’s no easy feat. The last years have seen the gradual move from manual moderation done by people to automatized moderation provided by technology.
Imagga offers a fully or semi-automatic content moderation solution, powered by our extensive experience and achievements in Artificial Intelligence. Our real-time content screening works at scale and ensures that any Trust and Safety program to protect your users and reputation is successful.
With the automatic filtering of unsafe images, video, and live stream, your moderation teams can breathe in relief — as their work is significantly reduced and they’re protected from the sheer amount of harmful content they need to process. You can use different scopes of content moderation which you can deploy in the way that works for you, whether it’s cloud, on-premise, or edge deployment. And the best part: the self-learning AI gets better over time!
Interested to give it a try? Get in touch today to learn how you can ace your content moderation with the help of Imagga.