The ongoing explosion of social media and online content has created a whirlwind of user-generated content. With all that content circulating, platforms need a way to moderate it.
Content moderation is crucial today because online communities and social media platforms are the primary means of communication and information dissemination. According to the World Economic Forum, by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be created daily. To put that in perspective, that equals 212,765,957 DVDs per day.
Artificial intelligence (AI) can optimize moderation efforts by helping human moderators accurately identify inappropriate or harmful content, thereby allowing businesses to scale quality content without harming users and jeopardizing a brand’s reputation. Let’s look at how to do this.
Step 1: Identify Your Content Moderation Needs
Before you can scale content, you need to identify your moderation needs. The type, length, and scale of the content matter when discerning how much help you need. Ask yourself these questions:
- What types of content (e.g., text, images, video) do you want to moderate?
- What guidelines and policies do you have in place or need to adopt?
- What happens when these policies are violated?
Every minute, people send 87,500 tweets, viewers watch 4.5 million YouTube videos, and one million people log in to Facebook. These numbers demonstrate that user-generated content dominates the online marketplace. Every business has its own needs. Having a strategy in place is important when you automate any process.
You also need to determine what method or methods of moderation work best for your business. When, how, and to what extent you want AI involved in your process will determine the most appropriate solution.
Here are the five moderation methods to consider:
- Pre-moderation: All user-generated content is pre-screened using guidelines that you establish.
- Post-moderation: Content is checked after it goes live.
- Reactive: Users report or flag inappropriate or offensive content.
- Distributed: Users evaluate content under a rating or voting system.
- Automated: Tools and filters moderate content.
AI-powered tools automate the moderation of website, social media, and online marketplace content. Once you know your needs, you have to choose which tools to use.
How can AI help you further in your content creation process? Read this article that discusses 10 AI applications that will help.
Step 2: Choose the Best AI-Powered Solution
Depending on your needs, you can choose from multiple AI-powered content moderation solutions. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Be sure to do your own research and evaluate the products before making a final decision.
Some of the most popular programs are:
When you’re evaluating these solutions, be sure to consider accuracy, speed, ease-of-integration, and cost. Pricing will vary with the level of accuracy you desire, the customization ability, the size of the data set, and the complexity of the content. The costs vary widely – companies can spend thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Once you have the right solution in place, you’ll have to train the program.
Step 3: Training and Integrating the Program
Training an AI-powered content moderation program involves feeding it massive data sets. The programs are able to learn and identify patterns in the data. The greater the amount of data, the more accurate the system is.
It’s important to note that the quality of the data will also determine the system’s accuracy. The data should be diverse, labeled appropriately, and representative of the kind of content you want to moderate.
Content may have the following labels:
- Abusive
- Adult or explicit
- Profanity
- Fake and misleading
When you’re scaling content, accurate labeling will accelerate your content process and ensure that the right content gets in front of your customers. Once you integrate the program into your existing systems, it will automatically start moderating content in real time.
Step 4: Monitor and Improve the System
Scaling content requires that you continually monitor and improve the systems you have in place. AI-powered content moderation systems are not exempt from this requirement. Once you deploy the program, human moderators need to review the flagged content to ensure that it’s marked appropriately.
Because the systems don’t provide 100% accuracy, appropriate content might sometimes get flagged as inappropriate and vice versa. Human moderators can fine-tune and retrain the system to improve accuracy.
Content moderation is a dynamic process. New training data is continually generated when human reviewers label content as harmful or appropriate. Reviewers then take that labeled data and feed it back into the program.
Step 5: Use Human Moderators to Review Flagged Content
The human element is necessary not only to train and update the system; it’s also vital for checking all flagged and user-reported content. Be sure someone reviews the flagged content before any action is taken.
Human moderators can provide context and make judgment calls, two tasks the AI system may not be able to perform. They’ll also be able to provide feedback and make recommendations on how to improve the process in place.
Evaluating the system and your process is necessary as your content efforts grow.
Step 6: Evaluate the Effectiveness of AI Content Moderation
Content moderation plays a major role in content scaling, and the effectiveness of the AI-powered content moderation system can help people manage online content faster and with fewer errors.
Evaluating these programs involves analyzing the following metrics:
- Number of flagged posts
- Number of inappropriately flagged posts (false positives and negatives)
- Time taken to review flagged content
- Type of content flagged
Analyzing the data will help you determine patterns that exist in the flagged content, content marked by errors, and the types of flagged content. As you scale, you’ll need to improve the system and make adjustments where necessary.
Evaluating the content moderation can also help you determine whether the program is helping you meet your scaling goals.
Step 7: Continually Update and Improve Your AI-Powered Content Moderation System
As online content evolves and the intricacies of content moderation become more complex, you’ll need to update your system to reflect the changes. This process is ongoing, and it involves human oversight.
Also, as AI-powered content moderation systems become more complex, the concept of Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) will change and evolve. HITL refers to systems in which humans give direct feedback to the model so it can make predictions below the set level of confidence. You may need to adjust these levels of confidence to ensure that it’s moderated appropriately.
Continuing to improve the systems will only help as you scale content. The greater the available content, the harder your systems should be working to safeguard you, your brand’s reputation, and the safety and comfort of your customers.
Here’s an article on how to further incorporate AI into your content creation process.
Summary
Using AI-powered content moderation can help you scale your content by speeding up the review process. Decide on the best method of moderation for your business and choose the appropriate AI solution. Human oversight of the moderation process will help you get the best results.
As your business grows, so will your content needs. Regularly evaluating your systems will ensure that your content moderation efforts are up to speed. AI-powered tools can assist you with your content creation needs, but you should have editors or a team dedicated to producing high-quality content also take a look at the work.
Want To Learn More?
For more information on how to scale your content and build your business, check out this guide, which provides all you need to know about using AI.
If you want to scale your content using AI but also give it a human touch, check out our AI-generated content editing services.
