What is moderation and why is it important?

If you run a social platform, a Facebook page, a gaming community, sports events or any kind of social media account, you’ll need to understand moderation.

The Bodyguard.ai team

The Bodyguard.ai team

Sadly, the online world is filled with toxic behaviour, including everything from body shaming to , sexism, racism, homophobia, harassment and threats. So, it’s up to the owners and operators of online platforms to filter out or ‘moderate’ content to protect the people using their service.

But what exactly is moderation? How does it work and what are the best ways to do it? In this article we’ll explain all these things and more as we guide you through the basics.

A quick definition of moderation

Simply put, moderation means managing what people can say in an online community. It can be done via written rules, unwritten rules or various forms of action. Its purpose is to protect people from negative content or hurtful behaviour and offer a safer space to community members..

Most online platforms deal with large amounts of user-generated content. This content needs to be constantly moderated, i.e. monitored, assessed and reviewed to make sure it follows community guidelines and legislation.

Different methods of moderation

There are two main ways to moderate content. The first is human moderation. This involves manually reviewing and policing content across a platform. As you can imagine, human moderation is often time-consuming and expensive. It also comes with a host of additional issues:

  • It’s extremely repetitive work

  • It has a very small margin for error

  • It can be deeply unpleasant to carry out

  • There’s a considerable time pressure, as negative content should ideally be removed immediately to have no impact. It is in the minutes and hours following the publication of hateful content that it does considerable damage.

The second method of moderation is automatic moderation. Here, software is used to automatically moderate content according to specific rules created for the well-being of users. It saves on the time, expense and effort of human moderation while delivering greater consistency.

What makes our way of moderating different?

At Bodyguard, we take automatic moderation to the next level. Our smart solution uses artificial intelligence to analyse massive volumes of content in real time, removing negative content before it can cause harm. Bodyguard is fully customizable and comes with a useful dashboard to help you manage all your accounts and platforms in one place. You also get access to a wide range of metrics, helping you engage with your community on a deeper level and gain insights into positive as well as negative content.

Our key features at a glance:

  • AI moderation: our solution intelligently filters out content then shows you how it’s been classified and what action has been taken.

  • Contextual analysis: bodyguard analyses text, typos, deliberately misspelled words and emojis in context.

  • Classification: easily organise messages into categories of severity.

  • Live streaming protection: automatically moderate millions of comments in real time during live events.

  • Dashboard: get access to insightful metrics that help you engage your community.

  • Easy integration: deploy Bodyguard with minimal fuss via an API on almost any platform.

With us, you can consistently and effectively protect users from harmful content and focus on engaging your community. It’s about keeping people safe while freeing up online spaces for positive interactions, freedom of expression and respectful debate.

Three key points to remember:

  • Moderation means managing what people can say in a respectful way in an online community.

  • The two main ways to moderate a community are human moderation, in which people manually remove negative content, and automatic moderation, in which software automatically moderates content.

  • At Bodyguard, we take automatic moderation to the next level by using AI to remove large amounts of negative content in real time before it causes harm.