What’s the difference between human and automatic moderation?
Online content moderation is essential to detect and moderate toxic content that is becoming more frequent on social media, blogs and forums. To protect brand safety and growth companies have traditionally used human moderation, but this can be a costly and time-consuming process.
The Bodyguard team
Every business should offer its customers or online visitors and staff a safe space. But how does human moderation compare to automatic moderation?
Is human moderation still essential?
There are some instances where human moderation is valuable as it can understand the reasoning behind online toxicity. A human moderator can analyse the intention of hateful comments and decide the action to take and how much freedom of speech is allowed.
The negatives of human moderation
The manual review of online toxicity is tiring. This is manual and repetitive work that involves staring at a screen for hours. As a typical example, analysing and moderating 400,000 posts or messages equates to 46 days of work. Human error is inevitable with this volume of reviews, while a machine can filter out toxic comments much faster.
*Good to know :
We receive something like 5 million comments per month. We only manage to moderate 3% of them (150k) with human moderation. It represents 10 full-time people for content moderation! With that kind of volume, it's impossible to manage all that content by manually.” Bodyguard has helped this client better manage their online toxicity through automatic moderation.
Human moderation can also be psychologically damaging. On average, 4-5% of messages are hateful, 20% of which are insults, besides racism, sexism, homophobia, moral harassment, threats...
The benefits of automatic moderation
Content consumption is part of daily life and will continue to grow. With this comes the need for moderation as toxic behaviours increase.
Once a visitor sees a harmful comment on a company’s social media account, they’re likely to lose respect, which results in brand damage. For instance, a Tweet has a lifespan of 18 minutes – that’s 18 minutes’ exposure to thousands of Twitter users. Once a message containing negativity is posted and been read the damage has been done.
Good to know : Bodyguard offers offers personalized and advanced moderation to protect your business
You r an a$$$hole you mf 🐶💩 [--> dog shit]
Toxic words: asshole, motherfucker
Toxic group of words: dog shit
Dedicated to: user
Category: insult
Severity: high
→ Verdict: hateful => delete (depending on the choice of the level of moderation and the actions to be taken)*
Automatic content moderation works 24/7 to combat toxicity. This moderation in real time means insults and disturbing content are deleted immediately, so they’re never viewed. It can be tailored to a business's particular needs, depending on the culture and target market, for example, an online gaming platform would have different content permissions from a pure player social media.
Can human moderation complement automatic moderation?
Successful community management comes from a balance between automated and human moderation. AI can identify, filter or delete quicker than a human. Bodyguard recognises this need for interaction between technology and human moderation and offers a solution that can be customised to suit business needs.
Whilst human moderation is necessary for the strategy needed to manage online content and the filtering out of hate, automatic moderation can handle the process effectively and efficiently.