What is Content Moderation, what is the future of that ?

Content Moderation. What it means? Trending for online media platform 

Content Moderation means to control over or screening the content(User generated Content) in an organized manner that is getting published in Social media, internet sites and other online outlets. Content moderation is done based  on certain norms and regulations or the Policies which varies depends on the platform.

Why Content Moderation is Needed.?

What if you are using any social media platform with your parents and some compromising picture came up suddenly or any adult videos pops up. 

What if,  you are posting any picture of your own and some random person make use of slang as a comment which is called as targeted cursing.

What if someone use hate speech on anyone.

What if Drug peddler is selling drug through Social media.

Then---

Will it be a good platform to use....? People will take a few second to logout from the platform. Hence it is of tremendous importance to keep the platform clean. Social media platform is a community like we have in our colony or in Apartment societies. Make friendships make relations, know each other through likes, comments, picture, status update etc.

The Platform must be suitable for the user to use. Hence platform need moderation. The term User Generated content generally used by the back end moderator team. We post the content but for them it's the user generated content. Overall safety of the community depends on the moderation team. This makes their role crucial which is called as Content Moderator.

As much as we are entering into the digital world, the importance of moderation is increasing rapidly and hence the job prospects of moderator.

Fundamentally in a sentence we can say moderation is needed to protect the site from liability, negative publicity and to curate and control user experience.

Types of Content Moderation?

Content Moderation are basically of five types. Post Content Moderation, Pre content Moderation, Distributed content moderation, Automated Content Moderation, Reactive Content Moderation.

All types have their different purpose and is manual controlled or automatically controlled.

Manual controlled are Human controlled Moderation and the Automatic moderation are AI based moderation where feeding of data to a machine is needed. Which we called as Machine Learning.

Pre Content Moderation-  Pre moderation is done before the user generated content(UGC) is getting published. Pre-moderation is the adverse moderation process which prevents the content to get publish in the online platform. Please remember the platform mentioned here is not the social media platform only, it can be market place like Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba etc. may be social media platform., might be micro blogging sites like twitter. The fundamental is to restrict the unfavorable content/media in the online platforms.

Mostly AI is used here. Human moderation is also done but the fact is that, it takes time which thus gives a bad user experience. Hence industries are trying to move  rapidly towards AI and Machine Learning.

Facts: Content are studied and keywords are feed to the system to analyse the context. This looks very easy to gather in mind but the fact is that its tough when you are doing sentimental analysis on certain context which Twitter is doing. Not only there are text based context, there are other formats of data which can be GIF(Graphic interchange format), jpeg, TIFF, PNG Photo, MP4, AVI, FLV Videos.

Different types of images are feed to the system to help the machine to study which contains adult content and which is not. Higher the feeding of data higher will  be the accuracy of the system  to classify.



Post Moderation: User generated content are checked/screened after they are getting published(goes on live in the platform) may be in the form of post, comments, videos, pictures etc. etc. This are then screened manually or automatic by AI. Then action been taken accordingly
a) If found Violating- Take down
b) If found Non Violating-
Sometimes Pre-moderation and post moderation occurs back to back and its a case specific. If the context contains certain specific keywords whereas AI  is not getting the actual context of the content, it is then routed for human moderation for final action. The system algorithm is so complex that it can be either ways to make sure the platform is absolute free from unwanted things(Criminal violation or which is illegal, inappropriate).
Eg- Quora, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

A recent example is Carry Minati's content which is removed from the You tube because of community guidelines violation of you tube- the video is about roasting and comparing TikTok(Now banned in India) with You tube. Video titled "YouTube vs TikTok – The End."

Reactive Moderation: It's not only the business responsibility to have a control over the content which is to be allowed or not. But it's also users responsibility to have a control over the content. Hence if someone found that the content is not suitable, the user can flagged the user/report the content the moderation team will take an action on that.

For example- You will see there is an report option beside every comment, this is meant to report the content if not found suitable from the user's perspective.

Distributed Moderation: It's the rarest moderation method, which relies on voting system. Its a type of democratic country voting. In which a member of the community will raise the issue and make a voting system on that particular content and based on everyone collaborative decision the decision is taken.
 A popular example of such moderation system used by slashdot which is a social news website called as "News for Nerds".

Automated Moderation: Automated moderation is becoming increasingly popular with more sophisticated  filters and tools. These are used to reject or flag user submission.

The most basic version is the Filter which catches the words from a list and act as a preset rule to either highlight, replace or ban the word or the content. Word filter is such type of filter where all the list of banned words are kept. Similar tool is IP ban list.



All the moderation have there individual Pros and Cons. Based on the requirement of the online platform specific moderation is used. At present most of the moderation technique is moving towards automation but the human touch will be always needed.

All manual moderation is done by human and is known as Moderators in a basic language. They follow certain guidelines before taking any decisions.