AI is having powerful, transformative effects across industries and niches. If you have a brand blog, forum, or other community, you might also think about leveraging AI for content moderation.

Using artificial intelligence in content moderation can provide your brand with several big benefits, especially if you already have an over-taxed content moderation team. If you’re not sure what those benefits are or how AI content moderation can be used to maximum effect, read on.

What Is Content Moderation?

Put simply, content moderation is the ongoing effort to:

• Remove harmful posts, comments, and other user-generated content that contains hate speech in real-time
• Ensure that your brand community is a safe, welcoming place for current and new customers/clients
• Promote a respectful and inclusive brand image to the market

For example, say that you have an online forum for your e-commerce customers. While the online forum is a stellar tool to allow customers to ask questions, form bonds with each other, and even interact with your staff members, trolls or negative online personas will inevitably appear and start to harass others. This harassment can extend to verbal harassment, sexual harassment, doxxing (the revealing of private information to the wider web), and more.

It’s up to your team to moderate your online platform’s content by checking it as it’s posted and enforcing strict rules among community members. Content moderation can include removing posts, editing posts, banning users, setting and adjusting rules, and interacting with the community.

Without content moderation, your brand’s forum, blog comment sections, and other “public squares” would quickly devolve and become unusable.

What Are the Inherent Difficulties With Content Moderation?

Content moderation is very difficult. According to certain research, approximately 41% of people have experienced online harassment, and another 66% of adults have at least witnessed harassing behavior online.

Unfortunately, it’s tough to provide consistent, 100% effective content moderation, even in the best of circumstances. Some of the most common difficulties associated with content moderation include:

• Employee safety and mental health. Your human moderators may be able to remove harmful content, but they have to see it. If the content in question is mentally scarring or dangerous, this can cause high employee turnover and negatively affect your workplace culture
• The sheer amount of content posted each day can outstrip what your employees are able to moderate. In this way, some negative content might slip through the cracks and still affect the other visitors or customers of your brand
• It can be difficult to catch inappropriate materials. Even if your content moderation staff members are well trained, they can still make mistakes from time to time, which can negatively impact the experiences of others at your brand website

Why Is Content Moderation Important?

Despite its inherent difficulties, content moderation is highly important. After all, without content moderation, your online spaces would not be safe for your legitimate customers, and people would leave your brand as soon as bad actors made it an unsafe or unappealing place to congregate.

Crucially, your users may expect you to prioritize content moderation going forward. According to certain statistics, the majority of people in all age brackets believe that stricter content moderation policies are important, especially for social media platforms and posts, like tweets or UGC.

Seen in this light, there’s every reason to devote significant resources to content moderation as soon as you can. Think of content moderation solutions as an effort to protect your brand and the spaces you provide for your true customers. If you can do a good job with content moderation, your customers will be more likely to spend time around your business and its website, and your reputation will improve.

How Can AI Assist With Content Moderation for Your Brand?

AI models and tools are capable of assisting with content moderation in a variety of key ways, plus providing certain major benefits. Generative AI tools leverage datasets and natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to detect inappropriate content in online communities and apps.

ChatGPT is just one example. They often integrate with other content moderation tools via APIs, and they can detect inappropriate content in many different languages, not just English.

When you start using AI tools, you might see the below advantages in no time.

Respond Faster and More Efficiently

For starters, AI can help with content moderation by enabling your team to respond faster and much more efficiently to policy violations. Specifically, an AI tool can quickly scan, identify, and remove a bad post or other content much faster than human review.

In fact, this is why most content moderation is already done with AI tools and automated machine learning algorithms. It's simply more efficient for an AI tool to scan 1000 forum or blog posts, quickly identify which ones are breaking the rules by looking for keywords, and then remove those bad posts in a handful of minutes.

For this reason alone, your content moderation team should use AI to maximum effect. As AI tools become ever more sophisticated and intelligent, they will also have fewer false negatives (e.g., posts that include a bad word but don't actually break content policies for your brand) and become more adept at spotting violations of your content policy that are stealthy by design. In other words, they'll become better at detecting high-level trolls.

Everyone from startups to established brands can benefit from improved response times to issues.

Moderate Content More Accurately

In addition, automated content moderation can assist by allowing your team to moderate that content more accurately.

Consider this example: An AI tool can quickly scan a potentially problematic post, then route that post or content to a human content moderator. The content moderator can quickly look at what the AI pointed out and make a judgment call as to whether or not the content violated the policies of your brand.

Humans can make mistakes when they have to sift through thousands of different posts or pieces of content per day. But when they only have to focus on the edge cases, they make much more accurate, beneficial decisions overall.

In this sense, AI tools will help your content moderators do a much better job! As language models and machine learning models become better, they will assist the moderation process with online content even more impressively.

Consistent Moderation Decisions

The same is true in terms of moderation consistency. Again, human moderators can quickly become burned out when they have to moderate a lot of content and deal with the less-than-stellar members of the community. This can result in moderators making snap decisions, some of which aren’t always for the better.

AI tools alleviate a lot of the pressure that content moderators routinely feel. In addition, AI tools can remind content moderators of content policies, help them make accurate edge case decisions, and so on. All of this will result in a more consistent moderating experience.

The side benefit? Your customers or site visitors will also feel like the moderators are fairer and more consistent in their judgments. That’ll have a ripple effect in your community, boosting your brand reputation and making your online social spaces much more pleasant places in aggregate. When you optimize your types of content moderation, you also improve the scalability of your brand and create a superior user experience.

Can AI Replace Human Content Moderation?

Even with the above benefits, you should never try to use AI tools to replace the human element of your content moderation team.

For one, there will always be edge cases or content posts that may or may not violate the policies you’ve put in place. For all their sophistication, AI tools can’t make judgment calls; it’ll be up to human content moderators to determine whether a piece of content makes the cut or doesn’t.

For another, you need someone on your content moderation team who can deal with members of your community who protest moderation decisions. For instance, if an AI tool removes a post that theoretically violates content policies, the original poster might have a problem with that. Someone on your content moderation team will need to speak with them, determine what exactly happened, and decide whether the AI’s decision stands.

All in all, AI tools should supplement, not replace, human content moderators.

Contact Awesome CX Today

With so many benefits to including AI in your content moderation efforts, it only makes sense to contact Awesome CX by Transom right away. We can help your brand with content moderation to protect your community from online harassment.

Get in touch with one of our representatives today to learn more!

Sources:

Online Harassment 2017 | Pew Research Center

U.S. opinion on social media content moderation policies by age 2022 | Statista

The Growing Role of AI in Content Moderation | Forbes

What Is Content Moderation? | TSPA.org