The ever-increasing number of spammers and scammers on the internet, particularly on social media have been affecting several brand strategies and business reputation on an internally destructive level. As a website owner, it is your core responsibility to devise effective countermeasures to protect your online reputation against hostile user-generated content.
One ideal way is to search for a company that offers the best content moderation services available at present. By teaming up with specialists in reviewing and analyzing content in a variety of user posts, you put up a stronger barrier for your digital presence against unfavorable content that may tarnish your reputation and customer safety. They enhance and increase the weight of the guidelines and ground rules established on your forums, websites, or social pages. In the long run, you will have diminished the probability of your followers and customers falling prey to scammers and defaming content.
While having an in-depth knowledge of content review and moderation process and knowing how it really works is the best way to get started, it still pays to take the time to understand each of the different types of moderation methods available and find out which of these are your best options.
There are several types of content moderation methods that you can choose from, each with their unique strengths and weaknesses. Maximizing their full potential and knowing which form of regulating UGC best suits your need enables you to gear your business against the varying circumstances you may encounter in the future.
1. Pre-Moderation
It is a method for scrutinizing user posts wherein contents posted on a particular online platform undergo a series of reviews before it gets live, hence its name.
It is best used for highly sensitive websites such as dating sites, celebrity social pages, fan bases, and online portals for young audiences as it helps reduce any controversy that a particular post may deliver to the public.
Among other moderation methods, pre-moderation offers the highest security since moderators get rid of a damaging post before it is publicly viewed online. This means that the post may or may not ever be seen again if it is deemed offensive, malicious, or simply not abiding by the community/platform guidelines and policies. Due to its high-security standards, threads within a website or social media page die faster than usual as users need to wait for the website administrator to approve their submissions before it is posted.
2. Post-Moderation
Post-moderation is a technique where content is checked and reviewed after it becomes live and accessible to the digital community. All contents are free to be posted in real-time without the need for an admin or moderator to review it first.
Unlike pre-moderation, this method fosters an open communication for subscribers and followers and it encourages them to interact with each other in real-time. It paves the way for consistently extending any thread on the platform which helps you gain more traffic on your site.
Despite its adherence to user convenience, it also has its weakness. Since every content is not reviewed beforehand, some offensive and inappropriate content still has the chance to slip into the cracks and make it to the public. To minimize this, moderators must be fast enough to handle such content before it can cause any more damage.
3. Reactive Moderation
Relying solely on community members and website users, reactive moderation allows users to get rid of content deemed inappropriate or outright hostile to their eyes by clicking on call-to-action buttons available on the platform. These buttons are usually represented by a flag icon (🏳️).
Since reactive moderation gives users full authority to report contents, it works well when combined with pre-moderation and post-moderation as it adds another layer of security all throughout. It helps the moderators keep up whenever they miss some content that needs re-assessing.
4. Distributed Moderation
Distributed moderation works directly with community members by creating polls. The polls serve as a notification when content posted fails to abide by the community or website’s ground rules and standards before it is completely deleted on the community platform.
Although this moderation technique uses crowdsourcing for a more interactive and productive atmosphere in the community platform, it offers the lowest level of security. On its own, it is exclusively dependent on self-moderation and is therefore time-consuming. Moderators need to wait for the votes to be tallied, and that still does not include online trolls trying to mess up the votes. If you want to use it for online platforms and social media pages, do so by combining it with the other three content moderation methods.
Overall distributed monitoring of UGC is best suited for small businesses or organizations where members can be controlled when posting something.
5. Automated Moderation
Unlike the first four moderation methods which rely on human moderators, automated moderation is instant and self-regulating. Meaning, this process is powered by software programmed to handle predetermined harmful content. It deletes, replaces, bans, or rejects a particular content in one go.
A distinct perk of automated moderation is it can block the IP address of a particular user or community members that are tagged as abusive to prevent them from coming back to the site and cause further damage. Also, it diminishes the need for additional manpower.
However, since automated moderation is powered by digital tools, the process falls short on reasoning and interpretation that only a real human operator can do. Moreover, the profanity filters of an automated moderator can easily be bypassed by various sophisticated methods.
What is the Best Type of Moderation Method For You?
Content Moderation may be the key to help your business battle against online content that threatens your brand reputation. But it is more important to be smarter in selecting the right type of moderation methods that best suit your online platform standards and conditions. Get yourself acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses provided by this article as these help you map your next move for staying protected in a globally accessible space crowded with individuals with diverse agendas.