Content moderation is the practice of monitoring and filtering user-generated content submitted to your website. It works in many ways, with each of them depending on the type of content being moderated and the type of moderation being carried out. It ensures that the text and image content posted on your site, forum, or social media profiles are free from negative opinions, fraudulent claims, and unverified information that can damage your reputation and your relationship with your demographic.Moreover, this service helps promote order in your online community, and ensures that every bit of information follows the posting guidelines you implement.

What kinds of content are moderated?

Any type of content that is allowed on your website can be subjected to moderation. You can moderate everything from images and videos, to text contents in the form of comments. Of course, it depends on whether you want each post to be filtered or if you only want a certain type of content to undergo moderation.

For images, your moderator can check if the submission passes your quality standards — if its subject is appropriate to your audience, or if it contains the metadata and caption you require. These same rules may apply to video submissions, but the process here can be more technical and complex. Video moderation may involve audio quality assurance, transcription, and redundancy checking.

For comments, you can use tools or filters to detect banned words and put flagged comments up for editing, approval, or rejection. Text submissions should also be reviewed for accuracy and sensibility to prevent potential law violations, cyber bullying incidents, and damage to your brand’s image.

What are the types of content moderation?

The two most common types are pre-moderation and post-moderation. With pre-moderation, every submission goes through your staff first before it gets published on your site, ensuring that nothing undesirable becomes visible on your public pages. While this is a popular choice for websites that want better control over their visitors’ activities, many users find pre-moderation detrimental to the social interactions within an online community for the delay it causes.

On the other hand, post-moderation allows interactions to be instant and conversational, which Internet citizens prefer, but the better user experience it brings may come at the expense of the website’s security and quality. That’s why some community managers who let submissions be posted before getting reviewed implement reactive and distributed moderation alongside their post-moderating practice. What they do is that they permit users to report violators or bury offensive content. In Internet speak, reactive and distributed moderation is known as “downvote” or “thumbs down.”

Who needs content moderation?

While content should be moderated in every website that welcomes submissions, those with a child-friendly image and those whose topics can stir defamation from contributors need moderation even more. Celebrity websites where bashing is common should employ a content moderator to protect the interest of the people they write about. Moderating content also saves you from possible legal problems from people who felt their intellectual rights were infringed by posts you failed to monitor.

If you publish time-sensitive content like news or opinionated ones like product reviews, pre-moderation is ideal for you. But if you manage a massive community where user-generated content should be seen real-time, post-moderation might work best. Hiring a content moderation team shouldn t even be a question; it should be a must. Without a moderation scheme in place, you are putting your website at risk of abuse and legal violations.