What is moderation and why is it important?

If you run a social platform, a Facebook page, a gaming community, sport fan forums or any kind of social media account, you’ll need to understand moderation.

Sadly, the online world is filled with toxic behaviour, from body shaming to sexism, racism, homophobia, harassment and threats. So, it’s up to the owners of online platforms to filter out, or ‘moderate’ content, to protect the people using their service.

But what exactly is moderation? How does it work and what are the best ways to do it? In this article we’ll explain all these things and more, as we guide you through the basics.

A quick definition of moderation

Simply put, moderation means managing what people can say in an online community. It can be done via written rules, unwritten rules or various forms of action. Its purpose is to protect people from negative content or hurtful behaviour and create a safer space for community members.

Most online platforms deal with large amounts of user-generated content. This content needs to be constantly moderated, i.e. monitored, assessed and reviewed to make sure it follows community guidelines and legislation.

Different methods of moderation

There are two main ways to moderate content. The first is human moderation. This involves manually reviewing and policing content across a platform. As you can imagine, human moderation is often time-consuming and expensive. It also comes with a host of additional issues:

• It’s extremely repetitive work.
• It has a very small margin for error.
• It can be deeply unpleasant to carry out.
• There’s a considerable time pressure, as negative content should ideally be removed immediately to have no impact. (It is in the minutes and hours following the publication of hateful content that it does considerable damage).

The second type of moderation is automated moderation. Software is used to automatically moderate content according to specific rules that have been created for the well-being of users. It saves time, expense and the effort of human moderation while delivering greater consistency and incredible accuracy.

What makes our way of moderating different?

At Bodyguard, we take automatic moderation to the next level. Our smart solution uses artificial intelligence to analyze massive volumes of content in real time, removing negative content before it can cause harm. Bodyguard is fully customizable and comes with an intuitive dashboard so you can manage all your accounts and platforms in one place. You also get access to a wide range of metrics, helping you engage with your community on a deeper level and gain insights into positive and negative content.

Our key features at a glance:

• AI moderation: our solution intelligently filters out content, then shows you how it’s been classified and what action has been taken.
• Contextual analysis: bodyguard analyzes text, typos, deliberately misspelled words and emojis in context.
• Classification: easily organize messages into categories of severity.
• Live streaming protection: automatically moderate millions of comments in real time during live events.
• Dashboard: get access to insightful metrics that help you engage your community.
• Easy integration: deploy Bodyguard with minimal fuss via an API on almost any platform.

With Bodyguard, you can consistently and effectively protect users from harmful content and focus on engaging your community and cultivating brand loyalty.

It’s about keeping people safe and creating online spaces that are primed for positive interactions, freedom of expression and respectful debate.

In a nutshell:

• Moderation means managing what people can say in an online community.
• There are two types of moderation: automated and human.
• Bodyguard takes automated moderation to the next level by using AI to remove large amounts of negative content in real time, before it causes harm.

For more information on how we can protect your brand from the negative impact of toxicity on your social media channels and other platforms, talk to us.