language-content-moderation

LANGUAGE CONTENT MODERATION: HOW IT HELPS BRANDS WITH MULTILINGUAL CLIENT BASE

Language content moderation is the systematic approach of screening user-generated content (UGC) based on specific guidelines to determine whether the content is appropriate or not for a given site, social media, or a public platform. As a result, the UGC that is deemed unacceptable for a given site, community, locality, or jurisdiction is removed by content moderators.

These days, in addition to traditional promotion, brands are heavily relying on UGC to maximize their reach, humanize their marketing campaigns, build trust, drive engagement, and more. Since UGC is seen as an authentic source among customers to guide purchasing decisions, it is increasingly becoming more important for sites, social media, and other platforms to enforce community guidelines, specific rules, and the laws of relevant jurisdictions. Besides, the posting of inappropriate content can also lead to legal issues such as criminal offenses and civil liability. Therefore, the importance of content moderation is becoming increasingly important.

The style followed for content moderation can vary for different sites and platforms. It’s primarily because the guidelines for UGC are usually set at a site or platform level and these guidelines often reflect a platform’s brand and reputation.

Benefits of Language Content Moderation

While quality user-generated content (UGC) can help businesses raise brand awareness, build trust, and increase engagement, potentially harmful content can bring the reputation of even established businesses down, affect users’ experience negatively, and may also lead to legal issues. That’s why today’s companies can immensely benefit from language content moderation.

Here is how language content moderation can help businesses:

Protects Your Brand Image

An enormous amount of user-generated content in the form of images, videos, articles, tweets, and reviews is uploaded on the Internet every single second. This makes the exposure of a brand/platform to harmful content inevitable.

However, with the help of a competent team of content moderators, brands can significantly reduce the existence of offensive and demeaning content posted by internet trolls and bullies. These moderators are well-trained to continuously monitor and screen content and ensure that users don’t violate the boundaries and guidelines of the brand they represent.

Consequently, content moderation helps develop a more positive environment and experience for users, allows everyone to interact freely without getting exposed to upsetting content, and builds a safe community. Hence, it also results in enhanced business credibility.

Helps Identify Patterns in Users’ Behavior

With the help of human content moderators, it becomes easy for you to recognize patterns in the content and the way people engage with your brand. By categorizing and tagging content based on key properties, you can draw actionable insights about the behavior and opinions of your customers and followers.

Improve search engine rankings and traffic

Around 70 percent of people consider UGC reviews before making a purchasing decision. Meaning, if the content that targets your brand is fake, hateful, or upsetting, it can negatively affect your bottom line. The good thing is that its vice-versa is also true. Properly moderated user-generated content can help drive more traffic to a brand’s website and social channels and improve rank on search engines.

Scale your campaigns without any hassle

When you have an efficient language content moderation policy in place, you can rest assured that your legitimate users are not exposed to harmful content and generate crowdsourced content for marketing and campaigns without worrying about negative effects.

Refine the consumers’ buying process and behavior

Advertising tricks and gimmicks such as pop-ups, auto-play videos, and banners are no longer as effective as an increasing number of people are using ad blockers and trying other ways to avoid them.

On the other hand, user-generated content has been proven to be more impactful than original content generated by brands and even influencers’ content. What’s more, consumers look for user-generated content online on their own before they make any purchase decisions.

Since they put their trust more in referrals, customers sharing their experiences, and what others say about a brand, content moderation can help improve and better guide the buying process and behavior of consumers.

Improve customer relations and experiences

When brands collaborate with real customers/users for content generation, it shows that they are more authentic, accessible, and friendly. This, in turn, enhances customer relations and a brand’s trustworthiness.

When you have a brand image that inspires people to talk and engage with your brand, not only your brand admirers but also others will want to interact with you. That’s where the screening of user-generated content for appropriateness and relevance becomes a necessity.

Having an experienced content moderation team can help you eliminate posts that contain insults, threats of violence, sexual harassment, or inappropriate content that your users and customers may find upsetting and offensive. They will help you increase your brand’s visibility online and boost audience engagement while cultivating a sense of safety and responsible behavior in the community.

So, if you also want to boost your brand’s visibility, credibility, and authenticity while maintaining a safe community, you should look forward to choosing a reputable agency that can provide you with a skilled and well-trained multilingual team of content moderators.

How Language Content Moderation Is Done

Language content moderation can be done online and offline.

Offline: In Excel/Word Files
Online: Forums, Public Portals, Social Media, and more

Typically, there are platform-specific rules and guidelines to determine whether the content is permissible or not. While moderating the content, certain kinds of issues are addressed, including but not limited to:

Harmful speech and abuse
Expressions of racism
Child sexual exploitation and abuse
Sexual harassment
Discriminatory speech based on gender, sexual preferences, and religion
Content that promotes terrorism
Pornography and sexual content shared on public social networks
Content that contains violence
Fake information created for disturbing the peace
Misleading that compromises the outcome of an event
Privacy, Copyright and Trademark violations
Content that threatens physical, emotional, or informational harms

To vet the content, there are both human content moderators and AI moderators. When using automated moderation, there is always a need for human intervention because AI moderation can result in too many false negatives and false positives, especially where contextual knowledge is needed. Thus, AI moderation must be coupled with human content moderation.

One great example to understand this is YouTube’s automated moderation. In an interview, Neal Mohan, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer stated that the lack of human oversight has caused AI moderators to take down about 11 million videos and none of them broke community guidelines.

Parameters/Guidelines for Language Content Moderation

Depending on the brand and the project, guidelines can vary for language content moderation. Some of the important parameters that content moderators keep in mind are as follows:

Rules regarding acceptable behavior that may include revealing personal information, naming staff with negative intent, defamatory content, intolerance, hectoring, insulting, bullying, etc.
Sanctions for breaching the content moderation rules regarding content removal, editing, temporary suspension of access privileges, and permanent blocking
Guidelines for etiquette in the context of a project to control poor behaviors and promote positive behaviors
Policy regarding post-hoc moderation
Protocols set around user-generated content that breaches a site’s rules
The efficient use of automated filtering and human moderators

Language content moderation services are playing a critical role, especially for businesses with a multilingual and multicultural customer base. For such businesses, if harmful content gets published in the source language somehow after passing through automated moderation, it will get published in other targeted languages as well. In order to tackle this challenge, more companies have started to invest in multilingual content moderation. For that, they are relying on human content moderators more than ever.

What to Do and What Not to Do in Content Moderation

As parameters and guidelines for content moderation don’t remain the same for each site and platform, the do’s and don’ts of content moderation are also not fixed. Many factors need to be accounted for when moderating content in a way that is best suited for the specific needs of your brand’s site or platform.

However, there are still some things that you can consider for determining what to do and what not to do while practicing content moderation.

What to Do in Content Moderation

Choose the moderation method depending on what type of website your company has, what type of content you host on your site, and what your customer base consists of.
Set up clear rules and guidelines for content moderation so that everyone involved in the content moderation understands what kind of content you want to flag as inappropriate.
Moderate content on major platforms where your users and visitors review your products and services, discuss your brand, and share about your brand.
Consider all types of content, including text, videos, images, and one-to-one messages for content moderation to ensure that your users enjoy a pleasant experience.

What Not to Do in Content Moderation

Do not misinterpret good, quality content and reject it just because of its negative nature. For example, genuine negative reviews after purchase need not be removed as long as they don’t contain harsh language because eliminating them can impact users’ trust.
Do not wait to get started with content moderation until it’s too late. As a growing business, you will often see spikes in the amount of content posted to your platforms, and not having a content moderation strategy and team in place can eventually hurt your brand.
Do not underutilize the resources you can use for content moderation. At present, a variety of content moderation tools are available for use. Use top AI moderation tools such as Crowdsource, Taggbox, and Juicer along with a team of skilled human moderators.

AI-based social media content moderation tools are specially designed for social media platforms to avoid inappropriate comments and user-generated content. Once they filter out the inappropriate content or escalate it for human moderation, you can embed and use the content for your digital platforms or take the help of human moderators for proper screening of content.

Hire Language Content Moderation Services from Semantics

Semantics is an esteemed globally-operated translation agency with a dedicated and adept team of more than 4,000+ linguists that enable us to support 150+ languages. Therefore, we are uniquely positioned to offer a wide range of services including translation, localization, transcription, interpretation, subtitling, language training, language content moderation, and more. We have undertaken language content moderation projects in multiple Indian and global languages before for OYO, Make My Trip, and several other clients.

To protect your brand and strengthen your position among multilingual customers, we are always ready to serve you with our robust team of human multilingual content moderators coupled with the power of advanced tools and technology.

Frequently Asked Question

What is Human Content Moderation?

When the user-generated content submitted to a site/online platform is monitored and screened by humans manually for the evaluation of its appropriateness, it is called human content moderation.

Human moderators follow the specific guidelines and rules set by the brand they are acting as an agent for. They help the brand protect its fan base by removing illegal, inappropriate, and offending content from its site, reviews, and platforms.

Human moderation is the best approach where the nature of the content is complex and its classification requires contextual knowledge.

What is Automated Content Moderation?

Automated content moderation refers to the moderation where user-generated content posted online is accepted, rejected, or sent for human moderation automatically depending on a platform’s specific standards and guidelines.

Automated content moderation is preferred where online platforms want the user-generated content to go live instantly while ensuring safe interaction.

What is AI Content Moderation?

AI content moderation refers to the screening of content done by machine learning models that are empowered with Artificial Intelligence (AI). They efficiently detect spam, unwanted, and offensive user-generated content using filters and approve, refuse, or escalate the content without human intervention.

Here, the filters are considered as general rules that are set by a platform to find unacceptable content. The best thing about filters is that they are easy to create, edit, and change. You can also use them in case of sudden rules changes, where AI content moderation software hasn’t yet updated (as training AI models takes time and a large and reliable data set).

Which type of content moderation is best?

The cost of interpretation services varies greatly depending on the language requested, the type of interpreter required, the experience of the interpreter, your industry, the duration & location of the appointment, and the certification required. However, you can contact us anytime and tell us your requirements to get a quote.

While the 8-second attention span of humans is quite debatable, it is certain that humans cannot be fully attentive the entire time. On the other hand, AI tools and automated moderation aren’t as reliable because, no matter how many filters and criteria you use to screen content, tools, and software cannot comprehend complicated content and may flag appropriate as inappropriate and vice-versa.

Therefore, the best way to practice content moderation is to combine the power of human moderation, AI moderation, and automated filters as they can mitigate the risks caused by each other’s limitations.

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