3 main challenges of content moderation
With content overflowing social media platforms on an enormous scale, the demand for moderation is increasing rapidly. How to cope with the responsibility it carries? Let’s dive into the biggest challenges for modern content moderation.
SM platforms play a crucial role in the current social and economic life, fuelling businesses, shaping trends, and connecting people. The recent debate over the social media platforms’ responsibility for the content they display has put even more pressure on thorough moderation. The line between reasonable moderation and censorship is thin and blurry – that’s why skilled and well-trained moderators, as well as consistent policies, are a must.
The big players on the market almost all outsource their content moderation services (image moderation, text moderation, video moderation). With such big demand for moderating user-generated content, keeping their own departments would be problematic and not really cost-effective. With outsourcing, they can run content moderation 24/7, dealing with a great deal of user-generated content and preventing content that is not in line with the platform’s policies from circulating.
3 main challenges of content moderation
What are the main challenges the content moderation service providers have to deal with nowadays?
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Fake news detection
With techniques like deepfake becoming increasingly sophisticated, it becomes harder and harder to detect fake news – and for social platforms, it’s a no.1 objective. In the current political landscape, they can easily turn into a hate speech spreading tool in the information war, and moderation prevents it from happening. In order to keep the moderation services highest quality, it’s essential for the content moderation company to provide the moderators with training, but also appropriate tools.
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Cultural proximity
Every day, thousands of users send complaints to SM platforms due to their content being unfairly blocked or demonetized. This issue roots partially in outsourcing content moderation. The moderators working in the offshoring model, from the other side of the world, often lack the context to proceed with the moderation process. That’s why some companies switch to nearshoring for content moderation service. In addition, they should be determined to create reliable policies that make it easier for the moderators to make quick decisions and work on quality assurance to avoid unfair bans.
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The increasing volume of content
The volume of content on social platforms is constantly rising, causing the demand for the workforce to increase. Dealing with it can be easier with automation tools involving Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. They can detect the policy-breaking elements in text and speech, automatically redirecting them for further revision. So far, they cannot replace human skills, but they can offload content moderators and make both text moderation and video moderation much easier.
