what is content moderation

Content moderation is the process of reviewing and monitoring user-generated content on online platforms to ensure that it meets certain standards and guidelines. This includes removing irrelevant, obscene, illegal, harmful, or insulting content, and applying warning labels to problematic content. Content moderation is a common practice across online platforms that rely heavily on user-generated content, such as social media platforms, online marketplaces, sharing economy, dating sites, communities, and forums. There are different methods by which companies can decide how content should be moderated, including pre-moderation, post-moderation, reactive moderation, distributed moderation, and automated moderation. The purpose of content moderation is to protect online users by keeping unwanted, illegal, inappropriate content off the platform, and to ensure that the content complies with legal and regulatory requirements, site/community guidelines, user agreements, and norms of taste and acceptability for that site and its cultural context. Content moderators deal with all incoming comments and messages on social media platforms, both public and private, and require the ability to deal with challenging work. The main types of content moderation are pre-moderation, post-moderation, and reactive moderation. Content moderation is critical for any brands social media strategy to ensure that their social channels and their comments sections are safe, friendly, and pleasant places to be.