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Fast and reliable content moderation outsourcing has become a non-negotiable element for countless organizations. Whether you run an ecommerce platform and need to ensure all product images and descriptions are accurate or you manage a dating site where you need to make sure users are exchanging appropriate messages, content moderation is critical for any business with lots of user-generated content.
Without a solid plan for content moderation, digital spaces can quickly become toxic and your brand image may be negatively impacted as a result. Maintaining a safe and welcoming digital environment is paramount for these use cases and countless others, yet many organizations lack the bandwidth to perform their own content moderation.
In recent years, several solutions have entered the market to offer outsourced content moderation services and tools.
In this article, we’ll dive into the definition and types of content moderation, then explore the latest and most effective services and companies offering content moderation outsourcing.
What is Content Moderation?
Content moderation is the practice of monitoring, managing, filtering, and analyzing user-generated content on digital platforms to ensure compliance with community guidelines, data privacy best practices, and legal standards.
This crucial task helps maintain a positive online experience for users while preventing the spread of harmful or inappropriate content. The task of content moderation seeks to filter out content that falls under the following categories:
- Violence or threats
- Profanity
- Sexual content
- Racism or hate speech
- Substance abuse
- Scams
- Personal identifying information
- Suggestive images
- Weapons
It can also uncover grammar mistakes, typos, and other content errors.
Of course, every online community is different. While strict community guidelines might apply to a workplace digital chat or ecommerce platform, they may not all apply to a gaming chat room.
These nuances mean that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to content moderation. This is why the best content moderation services offer customization alongside accuracy and speed.
Types of Content Moderation
Under the umbrella of content moderation, five key buckets describe the timing and methods involved in filtering through the content.
- Manual pre-moderation: In this type of content moderation, users must submit their content for review before it is published and visible to the larger group. Then, a human moderator reads through each piece of content to ensure that it meets platform standards.
- Post-moderation: Post-moderation means that user generated content is reviewed after it is published. The timeline for this review can vary depending on the moderation methods being used.
- Reactive moderation: In reactive moderation, some user generated content may not be reviewed at all. Rather, content moderation occurs only based on user reports. Many social media platforms primarily use this type of content moderation.
- Distributed moderation: Distributed moderation is similar to reactive moderation in that it relies on community feedback and engagement to filter out content that does not adhere to site guidelines. The difference is that reactive moderation relies on a moderator to intervene after a user report has been made, while distributed moderation generally leverages a voting system. This democratic approach lands highly-voted content in the most visible areas of the site, while negative votes can hide the content.
- Proactive or automated moderation: Instead of relying on staff or volunteers to moderate user generated content, the proactive or automated moderation approach leverages tools like AI. Using machine learning and AI, organizations can automatically filter content and uphold platform standards in a cost-effective and scalable manner.
Each of these approaches to content moderation has its own unique benefits and drawbacks. The specific type of content, site guidelines, and volume of content can help organizations determine which approach is best for their goals.
What is Content Moderation Outsourcing?
Online communities have the potential for incredible growth. This is exciting, but it also means that scalable content moderation strategies are essential. Content moderation outsourcing allows for scalable moderation without inflating your content moderation team.
It involves partnering with external entities to handle the moderation of user-generated content. These partnerships may come in the form of outside companies or services, or in the form of tools that organizations can implement and track internally.
Content moderation tools are software solutions like APIs and AI software that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically filter, sort, and flag inappropriate content. There is a wide range of quality in tools like these, and choosing one that can continuously adapt to the nuances of human communication is crucial.
Some companies provide content moderation services. These are generally specialized firms providing human moderation teams capable of understanding context, cultural nuances, and complex content. The human touch makes them adept at handling ambiguous situations that automated tools may struggle with, while the drawbacks lie in timing and scalability.
Relying on a team of humans works well for sites with manageable content volume, but after a certain threshold, the lag time on human intervention may stand in the way of consistently upheld community standards.
Due to the benefits and drawbacks listed, many organizations seek a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of AI and human content moderation solutions. Combining the efficiency of automated tools with the discernment of human moderators, hybrid moderation ensures a balanced and comprehensive content filtering strategy while preserving speed.
This blend allows for the swift handling of routine tasks by automated tools while providing the human touch for more intricate cases.
Best Content Moderation Outsourcing Services & Companies
Selecting a high-quality content moderation outsourcing service or company is essential to maintaining a positive brand reputation. From avoiding poor image quality in ecommerce to protecting community members from unwanted explicit content on dating sites, these tasks are essential for your success and brand image.
The exact content moderation service that best suits your business will depend on your site standards, priorities, budget, and communication formats.
1. Membrace.ai
Membrace provides content validation and enrichment services using a model that takes hybrid to the next level for ecommerce sites. Instead of simply using both human and AI feedback to moderate content, Membrace is developing the industry’s only Hybrid AI. This solution combines advanced AI technology with in-house machine learning models to continuously learn from human interactions.
How does this work? Just like in most hybrid content moderation formats, whenever a piece of content is too nuanced or complex for AI to solve on its own, a human expert intervenes. The differentiating factor is that the Membrace model then learns from the human answer, thus becoming increasingly precise with every case solved.
For including e-commerce sites, online retailers, food tech, classifieds, e-grocery, and PIM/PXM platforms, Membrace helps tailor the images, text, prices, and category details to be more accurate and high-quality. From price matching and deduplication to image adjustments and resolution upscale, Membrace can smooth out the errors to upgrade the quality of your ecommerce website.
Membrace can detect spam, nudity, profanity, clickbait, violence, and forbidden goods. From seller uploads to buyer reviews, Membrace provides fast moderation for any user generated content type and volume.
Key Features:
- User generated content moderation for text, image, and video
- Hybrid AI model in which machine learning continuously improves based on human feedback
- Highly scalable and flexible
- Moderation occurs in real time
- Additional content validation, enrichment, and improvement services
Membrace is the top tool for ensuring that brand quality persists and all ecommerce visitors feel safe.
2. Sightengine
Sightengine is a moderation API that works to automatically filter unwanted content from videos and images, even live streams. There are no human moderators involved in this solution, which can impact the effectiveness of their content moderation services.
Key Features:
- Analyze and filter all user-generated content, including text, photos, videos, live streams and usernames
- Hand-select the models that are relevant to your use case
- Custom moderation rules
- Filter chats and texts for inappropriate language, sexual content, and personal information
3. Besedo
Besedo specializes in content moderation and focuses on use cases including gaming, dating, the sharing economy, marketplaces, and online chat communities. As a hybrid AI and human content moderation solution, Besedo leverages ML algorithms as well as human content moderators.
Key Features:
- Algorithms that learn and adapt
- Data protection features
- Moderates user profile images and text
- Responses within 24 hours
4. Vue.ai
Vue.ai is an AI-powered data platform that helps users create a customer data taxonomy, extract data from documents, make recommendations for sales teams, and more. Their content moderation solution solely uses AI.
Key Features:
- Fully AI, no human moderators
- Consistent rule interpretation
- Data labeling
- Image recognition
5. Cogito
Cogito is a data annotation and labeling provider helping organizations create tailored AI and machine learning programs. On top of content moderation, Cogito offers document processing, generative AI, and computer vision solutions.
Key Features:
- Combination of human and AI content moderation
- Evaluates images, videos, text, and audio formats
- Moderation for metaverse communities
- Detects bugs and errors as well as offensive and inappropriate content
- Social monitoring to report on brand perceptions
6. iMerit
iMerit is a data annotation provider that delivers a hybrid solution to content moderation. Using a combination of annotation technology and subject matter experts, iMerit interprets text, images, and video content to filter out explicit and unwanted content.
Key Features:
- Subject matter experts involved in content moderation
- Image, text, and video moderation
- Custom-calibrated throughput requirements
- Ecommerce, social media, and healthcare applications
7. Sutherland Global
From generative AI and content services to design and analytics, Sutherland Global works to automate and transform various business processes while keeping the human experience at the center. The content moderation services leverage both AI and human experts.
Key Features:
- Image, text, video, review, and blog moderation
- Fact-checking and remediation practices
- Ecommerce and user generated content applications
- Content Guardians available for human intervention
8. WebPurify
WebPurify specializes in image and video moderation. Offering the option to use their turnkey criteria or custom criteria, this provider makes it easy for organizations with varying needs to begin moderating visual content. In this hybrid solution, human moderators help make decisions regarding image content and appropriateness.
Key Features:
- Live video moderation capabilities
- Real-time AI results combined with advanced human input
- Offensive intent detection
- Scalable to hundreds of thousands of pieces of daily content
9. Bazaarvoice
Bazaarvoice brings user generated content together with ecommerce websites to personalize the experience of online shopping. Bazaarvoice helps brands generate and leverage user reviews, product samples, social commerce, and other strategies.
Bazaarvoice provides a review moderation service to ensure that all messages adhere to brand guidelines.
Key Features:
- Filters reviews for profanity, authenticity, and on-brand content
- Filters reviews for pricing information
- Leverages natural language processing tools and human intervention as needed
10. Hive Moderation
Hive Moderation uses an automated deep learning model to moderate content in a variety of formats. This platform produces tagged metadata to help you filter, sort, and understand user generated content.
Key Features:
- Moderates images, text, audio, live stream, and even GIFs
- Returns 50+ metadata classes
- AI-generated content detection
11. Smart Moderation
The Smart Moderation app moderates comments on social media platforms to ensure that community guidelines are followed. Smart Moderation is an AI-powered tool that can scan websites and social media pages to identify unwanted comments and remove them.
Key Features:
- Detection of illegal content, trolls, spam, and inappropriate content
- One-click connection with social media profiles
- Real-time monitoring
- Customizable settings to meet any moderation requirements
Use the Best Content Moderation Service
Companies need a content moderation service they can rely on. With consistent and effective content moderation, businesses can uphold their brand image, keep communities safe, and adhere to legal and data privacy requirements.
If you’re looking for a way to keep busy ecommerce sites streamlined and polished and your sellers and buyer content up to your site standards, choose Membrace.
Membrace can handle large volumes of content with accuracy and fidelity to your business. It quickly detects and responds to spam, nudity, profanity, clickbait, violence, forbidden goods and services, and more with the industry’s only Hybrid AI.
Opt for the ever-learning power of the Membrace hybrid AI for precision and scalability. Get started by booking your demo below.
