Picture this: your organisation spends time curating brand-building content for your social media channels. And once you click ‘post’, the public has a (somewhat) free reign to comment. What if they comment inappropriately or share offensive material? It reflects on your brand. So, who safeguards your content? Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly dominant role in social media content moderation. Let’s explore automated moderation, its benefits and how it could also potentially put your social media content at risk. 

Human vs. automated content moderation 

Social media moderation refers to managing and reviewing user-generated content (UGC) and activity on online social platforms. This includes monitoring for: 

• cyberbullying 
• hate speech 
• profanity 
• violent or pornographic images 
• misleading information and more.  

Some social media channels are more susceptible to these issues than others. 

Generally, the social media team are responsible for moderating your content. However, doing this manually can be very time-consuming. Here’s where automated moderation, driven by AI, lends a helping hand.  

AI can enable faster, more accurate moderation meaning less subjective review by human moderators. The relentlessness of social media content is where automated moderation can be advantageous. But while it improves efficiency and consistency, it can present risks. 

Benefits and risks of automated content moderation 

Does your organisation have social media community guidelines? These stipulate general rules of conduct on your channel to help deter inappropriate content from being posted in the first instance. Here is an example. But even with these guidelines, users can still post content that, intentionally or not, violates these.  

Here are some types of automated moderation and the pros and cons of each.  

• Keyword filtering: looks for words or phrases that could be offensive or misleading. If any content meets these criteria, it could be automatically rejected. 
  Benefit: accurately identifies harmful content, including symbols and slang, and flags it for removal. It can also limit the spread of misinformation on social media, limiting your exposure to misleading content about your organisation and any legal implications.
  Risk: doesn’t understand nuance and might unintentionally suppress free expression by misinterpreting culturally specific content or satire as harmful. This restriction could confuse or frustrate your community, reducing confidence in your brand.  

• Image recognition: scans images and identifies any content that could be deemed sexually explicit or inappropriate, like violence.
  Benefit: quickly flags and removes unsuitable content, keeping your platforms safe and minimising the potential impact on your brand and community. 
  Risk: overzealous image recognition might flag and remove innocent content, like nudity in artwork. 

• Sentiment analysis: analyses sentiment behind comments and posts and could flag negative or emotionally charged comments.
  Benefit: helps identify the impact of your conversations. Brolly’s Insights has a sentiment analysis feature which helps
  Risk: does not account for context and could remove content about sensitive topics, limiting your community’s conversations.  

• User profiling: automated moderation can detect suspicious spammy or scammy comments. With spam and scams on the rise, risk management is needed.  
  Benefit: the consistency of automated content moderation means it can identify trolls, bots and repeat offenders. 
  Risk: may flag content posted by certain groups more than others, creating a less inclusive online community.  

Content moderation is like a screening process. And by understanding the benefits and pitfalls of automated moderation, you can continue sharing your content while being mindful of its mechanisms. Context, transparency and consistency are key.