According to Hootsuite research findings in 2022, 4.62 billion users worldwide are active on social media, about a 10% increase over the last year. We live in a bustling digital world where billions of posts, comments, and videos are shared daily. The ongoing increase in user-generated content makes it difficult for human moderators to deal with such big volumes of information.

Artificial Intelligence has emerged as the ultimate sidekick in the realm of content moderation. It’s the digital superhero that uses its powers to tackle challenges like scale, context, and the ever-evolving online landscape. From discovering spam to battling hate speech and graphic content, AI is transforming how we maintain safe and welcoming digital spaces.

With this blog piece, let’s explore the role of AI in content moderation, its challenges, how AI tackles those challenges, and some intriguing use cases.

AI and Content Moderation: The Dynamic Duo

AI plays a pivotal role in content moderation — it acts as a digital guardian against harmful and inappropriate content. With its advanced algorithms and machine learning capabilities, AI assists human moderators in maintaining safe online environments.

Here’s a closer look at its role:

  • Automates Detection Processes

AI algorithms swiftly analyze vast amounts of user-generated content (UGC) and can flag potential violations. They can accurately identify explicit images, hate speech, spam, and other rule-breaking content.

Types of UGC

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter employ AI-powered systems to automatically detect and remove offensive or harmful posts, ensuring user safety and fostering positive interactions.

  • Amplifies Efficiency

AI reduces the burden on human moderators by automating the initial screening process. It lets them focus on more nuanced cases and content that requires human judgment. For Example, YouTube’s Content ID system uses AI to find copyrighted content within user-uploaded videos, streamlining the process of managing licensing rights and protecting intellectual property.

  • Adapts the Evolving Content

Since AI models can continuously learn and adapt to new forms of harmful content, they significantly help platforms stay updated with evolving trends and threats. To maintain healthier online discussion sessions, various online forums and comment sections use AI moderation tools to identify and filter out spam, hate speech, and abusive comments.

In short, AI acts as a vigilant ally in content moderation. By combining human expertise with AI’s capabilities, online platforms can provide safer and more inclusive digital spaces.

Types of AI-powered Content Moderation 

Commonly, there are 4 to 5 types of content moderation:

  • Pre-moderation

As its name suggests, it’s a type of moderation done before the content is posted online. Pre-moderation ensures that inappropriate content doesn’t go online. It gives you more control over what content should be displayed to your audience. However, it has some downsides. For example, it takes more time to filter out inappropriate content, and posting can be delayed.

  • Post-moderation or Reactive Moderation

Post-moderation is done after the content is published. It involves reviewing and moderating user-generated content after it has been posted or submitted by users. Moderators then review the content to ensure it complies with the platform’s guidelines and policies.

While this approach allows you to freely express yourself without experiencing delays in content visibility, on the other hand, your potentially inappropriate, offensive, or harmful content can become visible to others until it is identified and removed by the moderators.

  • Distributed Moderation

Also known as crowd moderation or community moderation. Instead of relying solely on a centralized moderation team, it lets platform users report inappropriate or rule-violating content or behavior. It’s a more scalable approach to moderation since it can encounter biases issues or potential abuse of power that could take place if moderation were centralized only.

  • Automated Moderation

This approach allows users to moderate image and text content at the same time. Instead of relying on humans, it makes most cutting-edge technologies like computer vision and NLP flag malicious content. Also, it’s the most used and convenient approach.

What Are The Challenges of AI Content Moderation?

Besides its amazing benefits, it has challenges such as:

  • Scaling up and Volume

Did you know that in just a few years, people will be creating an insane amount of data every single day? By 2025, we’re talking about 463 exabytes of data being produced daily. To put that into perspective, more than 200 million DVDs are being made daily. Manual moderation cannot keep up with such a massive influx of information.

  • Contextual Understanding

Since AI models aren’t capable enough to understand the cultural nuances, sarcasm, and subtle language intricacies, making a 100% accurate decision for them is a complex task. Content moderation requires a clear understanding of the context to determine whether a piece of content violates guidelines.

  • Ever Evolving Content

New content forms and evolving digital trends pose challenges to AI moderation systems. The rapid adaptation required to recognize emerging harmful content, such as hate speech or graphic imagery, is a continuous challenge.

How Can AI Help Tackles These Challenges?

Artificial intelligence is super helpful in ensuring all the content is moderated correctly. Machine learning-based solutions make it easier for human moderators to handle tough business challenges that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to manage.

Machine Learning Algorithms

Machine learning algorithms analyze vast amounts of data and learn patterns. Through training on labeled datasets, AI models become adept at identifying and classifying different types of content, such as explicit images, hate speech, or spam.

Natural Language Processing Techniques

NLP algorithms can interpret emotions and understand the intended meaning of the text. Furthermore, Text Categorization classifies the text or emotion according to the content.

It helps detect hate speech and offensive language and identify potentially harmful content more accurately.

  • Image and Video Recognition

It would be highly tiresome for a human to manually moderate every picture, considering the sheer amount of photographs shared online. Here, AI-powered content moderation comes into play.

AI-based Image content moderation leverages image processing techniques to identify particular regions inside the image, further classifying them according to specified criteria. Also, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) can control the complete content piece if the text is present in the picture.

AI algorithms utilize computer vision techniques to analyze images and videos for explicit, violent, or inappropriate content. Deep learning models can detect objects, faces, and even subtle visual cues to flag potentially harmful content.

Content moderation with AI complements the manual review approach while increasing its accuracy. It makes the process faster, saving tens and thousands of work hours. Let’s look at some content examples that AI can moderate automatically.

Exploring AI Use Cases in Content Moderation

  • Social Media Platforms

Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc., use AI algorithms to identify and remove offensive or inappropriate content. It is done to ensure a safer and more welcoming environment for their huge user base.

  • Online Marketplaces

Online marketplaces use AI to spot fake products, shady listings, and illegal material. It’s smart to keep things legit and build trust between buyers and sellers. Plus, it helps protect everyone’s property and keeps the overall shopping experience safe and secure.

  • Comment Sections and Community Forums

AI-powered moderation tools are deployed in comment sections and community forums that help filter out spam, hate speech, and abusive comments. It fosters healthy discussions and promotes a positive online community.

To Sum Up 

Keeping up with the growing amount of user-generated content is tough for businesses. But there’s a solution: using AI in content moderation. It helps moderators to keep users and brands safe from offensive content. Moreover, AI makes moderators’ jobs easier by automating tedious tasks at different stages of content moderation.

Combining AI with human expertise is the smartest way for companies to handle harmful online content and create a safe visitor environment. You can also Supercharge your business with AI technology. Discover our innovative AI, ML, and NLP services and harness the power of automation!