What is Content Moderation? Can AI Content Moderation Replace Human Moderators?

The internet is a vast network with more than 4.66 billion users which are growing drastically with each passing day. The users on the internet are responsible for creating content that includes posts, messages, blogs, articles, videos, and more. Generating such content and that too in massive volume by the users raises the need for content moderation or regulation to ensure that the content that the internet users have around them including the social media platform is not fake, abusive, harmful, or is unfavorable to the viewers in any kind of situation.

Until now, all the big companies and market players have relied heavily on humans to moderate the content and fulfill all the content regulation requirements. But since Artificial Intelligence and Machine Language have shown promising results in almost every field, companies have started investing in the technology to moderate content too. One of the other reasons why companies are choosing AI content moderation over human moderation is the ever-growing content which makes the human moderation process less cost-effective and efficient.

Also, several reports have confirmed that AI-powered content moderation has an edge over human moderators as it helps organizations regulate the content and modify it as required in a more automated and efficient way. But the technology used in moderating the content has some limitations too as AI moderators can not eliminate the need of the human moderators and humans will be required to review the content for its relevancy, accuracy, and naturality. So the question that arises here is, will the AI content moderation technology be able to completely replace the human moderators? Is that even possible? Let us find out here. But first of all, we will start with the basics and will talk about what actually is content moderation.

How does AI Do Content Moderation?	How Humans Do Content Moderation?
Artificial Intelligence has earned a good name in content moderation and this is how the technology helps in moderating and optimizing content:	Human content moderation is the need of the market and this is how humans moderate content:
AI-powered tools are available in the market that moderate content easily and efficiently.	Humans are good at reading analyzing and interpreting things therefore they can analyze the content in a better way than machines.
AI uses new and updated algorithms to analyze and interpret what content is harmful to the audience and what is not.	Humans have a better business understanding and can therefore understand what customers like and what they want to view.
AI uses visual recognition to identify the type and category of content that can harm the image of a company.	Humans have the capability to carry out discussions.

What Is Content Moderation and Why One Should Do It?

As discussed above content moderation refers to optimizing and regulating content on various websites and platforms including social media to remove the unnecessary and harmful part of the user-generated content to keep the content relevant and useful. Various platforms have specific standards and rules as per which the content should be optimized to make it live on that particular platform, therefore, content moderation is required as it helps a particular website or a platform maintain a database of clean data.

Following are the few important benefits that one can leverage with content moderation:

1. Helps in Improving Ranking and Traffic of Your Website

One of the crucial benefits that you can leverage with content moderation is that it helps in improving the search engine ranking and traffic of your website. And the reason behind this is that content moderation ensures that your website has good quality content which is suitable for the viewers to read and has no intention to harm any of the viewers in any possible way. User-generated content if optimized correctly will definitely allow you to rank higher on the search engine results page (SERP).

2. Helps in Protecting and Enhancing Your Brand Value

As all users have their own likes and dislikes and they are free to share their views on your website, there will be times that the content generated by them will not be in favor of your company or brand and this is when you would definitely need to optimize or moderate the content. Suppose you have an eCommerce website where you sell products and services to users then there are chances that you may get mixed reviews from your users which may certainly impact your brand value and its image. Therefore content moderation helps you optimize the user-generated content on your website which will build confidence in your customers and they will purchase more from your store.

3. Helps in Understanding Your Viewers and Customers

One of the other benefits of content moderation is that it will help you in understanding your customers in a better way and will even let you gain user insights which can prove to be crucial for your business. If you will opt for content moderation, then your content moderators will get the chance to analyze your customer’s content and will help them understand what your customers are interested in and which brand or product they like the most. Such user-centric information can help you bring changes in your production or operation to come up with services or products that can keep your customers happy. Also, the content that you have moderated or optimized can even be used to market and promote your products keeping in mind what things can attract your customers and influence them the most.

4. Helps in Protecting Your Online Community

Last but not least, content modulation has a vast role in protecting your online community from numerous unwanted elements that can contaminate your online space and can create a negative impression on your target audience or your users. It is extremely crucial that you should with the trust of your potential customers and ensures that your online community feels safe from fake news, trolls, spam, etc. Also, your community should have all the right to express their feelings and reviews about the products and services that they are using and represent your brand or business. Therefore, content moderation services is the need of the hour to save your business from such contamination and keep your online platform safe and secure.

There are various other benefits of moderating and optimizing content and these include giving a much-needed push to your marketing campaigns and attracting a large customer base that will definitely help your business reach the heights that you have always dreamt of. Having understood what is content moderation, what are its types, we can now move towards the other important aspects of the blog.

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How Does AI Moderate Content?

It is not surprising at all that why companies nowadays are moving towards AI technology in every field and the same is being implemented for the content moderation outsourcing processes too. It has been a while since tech organizations have started using AI-powered tools to optimize and moderate content to ensure that all the offensive and dangerous content is removed successfully from the respective websites and platforms to maintain their brand value and image in the market.

It is true that AI technology can definitely help in moderating the content and that too quickly and cost-efficiently but the question that arises is that can AI technology do content moderation all alone? Several AI-powered tools are there in the market that moderate content in a simple way and most of them use visual recognition to identify the type and category of content that can harm the image of a company or can create an impact on the viewers in a negative way. But such a technology is not trustworthy besides recognizing guns and nudity as harmful content there are chances that the tool can interpret the images of breastfeeding mothers as harmful for the viewers.

Machine learning for content moderation has always remained challenging for organizations and business owners as the tool has a hard time interpreting the zest of the content on the social media platform and there are higher chances that the tools can make inaccurate judgments about their meaning. And then things get even worse when there is content that even humans find it tough to interpret or recognize for their genuinity and these include fake news, misinformation, satire, etc. As harmful or fake content does not have any straight definition therefore even the slightest change in the image or content on the internet can change the entire meaning.

The major challenge that AI technology is facing in moderating content is that the technology can judge or interpret images or videos for their type and category but cannot understand the human culture and interpret what is good or bad for humankind and what can affect a person in a positive and what in a negative way. But such challenges can be overcome by taking the help of humans and using both AI and humans together for optimizing and moderating content for the best results. There are chances that both technology and humanity together can safely and accurately moderate content as required.

How Humans Do it?

With artificial intelligence crossing every other barrier in content moderation with new and refined algorithms, companies have started relying on machine learning for content moderation. But it is true that human content moderation still has a stable presence when it comes to moderating content as it is the safest and most reliable way to moderate content for most of the organizations and companies out there. Many organizations still require human moderators to optimize the content to ensure that their website has relevant, high quality, and favorable content for their customers and target audience.

It is still believed that humans are the best at reading and interpreting things that help in optimizing and moderating content in the best possible way. As of now, there is no other machine or technology available in the market that can replace humans when it comes to filtering data or information. Therefore to ensure that companies are successfully able to create and strengthen their online presence in the market by curating content, they will surely take the help of both AI and humans to get the best possible results.

Following are the few reasons why AI content moderation services provided by renowned organizations can not replace human moderators:

1. Humans Have the Capability to Carry Out Discussions

In situations where you are required to get in touch with your audience to answer their queries or provide updates, human content moderation is a good choice as it can give more relevant solutions to the customer’s problems that they might be facing. Though AI has reached an advanced stage when it comes to interaction with humans, but still the gap can be felt at places when it comes to proper engagement and providing a more humanly-like touch to behold meaningful conversation.

2. Humans are Good at Reading, Analyzing, and Interpreting

The most important reason why AI-based content moderators can not take place of human moderators is that humans have good reading and interpreting skills and they nearly come up with a more real and relevant decision quickly. Such skills really help while moderating content or answering customers’ queries. Though AI-based tools can quickly reply to comments or write messages, allowing for a two-way conversation, still decision-making and interpreting capabilities are not the best that humans possess, which makes them fall behind as compared to human moderators.

3. Humans Understand Business Better

One of the other reasons why human content moderation is the need of the market and AI-based content moderators can not replace them is the business sense that humans have. Human content moderators are capable enough to analyze and understand what customers want and can even predict what they think about a certain product or service, just by talking to them or reading their feedback and reviews. Also, humans can easily figure out any trending thing in the market and can understand why it is being liked by the customers which machines are not capable of doing either.

It is true that with human content moderation you can definitely rely on having the most accurate, safest, and most relevant content on your website which will ultimately help you in attracting your target audience, engaging your customers, improving your brand presence, and taking your business to the next level. Also, human moderators will ensure that they answer every query of your customers in an efficient way.

Final Verdict

Humans are still miles away from being replaced completely by AI technology. It is true that artificial intelligence has proved to be an emerging technology in moderating and optimizing content online, but it seems that the technology is not capable of understanding the type and nature of the content as humans can do. Machines can easily get confused determining whether the content is harmful to the viewers or not as there are situations when there is just a fine line between the good or the bad content. Therefore, by combining both AI technology and human moderators we can get the much-needed efficiency and the context-understanding empathy to get the fine and desired results for optimizing and moderating content.