Content Moderation
Also known as: Trust and Safety, Platform Moderation, Content Policy
The practice of monitoring and filtering user-generated content to enforce platform policies and legal requirements.
Content moderation is how platforms decide what content stays up, gets removed, or gets labeled—a challenging intersection of technology, policy, and human judgment.
Approaches
- Human review: Moderators evaluate flagged content
- Automated: AI systems detect violations at scale
- Hybrid: AI flags, humans decide
- Community: User reporting and voting
What Gets Moderated
- Hate speech and harassment
- Violence and graphic content
- Misinformation and disinformation
- Copyright violations
- Spam and manipulation
- Illegal content
Challenges
- Scale: Billions of posts daily
- Context: Satire vs. sincere, cultural differences
- Speed: Viral content spreads before removal
- Consistency: Similar content, different decisions
- Appeals: Handling mistakes fairly
AI’s Role
AI enables moderation at scale but introduces:
- False positives (overblocking)
- Bias against certain groups/languages
- Gaming by bad actors
- Opacity in decisions