If you are a marketer or a business owner, then it behooves you to find out the social media site that has the best internet content moderation policy. Chances are you have social media accounts that promote your brand. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are the usual line-up that brands use. These are the sites, after all, that your target markets normally use, encompassing almost all demographics, from Baby Boomers to Zentennials or Gen-Z’ers.

But recent news, especially those concerning Mark Zuckerberg’s company, has also driven home to you the importance of internet content moderation. This is something that your customers also look for. No internet user today will support the very idea of censorship, but at the same time nobody — not an individual, not a brand, not an advertiser — would want to see offensive content on a platform that they use. Any content that smacks of racism, bigotry, violence, hate speech, criminal intent or acts, just to name a few is considered a red flag. Social media sites have been removing their posts because they do not want to turn away their millions of users and advertisers.

You might want to do the same as a business owner.  Your customers who find your advertisements being posted beside or near an offensive ad may think you have something to do with that. And even though you don’t, you won’t have a chance to explain it to them before they leave and stop patronizing your brand.

How they do internet content moderation

Let’s take a quick look at how the most popular social media sites are managing their internet content moderation.

Facebook has been undergoing a lot of heat because of the controversial posts that have landed on it. Some of the more jarring examples that have shaken the internet community are the beheading of a woman caught in the Mexican drug war and hate speech being aimed at black children. Facebook has revised its community guidelines as a response to the criticism. It also hired more than 20,000 online content moderators to rigorously review each post from its billions of users. Those found offensive or in violation of the guidelines are taken down, and their owners a chance to respond. Posts can be restored on site if the owners can explain how their posts do not violate the guidelines.

Facebook will soon be using AI to make the job of social media content moderation faster, more accurate, and efficient. It is applying its current guidelines and the process that supports them to another top social media site which it acquired:  Instagram. This visually heavy social media site has recently weathered criticism for its social media content moderation when hashtags of inflammatory comments that blame the Jews for 9-11 started appearing on its site.

Meanwhile, Twitter has amped up the way it does its internet content moderation. Its social media moderators are being trained to be more ‘sensitive’ to content that can directly or indirectly insult people or cast a slur on their activities, beliefs, and identity. It has placed its focus on weeding outposts or tweets on non-consensual nudity, sexual advances, and veiled or outspoken threats made by a user to hurt other people.

Internet Content Moderation for videos

YouTube also has its hands full when it comes to social media content moderation, given the millions of videos that are being uploaded to its platform every day. It created a highly trained group of online content moderators, called “YouTube’s Heroes,” that can not only spot potentially offensive videos but have the smarts and knowledge to understand the context in which they are being used and not just yank them out indiscriminately.

All these guidelines and efforts are laudable. Implementation, though, as admitted by the social media sites themselves, is a work in progress. HOPLA is managing its own talent pool of remote staff who do internet content moderation. We can help you position your brand and products on the social media platform that can reach your target market while reducing the risk of your exposure to offensive content. If you have questions as to how to make this work, and how to maximize your presence on the social media sites, call us now.