2022 Content Moderation Trends
- By Blair Ewalt
- CleanSpeak, Technology
- March 15, 2022
These content moderation trends include relevant topics to content moderation in 2022 for social networks and other businesses.
2022 Content Moderation Trends
In 2022, every major social network will have profanity filtering built into the core of their website and mobile app. These filters will be across the whole platform so that your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can be enjoyed by all users, regardless of their taste in language or content. But how can you get to a point where your communities can be safe and productive places for all? How do we get to this utopia where all social networks allow their users to express themselves freely without harming others? What changes need to be made between now and the future to reach it? Let’s take a look at some content moderation trends that will contribute to this change.
Automated Filtering
Automated profanity filtering of content, both written and video/audio, is quickly becoming a reality as research pushes forward on machine learning and deep neural networks. This technology will become more affordable over time as well, leading to widespread use for social media companies.
What does automated profanity filtering mean for today’s business leaders? Well, 2022 could very well be marked by machine learning at scale. Along with increased accuracy, there could be new costs associated with training effective filters.
Either way, we can expect some real changes to how businesses function online over the next five years or so because of such filtering. The current state of automated learning leaves lots of room for error which leads most platforms to use a human touch to keep them safe.
Profanity Filtering
Some questions regarding profanity filtering: What are some of the most popular swear words? How do we pronounce them? How many ways can we spell them? What do they mean? Perhaps most importantly, do we want our kids or other children to use them?
As user generated content platforms such as game chats, online forums, and others expand content moderation teams, including managers and moderators, things are only going to get more interesting when it comes to profanity filtering.
Whether live-streaming video or posting about your political views on Facebook, if we are using language that could offend someone—or maybe even just make a couple people angry—we may find ourselves moderated as well.
Profanity filters are put in place to help keep communities safe from profane language while at the same time making content moderators’ jobs easier. According to League of Legends, Players who experience in-game toxicity are up to 320% more likely to quit playing the game. By using a profanity filter, companies keep obscene content off their platform which helps with brand strength and user retention.
Collaborative Filtering Between Humans and Machines
As soon as humans started to communicate, words were used to offend and hurt one another. In recent years, profanity has become a major problem on social media platforms and it’s starting to take a toll on businesses that use these networks. Automated algorithms are not sophisticated enough to be able to distinguish between abusive language and vulgar language.
To address this, human content moderators are tasked with deciphering between which posts need more scrutiny. However, given the explosive amount of content, many moderators view a fraction of what is available. This becomes even harder when dealing with languages other than English. If you do not have any training or software that can deal in foreign languages, moderating content in these languages becomes impossible.
Machine Learning Algorithms
AI algorithms will continue to improve their content screening capabilities. Current content moderation tools already sometimes use machine learning, which means companies are already familiar with these tools and how they work—but machine learning will continue to evolve, leading to more accurate results.
The trouble is that AI systems can only understand human language up to a point; context is extremely difficult for algorithms to understand. For example, if you write, “let’s go to the burger joint,” an automated system might accidentally flag “joint” as a banned word because of its association with marijuana. While current algorithms aren’t perfect, they also improve every year. One solution to this is to pair AI with a comprehensive, customizable filter which allows your company to choose which words and severity levels you may want to filter from your audience.
Sentiment Analysis in Social Media Posts
Another big trend in 2022 is identifying social media posts by their sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral). As with profanity filtering and other forms of content moderation, though, sentiment analysis on its own isn’t enough. After all, robots are often terrible at telling when we really mean what we say. An algorithm could flag taxes suck as having a negative tone—but taxes actually do suck! At best, then, a computer might be able to distinguish between positive posts and negative ones (though it wouldn’t know why they were positive or negative).
Humans are still better than machines at interpreting tone—so any modern platform that works on user-generated content should have a team of people ready to review flagged material quickly depending on their scope.
The content moderation trends that are taking place are mostly thanks to the trusty machines that we work with. However, computers and algorithms can only do so much as this point so it can be helpful to have a human moderator keep track of the filter, and make applicable changes and decisions when need be.
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Today, businesses large and small are investing in automated solutions to prevent offensive and inappropriate language, imagery, and videos in all communications, particularly customer-facing content.
CleanSpeak is an industry-leading profanity filtering and content moderation platform that protects online communities from offensive and inappropriate language and images. CleanSpeak’s enterprise-scale filtering and moderation software prevents profanity and hate speech from online display and visibility and gives organizations the confidence they need that inappropriate or unwanted online content will not be visible to customers.
CleanSpeak filters billions of messages each month in real time. It’s trusted by companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 corporations, spanning a wide range of industries including gaming, financial services, healthcare, education, entertainment, and consumer goods. Our advanced profanity filtering and content moderation technology can enable organizations to improve customer goodwill, reduce the risk of PR disasters, and save millions of dollars associated with lawsuits and lost business.
Our team has been working on our profanity filtering technology for more than a decade to keep customer communications clean and productive and maintain a safe environment for users around the globe. To see if CleanSpeak is right for your business, try it for free today.