Content moderation companies and departments work hard to keep offensive language out of video games, off platforms like forums, out of ad campaigns, and more. Most content moderation looks specifically at text, meaning that videos and audio chats can slip past the moderation efforts that a company might have in place-or else be extremely expensive, hiring multiple people to review this kind of content.

That's where content moderation with speech-to-text comes in-by converting speech to text, the same processes that apply to written content can be applied to spoken content, providing additional options for moderation. To get started, let's look at what content moderation is and how it typically works, before we dive into some of the benefits of content moderation and how AI-powered automatic speech recognition solutions like Deepgram can help.

What is Content Moderation?

Content Moderation refers to the process of monitoring user-generated content online and ensuring that it complies with any site rules and relevant laws. For example, companies like Spectrum Labs use artificial intelligence to identify problematic content like sexually charged messages, hate speech, radicalization, bullying, scams, grooming, and more. Moderation is used in a variety of different contexts, from social media sites to advertising platforms to video games. Any company that needs to ensure that the content that's being created and shared via its service has a need for some kind of content moderation. That moderation can come in a few different forms, including:

  • Pre-moderation: All content is reviewed before it's allowed to go live.

  • Post-moderation: Content is allowed to go live, but is still reviewed after being posted.

  • Reactive moderation: Content is only reviewed when it's flagged by other users as potentially problematic.

  • Distributed moderation: Content is upvoted or downvoted based on user feedback, and shown or hidden based on that voting, rather than the decision of moderators.

Additionally, moderation can happen in several different ways. In the most basic forms, humans review content to make sure that it complies with any relevant guidelines. But this process can be time consuming and tedious-and, in some cases, simply not possible with the amount of content that gets created. That's where automatic moderation comes in.

Automatic moderation occurs without a human intervening, and can be as simple as removing content that contains words from a pre-specified list, or as complex as training a neural network for AI content moderation. Automatic moderation is especially relevant when we talk about automatic speech recognition for media monitoring, because, as mentioned above, once the audio has been turned into text, the same rules and filters can be applied to it as would have been applied to written content. But before we get to the benefits of content moderation and how STT can help, let's explore some of the most common use cases for content moderation.

Top 5 Use Cases for Content Moderation

Content moderation is used for a variety of different use cases across different industries, some of which might surprise you-let's take a look at the top five use cases for content moderation.

1. Gaming

Online gaming communities aren't often known as friendliest of places. With content moderation, game companies can work towards creating friendlier, more welcoming communities.

2. Forums and Social Media

Sites that rely on user-generated content-from forums like Reddit to social media like Facebook-rely on content moderation to review what's posted, ensuring it follows site guidelines.

3. Advertising

Advertising platforms have a vested interest in making sure that any ad served through their platform complies with their guidelines and any relevant laws. Content moderation reviews user-created ads to make sure that they're all above board.

4. Ecommerce

Content moderation can serve a number of purposes for ecommerce platforms, from making sure that illegal or prohibited items aren't listed and sold to making sure that customer product reviews aren't offensive or spam.

5. Health and Finance

Although they might not be the first things that come to mind when you think of content moderation, the health care and finance industries can make use of content moderation technologies. With lots of personal identifiable information (PII) and the need for HIPAA compliance, content moderation companies like Private AI can help to clean and process data to remove identifying information before the data is used for other purposes.

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