In this age of digital content, companies find it challenging to ensure that online environments are safe. Billions of users create content daily, making it difficult to manage security and appropriateness. Did you know artificial intelligence (AI) can help with this?
Using AI has transformed content moderation, especially on social media. Thanks to AI content moderation services, spotting abusive language, dispelling false information, and upholding community standards make online environments safer.
A few paragraphs might not convince you that using AI benefits social media moderation, so let’s dig into how AI can help the digital landscape.
The Difficulties of Manual Social Media Moderation
Manual social media moderation, although necessary, presents several difficulties:
Abundant Content Created By Users
Users post content on social media daily. Posting a status and sharing photos and videos is the norm. With around 5 billion social media users worldwide, keeping up with this enormous volume can take much work for human moderators.
Shifting User Preconceptions
Social media users want a safe online space and immediate response to platform issues. At the start, manual moderation was manageable. However, with a lot of people always online, it frequently fails because it takes too long to review content and reports thoroughly.
Exposure to Harmful Content
As humans, encountering upsetting or harmful content while scrolling on social media can be stressful and exhausting. Constant exposure to misinformation, hate speech, sexually explicit content, violence, and other forms of distressing content makes users feel unsafe, negatively impacting their online experience.
The Advantages of AI-Powered Content Moderation For Social Media
Thanks to AI, we’ve come a long way in content moderation. Here are some of its benefits:
Automated Evaluation and Categorization
AI algorithms can swiftly process large volumes of data to find harmful and non-compliant content. These automatically examine pictures, videos, and texts discerning explicit content, hate speech, and other things.
With AI capabilities, social media companies can handle traditional moderating issues more skillfully, guaranteeing they stay open and responsible.
Fast and Simultaneous Moderation
AI can also handle enormous amounts of user-generated material on several platforms simultaneously. Keeping up with fresh data while maintaining accurate performance is essential in ensuring digital safety on social media.
But what about live content? Fortunately, AI tools are helpful for live broadcasts because they take action instantaneously, assisting platforms in resolving policy violations as they happen.
Precise Recognition
By gaining fresh insights from data, AI becomes more adept at identifying low-quality and undesirable content. As AI algorithms learn over time, they can get more precise at detecting texts, chat messages, photos, and videos containing elements that suggest offensive language, toxic visuals, and other illegal forms of content.
Cost-Efficiency
Due to the overwhelming content social media platforms must manage, human moderation isn’t enough to deal with the content stream in real time. While increasing staff seems like the ideal solution, social media companies find it impractical to hire more moderators.
These platforms turn to AI for support to save money while protecting social media moderators’ well-being. Adopting an AI-driven solution might be a heavy investment initially, but it becomes cheaper in the long run due to low maintenance costs.
Social Media Platforms That Leverage AI
You may not know it, but some of your favorite social media apps incorporate AI into their moderation efforts. Check out the list below:
Facebook, the most popular social media platform, uses AI to detect and eliminate harmful content such as hate speech, nudity, and violence. Their AI systems scan billions of posts, images, and videos daily to ensure compliance with community standards.
Instagram, Facebook’s sister app, uses AI to identify and filter inappropriate content, particularly comments and messages. AI also detects and removes accounts engaging in abusive behavior.
Twitter (X)
Another old and popular app, Twitter, now X, employs AI to monitor tweets for abusive language, misinformation, and spam. X uses machine learning models to flag potentially harmful content for review.
YouTube
AI is critical in identifying and removing content that violates community guidelines, such as videos containing violence, nudity, or hate speech. YouTube’s AI also helps demonetize content deemed inappropriate for advertisers.
TikTok
Despite being new, TikTok quickly gained recognition as a short-form video-sharing platform. It utilizes AI to moderate content by detecting harmful behavior, such as bullying or hate speech, and removing videos that violate community standards. Tiktok’s AI also aids in curating personalized content feeds.
The Requirement for Human Oversight and Ethical AI
While AI has significantly improved the efficiency of content moderation on social media platforms, it is not infallible. Human oversight is crucial to address the limitations of AI, such as its inability to understand context and nuances in language. For example, AI might mistakenly flag satire or irony as harmful content, leading to wrongful removal or censorship.
Human moderators provide the necessary context and judgment that AI lacks. They interpret the subtleties of cultural references, humor, and other complex forms of communication that AI might misinterpret. They also play a crucial role in handling appeals and reviewing content that AI systems have flagged or removed.
Ethical considerations are also paramount when deploying AI in content moderation. AI systems can inadvertently perpetuate biases in training data, leading to unfair censorship of certain groups or viewpoints. To mitigate this, ongoing human oversight is necessary to identify and correct biases, ensuring that AI-driven moderation is fair and balanced.
Moreover, transparency in AI algorithms is essential. Users must know how AI decisions are made, and clear avenues for challenging these decisions should exist. Ethical AI practices demand accountability, where platforms take responsibility for the actions of their AI systems and continuously strive to improve fairness and accuracy.
Harnessing AI for Safer Social Media: A Balanced Approach
AI has revolutionized AI social media moderation services by enhancing efficiency and accuracy. However, it’s crucial to maintain human oversight to ensure context, fairness, and ethical considerations are upheld. Combining AI’s capabilities with human judgment allows social media platforms to create safer and more inclusive online environments for all users.
