Video is a powerful medium for communication. However, in the internet and social media age, it can also be a tool for abuse and harassment. You also can’t always trust your user-generated content to upload content that aligns with your brand. So to prevent issues like these, you’ll need to include some form of content moderation.
What is Video Moderation?
Video moderation is the process of reviewing content before it’s published. It can be done by humans or with automation, and for many different reasons, such as:
- Ensuring content meets your site’s guidelines or vision
- To remove offensive or otherwise inappropriate material from your site
- To monitor for copyrighted material (such as music, movies, and TV shows) that you don’t have permission to use on your site
Video moderation can include:
- Removing explicit content
- Removing bullying
- Removing content that violates legal and ethical requirements
- Removing content that is inappropriate or offensive
- Enforcing community guidelines and terms of service
Some types of content moderation include:
- Automated moderation: Uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect banned content by contextual cues.
- Pre-moderation: The most elaborate way to approach content moderation.
- Reactive moderation: Involves asking community members to flag up content that violates house rules or is undesirable.
- Distributed moderation: Uses a rating system and trusts the community to self-moderate.
Supervisor moderation: A more focused form of reactive moderation that involves selecting a group of moderators from the online community to modify or delete submissions.
Why do I need video moderation?
A good video moderation strategy is essential for any brand that plans to use User Generated Content marketing strategy. You must ensure that the content you share is appropriate, legally sound, and consistent with your brand identity.
There are many reasons why video moderation is important, such as:
- Avoiding inappropriate content. Your videos will need to be checked for potentially offensive material – things like nudity, adult content, or hate speech can easily slide by if your company isn’t careful.
- Avoiding copyright violations. If someone else’s intellectual property (e.g., music, tv shows, or films) appears in one of your videos without permission from its owner, this could result in a copyright claim against you. These can require removing the offending video until it can be proven that authorization has been obtained from all relevant parties involved with creating/distribution). It could take weeks or even months, depending on how long ago someone first posted their original work online.
- Ensuring content aligns with company values. There’s nothing more dangerous than the unfiltered internet. Without enforcing content moderation, you’ll more than likely end up with user-generated content that doesn’t align with your company’s needs, such as meme videos or internet trolls.
- Flagging and preventing spam. Of course, there’s still a risk that a malicious user will abuse your system to upload spam to your platform. With video moderation, you’re able to spot these as it happens and prevent it before it gets out of hand.
How can I implement moderation?
You can choose to implement moderation in one of two ways:
- Use a moderation platform. A platform that allows you to track and manage content across multiple channels, including social media platforms and messaging, apps can help you spot issues as they arise. These are generally in-house tools that can be used to view content en masse and apply flags if needed. There are also some external options you can use as well.
- Use an AI tool. There are a plethora of content moderation tools available that can leverage the power of AI to assist with video moderation. These solutions are great for flagging obvious issues within content, like foul language or explicit nudity, but aren’t as effective for other types of issues.
- Use human moderators. If you don’t have access or want access to these tools, there are still plenty of ways to moderate your videos before they go live by having people manually check them out beforehand–and even during the broadcast itself!
Video Content Moderation with Cloudinary
Video moderation is an important part of running a successful online business. You need to make sure that your videos are safe for users and compliant with the latest regulations. And thanks to Cloudinary, you can include video moderation alongside a slew of other features.
With the Google AI Moderation add-on, you can extend Cloudinary’s powerful cloud-based media library and delivery capabilities with automatic AI-based moderation of your videos. It allows your users to upload content to your platform, which is passed through Google’s AI models to look for explicit and suggestive content before being approved and continuing to your application.
If you want to start moderating your user-generated content, Cloudinary is the platform for you. You can sign up for free today and take advantage of our Google AI Moderation add-on and tons of other features!
