We’ve talked about the importance of community before here, as well as the importance of moderation to maintain and grow a healthy audience. But let’s face it, human moderation is expensive. It requires big budgets, big teams, and lots of time; none of which are easy to come by in a busy newsroom.
As a result, you’re left with partial moderation on select articles, no comments section or a system that moderates all comments indiscriminately. None of these options allow you to grow an engaged and thriving community around your content.
That’s why we’ve come up with something better.
Introducing Viafoura’s New Smart Moderation System
The most common feedback we’ve heard about moderation is that it’s too time consuming, expensive, or ineffective at meeting publisher needs. To address these issues, we’re excited to introduce an automated system that uses natural language processing and machine learning to analyze every comment posted on your site, in real time. Now when someone leaves a bad comment, it’s disabled automatically from your site before they’re seen by your community.
How?
First, our system attaches three pieces of information to every comment that’s made:
- Warning – highlighting whether the comment contains personal attacks, hate speech, vulgarity, or political hostility
- Recommended Action
- Current Status
Second, the tagged comment is added to the Smart Moderation tab under one of four queues, namely:
- Approved – comments that the system identified as meeting your community guidelines
- Unknown – comments the system was unable to classify
- Rejected – comments the system identified as not meeting your community guidelines
- Timeout – comments that could not be classified due to a technical error
Lastly, based on your settings for each queue, the comment is:
- Published
- Disabled
- Flagged for pre-moderation
For example, in the rejected comment below, you can see that Smart Moderation was able to analyze the comment, highlight abusive text, and take action.
This makes it easy to integrate the system into your existing workflows.
You can set bad comments to be tagged and automatically disabled before they are seen by your audience.
We work with you to customize these settings for your community before switching on Smart Moderation. Additionally, if you’re a large publisher and have a moderation team or a vendor, you can set bad comments to be followed up by your human moderators. Smart Moderation reduces the number of bad comments that need to be followed up by moderators, dramatically reducing costs. With every comment, our Smart Moderation system also gets smarter, as it analyzes comments and the actions taken by your team. This means increased efficiency, accuracy, and tailoring to your content the longer you implement it.
Our aim with Smart Moderation is to give you the ability to scale and grow your content and community without incurring major costs or compromising your comments section. Now, you can focus your attention on the stories and content that matter most to you.