📖 Content moderation glossary
What does a content moderator do?
In short
A content moderator is a person who reviews user-generated content, such as comments, posts and images, and decides whether it complies with a service's rules and the law, then takes or confirms the appropriate action.
Moderators apply the policy to real cases, many of them ambiguous: is this a joke or a threat, criticism or harassment, a quote or an insult? They need good judgement, knowledge of the community and the language, and consistency.
The job is demanding. Exposure to violent or hateful content takes a toll, and volume pressure leads to mistakes. Automation helps by taking the obvious cases off their hands, so that people spend their time on decisions that need judgement.
Example: a news site entrusts its comments to OpenModeration. The AI hides clear violations automatically, the few dozen doubtful cases are handled by the OpenModeration team, and the newsroom has nothing to do: it sees every decision and its reason in real time in the console and can take over at any moment. Moderation can also be fully outsourced.