It’s all in Moderation
Making sure your online community follows the rules and feels free to contribute to conversation is important in ensuring that young people engage with what you do. Find out how to make sure the content in your community stays relevant, engaging and sticks to the rules!
Submitted
9/16/2009
By
actnow
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698
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Updated
12/2/2009
Photographer : Alina
Creating an online community where users generate their own content can be a great way for a community organisation to expand their network and further their cause. However enabling people to publish content on your website can also come with a few risks, for example, defamatory or offensive material such as illegal or explicit content.
So how can you get the best out of user-generated content, whilst avoiding ending up with a lawsuit?
One answer is content moderation.
Content moderation is a way to ensure the content on your site is appropriate while at the same time contributes to building and fostering your online community.
To do this successfully you need to have a system for moderating the content that is posted on your website. But what type of moderation do you choose? And how can you do this in a way that is going to keep your community flourishing and is not labour intensive?
What is a moderator?
Moderators are people that keep an eye on your online space. A moderator reviews the content on your website and makes a decision about its appropriateness and appearance, according to guidelines set by your organisation. This could involve approving new posts, editing or deleting unwanted content and welcoming new people to the community.
Systems of moderation
If you’re considering developing an online moderation strategy you have to think about who uses your site, what type of content they can create, how they create content and the associated risks. You also need to consider how you will moderate content - who will moderate it, how and when.
There are four types of moderation these include:
1. Pre-moderation
Pre-moderation is all about moderating the content before it is posted to your site. When a user posts something on your website it must be verified by one of the moderators before the content goes live.
This is an appropriate strategy if you want to avoid inappropriate content from reaching certain audiences, for instance, when working on a website for children. It can however be a negative approach for some online communities because it can stifle online discussion and stop conversations from happening in real time.
2. Post-moderation
Post -moderation enables content to go live before it is moderated. Moderators view the content after it has been posted, usually within a set time frame such as 24 hours, and decide whether it is suitable or not to remain on your website.
The positives about this approach are that conversations between people can happen in real time, which is vital for some websites, for example where there is debate about current affairs. However, inappropriate content could be viewed by other members before it is moderated which could result in legal issues for you. One way to avoid this is to have moderators on the website frequently viewing content that is posted.
Post and Pre-moderation can be undertaken by staff or people who frequently use your online community. They will need to be trained and given ‘access rights’ to approve or edit content.
3. Reactive moderation
Reactive moderation is where the users of the website are the ones who moderate inappropriate or offensive messages as they see them on the website. If they notice errors or questionable content, they report it to official owners of the site for action or they moderate other user’s contributions.
You can use this approach if you have an active community who will identify negative posts and let you know about it as soon as it happens.
This can be done easily by including a feature on pages and in discussions such as "report this content" or alternatively can be also done like a wiki (for example Wikipedia), where users add, remove, or edit web page contents as it goes live.
4. Distributed moderation
Distributed moderation is an integrated approach to ensure that no content falls through the cracks. For example, at ActNow there are a group of young people who Post-moderate content and at the same time we also have a "report this content" feature. This ensures that both young people who use the website have the opportunity to report content that they think is inappropriate and we have people who are monitoring the website for such content.
What content stays and what content goes.
How do you ensure your website moderators know what needs to be moderated? Here are some helpful tips to ensure everyone is on the right page.
1. Have clear, plain guidelines that are easy to follow and easy to read. Make sure that when members sign up to your website they agree to these rules.
2. Make sure your moderators always let your online members know when they move, edit or delete their content and ensure that they provide a valid reason.
3. Record all communications. Any communication between moderator and online community member needs to be recorded as you will never know when you might be asked to show your reasoning for something.
