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Automated Comment Moderation Giving You a Headache? Try This

By Çiler Ay on Tue, 30 Jan 2018

A post over at ICUC Social deals with raises some good questions about automated comment moderation and social media management, detailing both the pros and cons of the tech. It does a great job of showing how community building has become an essential component of brand communication, as well as how higher engagement within these communities can lead to better conversion rates.

The post identifies the major problems that many brands run into when trying to moderate their communities, and how bots can help surpass them. But in detailing this new tech, ICUC doesn’t shy away from discussing how automated moderators don’t always meet community managers’ needs. Regarding bots, they say:

“Bots cannot, however, process human emotion. They cannot listen, they cannot use their intuition, and they are unable to provide that extra ‘over-and-above’ that so often accompanies great customer service.”

This is undoubtedly true for many automated social media moderation tools, and these are things we take issue with, too—so we’re trying to fix them with a whole new kind of automated moderator.

Should human moderation be replaced by bots?

             ICUC’s Tweet

What Issues do Many Automated Moderation Tools Face?

Most automated comment moderation tools are plagued by the same limitations. The two most glaring problems are that they rely on fixed keyword lists and can’t moderate in real time. These systems sound helpful on the surface, but imagine the time your team wastes updating and editing keyword lists and approving/rejecting comments that the system flagged.

Unfortunately, no matter how often you update your keyword lists, trolls and spammers will always be one step ahead. Keyword-based systems that commonly power automated moderation tools are easy to get past; all it takes is a creative variation in spelling to slip through. It’s nearly impossible to account for every variation in profanity this way, and spam is even more difficult to combat on a fixed system.

How is Your Comment Moderation Tool Different?

With all those issues above, ICUC is correct: “primitive AI” social media moderation tools can be a recipe for disaster. But they don’t have to be. Smart Moderation is an antidote to headaches caused by other auto moderation systems thanks to one major difference: it’s a dynamic, always-improving AI powered by machine learning. This means:

  • It becomes more accurate without extra effort from you.
  • Unlike other systems, it understands nuance and context like a human does.
  • It’s multilingual, which is perfect for global and multilingual brands.
  • It’s adaptive and able to work exactly in the way you need it to.

Boasting a 91% accuracy rate, the software is always getting better under a dedicated team of trainers. This is great news to anyone who’s had to spend their own time ensuring other systems remain accurate by maintaining keyword lists.

ICUC’s post mentions how most systems don’t have emotion and intuition. We make up for that by providing a tool capable of reading the nuances of language, identifying whether something fits or violates community standards depending on how it’s used.

Your typical comment moderation tool won’t allow the phrase “f*ing awesome,” but ours will; it can tell that the phrase is meant as praise, which you may want to keep in your community discussion. Of course, if you want a strong profanity filter, that’s fine too! Simply tweak the system to fit your community’s specific needs.

Essentially, using this software is much like working with a human employee. And that’s great, because your real human team members can tackle other duties while the system takes care of your community moderation needs.

With AI tools and assistants being relatively new technologies, no one tool is perfect. But if you give us a try, you’ll see how powerful machine learning is to deliver a social media management experience over and above other automated moderation systems.

Tags: Comment Moderation, Comment Moderation Facebook, Comment Moderation YouTube, Comment Moderation Instagram, Comment Moderation HubSpot, Comment Moderation Hootsuite, Comment Moderation Disqus, Comment Moderation API