While most publishers are focused on harnessing the value of audience engagement, many publishers are wrestling with how best to manage growing and established communities. Publishers have long been plagued by trolls armed with abusive language and spam filling in the comment sections — all of which drives away online audiences and stops user engagement in its tracks. This is why some major digital publishers have turned off their commenting feature entirely.
As we’ve established, the Business Case for Engagement is strong: active, engaged users are more likely to give publishers more attention, spend more time on-site, and more likely to convert into paid subscribers. And one of the primary ways users engage with content is in the comments section, after all, 68 per cent of online audiences spend more than 15 per cent of their time reading comments.
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Commenting: Problems With The Status Quo
The groundswell of problems indicates the current commenting and moderation model is broken: trolls leave negative comments, bully community members, and engage in uncivil discord.
So, how have digital publishers contended with this problem? Up until recently, human moderation or by throwing in the towel and completely turning off commenting all together. But as digital publishers have come to discover, human moderators can make mistakes, relying on their own perspective and while expensive are not online 24/7. Most publishers may not have dedicated moderators who can vet every comment, so the task falls to editors and/or journalists. And when moderation is more of a garbage removal exercise, the task becomes a laborious and thankless chore.
If you’re a publication with a large community, you’ll need a team of moderators to sift through all the user-generated content. Not only is manual human moderation labour intensive (and expensive), but it also provides a poor user experience. Users see a delay between submitting comments and watching them go live, which could discourage them from engaging at all.
Moderating after comments are published opens publishers up to having potentially libellous material on your website (even if it’s only temporarily live). And while human moderators can account for context while approving and rejecting comments, their intrinsic biases may impact which comments are filtered — this can lead to a frustrated audience. As a result, human moderation is not sustainable or scalable as your publication and community grows.
Current moderation tools also fall short when it comes to filtering out negative comments. In a side-by-side comparison of 180,650 publicly available comments on a sample business page, even after Facebook Moderation, SaaM automatically flagged 26.7 per cent as you can see illustrated below. Of that 47 per cent, half of those were identified as outright abusive without any further moderation required.
SaaM Report
Moderation period: Jan 1-Feb 4
Content: Public comments posted during moderation period (post Facebook moderation)
Results:
180,650 Comments
26.7% Automatically Flagged
Breakdown of the 26.7% Automatically Flagged
Source: Real client report statistics 2016
Tools like Facebook Commenting simply don’t offer strong filters to catch all the variations on profanity, abusive comments, and bullying that often plague comment sections. With approximately 6.5 million variations of a single English word, it’s easy for trolls to hide profanity and abuse in the context of their comments. And when Facebook limits the number of characters in their banned words list, which makes it even more difficult for moderators to filter out abusive language.
Then what’s a solution that helps digital publishers stop the trolls consistently to increase civility in their comments? Smart automated algorithmic Moderation.
Smart automated algorithmic Moderation: What’s SaaM?
Why expose anyone to the task of taking out the troll trash? Leveraging the algorithm to manage comment moderation protects digital publishers, journalists and their audience. And that’s where Viafoura Smart Moderation comes in. SaaM, or Smart automated algorithmic Moderation, empowers digital publishers to automate moderation across owned and social channels.
SaaM allows you to moderate all comments as they’re submitted, and learns from post-moderation changes. This is done through automated moderation which parses comments as they’re made, and publishes or flags them based on predefined criteria. Our real-time, Smart Moderation uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically detect and hide nasty comments replete with personal attacks, foul language, political hostility and spam before they’re seen by online audiences.
Once flagged, these comments can either be deleted automatically or reviewed and approved/deleted by a publisher’s in-house moderator or community manager. As a result, digital publishers can foster real-time dialogue between users, since the automated system monitors every post to ensure that no spam, hostility or vulgarity is published.
And because this system is automated and uses machine learning to correctly identify more negative comments over time, digital publishers can slash their human moderation costs. And filtering out negative comments at the source deprives trolls of the satisfaction of seeing their abusive remarks go live — which can help discourage this bad behaviour.
Digital publishers can allow SaaM to do the heavy lifting when it comes to comment moderation so they can focus on building a positive community around their content.
And if you’re a publisher with appointed community managers or one with volunteer community moderators, you can still empower your online audience with SaaM. Human moderators embedded in a publisher’s community can quarterback with Smart Moderation to keep nasty comments at bay while still having a human touch to keep commenter conversations civil and constructive.
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Advantages of SaaM: The 4 Cs
SaaM provides 24/7 automated commenting coverage through Latent Semantic Analysis to reduce human moderation resources and costs. As a result, SaaM helps digital publishers uphold the 4 Cs of Smart Moderation to create a positive user experience.
- Consistency: SaaM’s algorithms ensure that community commenting rules are enforced 24/7, by automatically blocking unwanted comments more effectively and cost efficiently than human moderation.
- Context: There are millions of ways commenters can hide abusive language and profanity. SaaM accurately uncovers this unwanted language and blocks it.
- Civility: With automatic moderation around the clock, users can engage in ongoing civil interactions and build a strong community.
- Cost: SaaM enables digital publishers to reduce the costs of human moderation.
Because SaaM helps digital publishers maintain these four pillars and a positive user experience, it also fosters a more active and engaged online community. Users can spend more time in the comments section and directly engaging with content, boosting their attention time. And as an independent report from the MIT Sloan Management Review previously established, there’s a definitive correlation between user engagement and conversion.
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In Conclusion
Moderation is top of mind as digital publishers aim to drive engagement, increase civility, and create a positive user experience. Up until recently, staying on top of comments has proven to be a burden for many publishers — but that doesn’t need to be the case with SaaM.
Are you ready to cut your moderation costs, uphold the four Cs, and grow your own online audience?
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