Multilingual content moderation services

Why Do You Need Content Moderation Services In This Digital Age?

Bill Gates coined the famous phrase “Content is King” in his essay published back in 1996.

In that essay, he ‘prophecied’ how content will be everywhere and created by everyone in the age of the internet: 

“One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.”

In the not too distant past, content production used to be an exclusive thing that can only be performed by publishing houses, professional writers, filmmakers, and more. However, the world has changed, and now all of us can produce, generate, and publish content with ease. 

This type of content is called User-Generated Content, or UGC. 

In today’s social media age, a massive amount of UGC is being published on various platforms where it can be consumed by the public, and the thing is, some of these UGCs could come across to others as profane, vulgar, insensitive, fake-news spreading, and more.

In fact, some content might be plain and simply illegal. 

This is why if your website or platform offers ways for users to generate and publish their content (i.e. comment section, the ability to upload photos/videos, etc.), these pieces of content should be managed through a process of content moderation. 

What Actually Are Content Moderation Services?

Content moderation service, simply put, is the process employed by a website (or online platform) owner to identify and regulate/delete potentially harmful content, for example, content containing fake news, nudity/pornography, racism, sexism, and more. 

The actual content moderation process could vary from platform to platform, but it will mainly involve creating and establishing a set of rules and policies to determine what types of content are categorized as harmful or offensive, and how to regulate each type of content. 

Website/platform owners can choose to moderate their UGC in-house, but a more viable alternative today is to outsource the content moderation process to a specialist agency or content moderation company like Oworkers. 

Yet, with all the different companies offering content moderation services, how should we choose the right vendor according to our needs and budget? 

Below, we will discuss the key factors to evaluate when choosing between different content moderation service providers. 

Key Factors To Consider When Evaluating Content Moderation Service Providers

1. Types of content moderations offered

There are many different approaches a content moderation company can use when moderating user-generated content, the most common approaches are: 

• Pre-moderation – Reviewing content before the content is published. This approach provides the best and strictest control because content moderation happens before the content is visible to the public but users will need to wait for some time before their content will show up, which may ruin the overall user experience. 
• Post-moderation – With this approach, content becomes immediately visible, but will be reviewed by moderators (or AI technologies) in parallel, which may regulate or remove the content accordingly. However, before the content is removed, other users can screenshot or save the harmful/offensive content, which could defeat the purpose of content moderation. 

• Reactive moderation – This approach relies on other users (site visitors) manually flagging harmful and inappropriate content. Only after the content has been flagged that human content moderators will review the content and regulate it as they see fit. 

• Distributed moderation – This method involves a voting system involving all users (i.e. forum members) where the voters decide whether the content should be regulated or can stay published. 

• Automated moderation: Using software solutions and/or AI technologies to assist human moderators or fully perform the content moderation by using techniques like word filters, image recognition, OCR (Optical Character Recognition), and more. 

Different vendors may offer different types of content moderations (and some may offer all of them). It’s crucial to first identify which type of content moderation method (or a combination of methods) that you’ll need based on the type and frequency of user-generated content published on your website or platform. 

2. Expertise in your industry

Different industries may need unique approaches to how UGC should be moderated. This is why it’s crucial to choose a content moderator company with enough experience, credentials, and familiarity with your industry so they’ll understand your unique needs and your customers’ unique preferences.

You may also want to choose a vendor with cross-industry experience, as the company’s experience with multiple industries will mean better capabilities in handling a wider variety of situations and challenges. 

oWorkers, for example, offers a team experienced in moderating content on a variety of industries and platforms like online media, gaming, social networks, dating, online communities, online marketplaces, and children-specialist platforms. 

3. Reliability in recognizing and regulating harmful content

This is the moment of truth: does the content moderation services company have the ability and consistency in identifying offensive and harmful content and regulating it accordingly? 

Even if your business has developed a well-defined policy on how to address offensive content, in reality, there will be situations not covered in your policies or SOPs, and yet may need to be handled immediately. 

This is where the experience of the content moderation company, the content moderators, and how “trained” the AI technologies are will be put to test. 

Having moderated content for many years across different industries and specific client engagements,  oWorkers can proudly claim familiarity with, and ability to handle, the following types of offenses:

• Obscene content
• abusive or intimidating comments
• Defamatory content
• Libelous material
• Breach of copyright
• Child abuse
• Safety issues
• Spam
• Off-topic comments 
• Fraud 
• Illegal items 
• Cyberbullying
• Nudity/ porn
• Drugs/ weapons/ Alcohol
• Celebrities related issues like trolling

4. Multilingual capability 

While today you might not have the plan to cover other countries/regions with different languages, users from other countries can still post offensive and/or harmful user-generated content in different languages on your website or platform, and when this content is viewed by others that understand the language, it will still be offensive to them.

Also, you wouldn’t want to go shopping for a new vendor each time your business expands to cover a new location with a different language. 

oWorkers’ content moderation service is built with multilingual capability in mind from its inception, made possible in some part through its presence in three of the most popular geographies for content moderation services. 

At the moment, oWorkers offers content moderation outsourcing in over twenty of the most widely used language in the world, including but not limited to English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Finnish, Danish, Irish, Swedish, Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, Norwegian, Slovak, Croatian, Romanian, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Hindi, and Arabic. More languages can be provided on demand.

5. Familiarity with different content types

Different types of user-generated content will have differing content moderation needs. 

For example, content posted on dating sites might require different moderation approaches when compared to news platforms and educational sites. 

Below are some types of user-generated content you may have on your website or platform, and unique approaches in moderating each: 

• Comment section – blogs and sites that allow visitors to leave comments. Content moderators must understand the context of the website/blog to understand which pieces of content are considered harmful or offensive. 
• Reviews – eCommerce sites often encourage user feedback and reviews for their products. In such cases, content moderators may also pay attention to potential abuse by competitors (deliberately posting negative reviews) apart from the risk of offensive content. 
• Chat – there are many platforms that offer chat functions between different users (i.e. gaming), and moderation must happen in real-time, ideally with the help of AI technologies capable of real-time detection and moderation. 
• Forums – forum posts can be moderated with a more or less similar approach to comment sections, with the understanding of the forum’s context and unique policies being the key to successful outsourced content moderation. 
• Audio content – audio content posted on public-facing platforms and websites need to comply with relevant regulations/standards and the policies defined by the website/platform owner. 
• Video –  video, being a rich medium, is considered one of the riskiest mediums in causing harm and offense. User-generated videos are the most sensitive to possible abuse and indeliberate offenses, so video content needs to be moderated with much more care and attention

Whatever the type of user-generated content, oWorkers content moderation outsourcing services are committed to making the internet a pleasant experience for visitors and safer for sections at risk, like children. We will use human expertise along with modern technologies to make each visit a positive experience. This includes live monitoring. We will ensure that no part of the content, whatever the media, is unsupervised.

6. Transparent and reasonable pricing

Since outsourcing the content moderation process is an investment, pricing should be an important consideration. 

In outsourcing a content moderation service, however, there are many parts of the deal that are often considered subjective and intangible, and so it can be difficult to determine and justify the price of the engagement, which may lead to confusion and disputes. 

With that being said, it’s recommended to choose a vendor that offers a transparent pricing structure, preferably one that is displayed on the vendor’s website. OWorker, for example, offers a transparent pricing mechanism, between US$ 5.5 and 15.5 per hour (€5-€13/hour). 

Additional costs determined by variables the size of the moderator team, types of content, volumes, and languages to be moderated are also easily calculated. You’ll get a predictable cost, every time, without having to worry about hidden fees and other issues.  

7. Timeliness and reliability

Content moderation is a time-sensitive business, and your organization simply cannot wait as the user-generated content is being moderated (or not). The faster you process the content moderation, the faster you can execute other tasks that are directly or indirectly affected by the content moderation process. 

In short, how quickly and reliably the content moderator company can moderate your content should be an essential consideration when choosing between different content moderation companies. 

With BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) centers in three strategic global locations, oWorkers is able to offer the advantage of 24×7 delivery. OWorkers can also offer speedy delivery for its global clients while taking into account the timezone differences with the client’s operational area. In most cases, oWorkers are able to commit overnight delivery.

8. People management

As a BPO company, the content moderation company is ultimately driven by the strength of its human resources. 

After all, we choose to outsource our process to a BPO because automating the process isn’t possible or viable at the moment. So, the quality and reliability of the content moderation BPO service will be determined by how effectively it can manage its people, which encompasses many different elements like hiring, training, attrition management, and managing the general welfare of its people. 

oWorkers will offer you the flexibility to ramp up (or down) your content moderator team by 100 people in just 48 hours. This is simply impossible if we haven’t committed to a deep engagement and active participation in ensuring our people’s wellness. By ensuring oWorkers is an aspirational workplace, we can attract a continuous supply of talent. 

Our training team takes new hires under their wing and is deeply committed to training them to become billable resources so each of them can make a meaningful contribution to their families. This is why our attrition numbers are regularly better than most of our competitors in the industry, giving us an edge in retention of knowledge, and limiting our cost of hiring and training.

9. Technology and data security 

Content moderation naturally deals with the regular transmission of data, including potentially sensitive and regulated information of your business and your users/customers. 

Therefore, it’s crucial to choose a BPO vendor that is deeply committed to providing the highest levels of data security to protect the client data that they regularly handle. Also, with today’s post-pandemic reality forcing employees to work from home, ensuring their remote workers are also performing the highest level of data security best practices is also an important quality to consider from a content moderation outsourcing. 

oWorkers have partnered with the best AI content moderation tools that are deeply committed to data security, assisted with human moderators that have also been trained to perform the highest level of data security best practices. 

The fact that 85% of our clients are technology companies keeps us on our toes. We operate from super secure facilities & protocols for your data security, We are GDPR compliant and ISO (27001 :2013 & 9001:2015) certified. Our data security extends to work from home.

10. Management, financial, and regulatory stability

A content moderation service company can only provide effective and efficient operations when supported by strong management. 

It’s crucial to assess how well a BPO company manages itself and its people before committing to outsourcing your content moderation process. The company may be capable of delivering great value in a particular area, but unless the management shows an inclination to be providing that service, it will not be able to function smoothly. 

In addition, the company should ensure that it is on the right side of all legal requirements, as well as financially sound to provide an environment for the business units to operate with freedom.

oWorkers is a locally registered company in all its global centers. We pay local taxes as well as social taxes for our people. It has been a profitable company and takes on engagements after careful evaluation and discussion. Our management team comes with hands-on experience of over twenty years in the business.

Conclusion

A BPO services provider with a focus on data entry and related services, oWorkers delivers content moderation services to clients, with several unicorn marketplaces among them, across the globe. Many of our clients have reported savings of up to 80% after outsourcing to us. Like it has for many others, your search for great quality and quick turnaround at competitive pricing from a content moderation services company should end with oWorkers.