One of the realities of the modern world is social media. Like airplanes, call centers, and congested cities. It is present. It is expanding. It is utilized by millions, if not billions, of people worldwide. It’s also open. It relies on user-generated content (UGC), which is content that you and I, along with billions of others, create or copy-paste and post on our accounts and with our networks. Content that can be easily shared by the large number of individuals that have access to it through us. In fact, many people see social media as a ticket to instant stardom, and they continue to try to create content in the hopes that it will pique people’s interest and ‘go viral.’

Websites, or web properties, are what social media platforms

Many other websites, which are not necessarily built as platforms to foster human contact, also urge visitors, users, and consumers to participate.

Many organizations harness the power of social media platforms and make an attempt to carve out places for themselves under the website content moderation platform’s overall canopy, where they can foster interaction on topics of relevance to their organization and brand.

The importance of internet content moderation

As a result, massive amounts of content are created in impossibly vast proportions. Imagine 4.6 billion people around the world, almost 60% of the world’s population, busy creating content.

Someone is uploading photos of her recent vacation in Scotland, someone is being wished on his birthday by friends and acquaintances, someone is uploading photos of a new line of dresses their business has introduced, someone is digitizing and uploading court judgments from many years ago, someone is sending out messages asking for references for a carpenter, and so on.

This is only four of the 4.6 billion. The examples we’ve chosen are our most likely harmless transactions that occur on a regular basis. We participate to the extent that they are relevant to us, else we generally ignore them.

As we all know, it takes all kinds to create the world. We have built a form of civil society structure and boundaries for acceptable and undesirable behavior over thousands of years of coexistence. These unwritten principles of civil society also guide legal structures in many nations.

These rules of acceptable behavior, which were created mostly via and for interaction, also apply to our behavior on the internet. Though it is not feasible to do bodily harm through the internet, some of the content available can have a profound, long-lasting, and frightening impact on the consumer’s psyche.

The anonymity provided by the internet, in which a user sits in a dark corner of the world away from prying eyes (at least physical) and people, can influence different people in different ways. For some, it may bring comfort and solace, while for others, it may act as an incitement to engage in mischief that they are unable to do in real life, to pretend they are secure, or to achieve the (in)famy they believe they deserve.

Everything is possible, whether the content is about violence, child pornography, rape, murder, or religious hatred. Once on a platform, it takes on a life of its own and grows rapidly, propelled by voyeurs as well as people looking for their own.