What is Chat Moderation & Why it’s Important for Chat App?

Published On March 19th, 2024 Tech Talks

Users get an inch closer to your brand each time they send or receive a message via your chat app. Every notification, every image, and every audio exchanged through your app builds the user’s relationship with your business stronger and deeper. The more frequent an interaction takes place, the more important it is to consider the app’s content standard and user safety.

If you are thinking about how to add this feature to your chat app development, then the ‘Chat Moderation’ can help retain the sanity of the app.

What is Chat Moderation?

Chat moderation is the practice of managing and supervising online chat discussions, forums, social media, and online communities to ensure that they comply with set standards and guidelines.

Plus, the prime goal of chat moderation is to restrict and address inappropriate content to make the chat space a secure environment for user interactions.

Who is a Chat Moderator?

Chat moderators are usually persons or chat admins who manually moderate in-app messages or content that might disturb the harmony.

What does a Chat Moderator do?

An online moderator usually monitors chat room discussions, forums, public chats, and any online chat space to make it a safe place for conversing.

And as of Feb 01, 2024, chat moderators are paid $30.93 an hour in the USA.

 
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Type Of Content That Requires Moderation

The conversations that take place within your app contain different forms of content. This user-generated content, if offensive or upsetting to other users, may be subjected to moderation. The moderation process varies from one case to another based on the type of content that comes under scrutiny.

Below are the various types of content that can be subjected to reviews

1. Image Moderation 

Images or visual information attract user attention more than any other medium of content and stays in their memory for a long time. Imagine a user coming across an inappropriate image in a chat conversation within your app. This may closely disturb the viewer’s sense of safety and trust in your brand.

But, the solution to avoid such risks is not completely your burden. 

Messages that are regarded as not suitable for the platform can be flagged and removed as per the image moderation policies. These policies can be implemented during the chat service.

2. Messaging Moderation

Text or message moderation refers to the screening and review of text messages that are exchanged during a conversation. Since the content is completely user-generated, the control over each chat thread may be quite complicated.

To resolve this,

  • chat moderation should imply that the subject, language as well as the sentiment of every message aligns with the brand regulations.
  • Explicit text content has to be prevented by reporting or blocking features available for users and the moderators. 

3. Voice Moderation

While voice chat is a powerful way to exchange ideas on the app, it is difficult to moderate it.

  • Voice chat moderation is prone to privacy issues with practical difficulties in protecting a positive chat atmosphere.
  • Since verbal communication cannot be instantly controlled, regulatory actions and warnings may be given to the users who are reported.
  • Similarly, automated chat moderation filters and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven chat moderation makes it difficult to moderate voice chats.

Now that we have learnt the types of content that can be moderated, let us see how to classify moderations:

How do you moderate chat?

Listed below are a few strategies to moderate chats in any online chat space.

1. Automated Moderation

It is the process of using AI-powered algorithms and tools to protect your apps from abusive, illegal, and inappropriate content. During this process, human moderators are refrained from reviewing disturbing content.

2. Manual Moderation

A dedicated human resource carries out manual moderation by reviewing the flagged or reported content and removing it. This is considered as an overwhelming task for any human to scrutinize unhealthy content on a website that can be a bully, fake or illegal information.

Based on the Period of Moderation

1. Pre- Moderation

The process of removing the content before it reaches the recipient is known as pre-moderation.

2. Post-Moderation

Post moderation is the process of screening and removing the content after a user reports or flags a content that disturbs them

Based on Community Guidelines

1. Reactive Moderation

A group of members within a chat community is designated to identify and report any undesirable or offensive content in a chat thread with many active users. The process is known as Reactive Moderation.

2. Distributed Moderation

This type of moderation is rarely used by chat apps. During this process, moderators are assigned to review and approve the content before they get published within a group.

Why is Chat App Moderation Important?

A sense of community is essential for users to interact with your brand’s comfort. However, the free exchange of ideas should not mean the use of hate messages or discussions that are off-topic. Focusing on a healthy chat application development for conversations is a serious responsibility and the effort has its perks.

Below is the list of reasons why messaging app moderation can take your chats to the next level.

  1. User Safety and Brand Safety:  Protect your users and your brand from exposure to disturbing content.
  2. User Patterns: The type of content in your app reflects the type of users across your app. This helps you better understand your users and ensure focusing on quality leads to your brand.
  3. Brand Exposure: The content discussed within your app exhibits how your brand must be perceived by new users. The standards maintained within conversations by a large user community can bring more brand awareness and build trustworthiness.
  4. User Retention: Users will stay glued to your chat app if they feel it to be more secure. This sense of safety will bring more users by word-of-mouth. Finally, it elevates your brand value, widening the horizons of your business.
  5. Improve Transactions: The more a user trusts your app, the more a chat converts into a transaction. When this happens, your brand starts to see monetary values. 

The Need for a Solid Messaging App Moderation Infrastructure

The point of deciding on ‘Make or Buy’ a chat moderation infrastructure or building a video chat can sometimes be overwhelming. Reinforcing comprehensive security takes a huge amount of energy, resource, effort, and cost.  

Whereas, if you buy a chat functionality that is built by experts, there are hordes of benefits of webchat apps. The development cost can be minimized, apps are more secure and confident, and is inclusive of smart investment and features.

MirrorFly’s Chat Moderation Features

Our expert mobile and web developers have created moderation features for chat apps to protect user privacy and the safety of every conversation thereby leading to increased brand awareness.

Whether it is one-to-one chat or group chats, the moderation feature ensures that any abusive or inappropriate message gets reported instantly. And ban users who are identified as a menace to the app’s integrity.

Here’s a glimpse of how our features get into action:

1. Manual Message Moderation

In this type of messaging moderation. When a user’s message is considered to be inappropriate,  our APIs and SDKs allow chat admins ( or a chat moderator) to manually moderate the messages. Our chat features are built with a steadfast focus on the security of events across your app’s connections, profiles, and chats.

Note: Please refer to the above section to learn who is a chat moderator.

2. User-to-User Blocking

When a user is reported or observed to have polluted the sanity of the app, our APIs give the necessary When a user is reported to have polluted the sanity of the app, our messaging API gives admins to block them. Similarly, a group that is reported for abuse may also be revoked of access to use the app.

3. Ban User

Chat admins can ban users from groups and channels when they are known to harm the security of the chat platform.

We understand that the legacy of a brand stays with the experience it gives to its users. Thus we step in to provide such a sense of security and reliability using our moderation features. Include this feature during your chat app development without a miss. You can explore more features of ours by talking to our experts

Using Chat Moderation Features: Get a head start

In summary, when you build a chat app or focus on video chat app development, integrating Chat Moderation APIs can give a safe place for your users to exchange ideas, and discuss topics within the app.

We bid bye with a reminder to ensure a safe community for your users with MirrorFly’s moderation features. Further, if you would like to avail complete ownership of our call and chat features, get our best self-hosted SDK license key by paying only once.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why is chat moderation important?

Chat moderation helps you create a healthy and safe environment. Chat apps are a great source to develop and maintain a community, but some spam messages, violating contents, and concerning behaviours might spoil the community guidelines. Here, chat moderation helps in maintaining the community guidelines in a proper way.

What are the types of moderation?

Chat moderations are generally classified into two types:
Manual moderation: Moderators observe messages, filter spam and violated contents, and help to avoid concerning behaviours related to community guidelines. It is suitable for small communities and businesses with limited resources.
Automated moderation: automated moderation works based on certain conditions, pre-programmed with community guidelines. Automated moderation can be used in large-scale enterprises with unlimited texts. But in some cases, it misses human emotions and flow.

Who is the chat moderator?

A chat moderator is a person who is responsible for reviewing and retaining healthy communities on communication platforms. Generally, the chat moderator observes your texts, voice, or image and analyses them with community guidelines to make sure everything is maintained with dignity.

List MirrorFly’s messaging moderation features.

MirrorFly allows you to use every moderation tool required for a chat app to maintain community or enterprise guidelines. Here are a few messaging moderation features from MirrorFly.
1.Chat moderation
2.Image moderation
3.Voice moderation
4.Automated moderation tools

Can you explain user-generated content?

User-generated content (UGC) refers to any form of content, like images, text, voice, and video, posted on social media or community platforms directly by users. It involves use cases like social media, dating apps, matrimony sites, media and entertainment, etc.

Vigneshwar

Vigneshwar is a seasoned digital marketer and blogger, extremely passionate about driving search engine visibility for websites. He thoroughly enjoys exploring emerging technologies and is currently honing his expertise in Chat APIs and their associated tech stacks.

12 Comments "What is Chat Moderation & Why it’s Important for Chat App?"

  1. Divakar Solomon says:

    How effective is the manual moderation feature?

    1. Vigneshwar says:

      Hello Divakar, I hope you are doing great. Manual modifications have enormous benefits that really enhance the user experience. Manual moderators can work based on the community guidelines they represent and can be more useful in filtering chat contents with human emotional values. But manual chat moderation might be time-consuming and highly expensive in terms of the increase in monthly active users, message count, and more. The manual chat moderation feature is really effective for small communities with limited texts.

  2. Pranav Lal says:

    Is chat app moderation available on GitHub?

    1. Vigneshwar says:

      Hello, Pranav. I hope you are doing great. Yes, there are several chat app moderations available on GitHub. One of the best apps is MirrorFly for chat moderation. You can get the benefits of chat app moderation with their essential and premium plans. Always remember that chat moderations are essential for chat apps that host UGC and social community-based chat apps.

  3. Danvith John says:

    Can I get chat moderation in the free real-time chat API?

    1. Vigneshwar says:

      Hello Danvith, Chat moderation is a high-end feature that cannot be provided with free real-time chat APIs. Meanwhile, you can book your demo with the MirrorFly business development team and connect with our tech experts to observe the functionalities of chat moderation. Even though we offer a month-on-month subscription, you can switch to your comfortable plan and continue using the chat moderation feature.

  4. Rohan Mathew says:

    Is solid moderation infrastructure really needed for a chat app?

    1. Vigneshwar says:

      Hi Rohan. Yes, solid moderation infrastructure is really needed for chat apps that host user-generated content (UGC). For the rest of the apps, it’s recommended to ensure the safety of conversations between users. While chat apps that hots UGC must have chat moderators in order to identify violations and concerning behaviours and to observe conversation to make sure they are organised and used according to social norms, If you are planning to build or buy a chat app, it is mandatory to prioritise the chat moderation feature.

  5. Brian says:

    Hello, I am Brian Feron. Do I need to pay additional charges to use your chat moderation features?

    1. Vigneshwar says:

      Hi, Brian Feron. I hope you are doing great. MirrorFly facilitates chat moderation in its essential plan. You don’t have to pay any additional charges to use chat moderation if you fall under these plans.

  6. Lusy says:

    Hi, I am Lucy Curtis. I am building a messenger app and I came across your article about chat solution. I’d like to know if built-in chat moderation really protects user conversations. How well are they useful? I’d like to know more about this.

    1. Vigneshwar says:

      Hello, Lucy Curtis, Congratulations on your Messenger app! Yes, built-in chat moderations are more helpful in protecting users conversations, filtering spam contents, and analysing the originality of the texts. Moderators are developed in a way to observe conversations, identify violations or concerning behaviours, and take the necessary actions to label them. Well, in order to know more about chat moderations and their use cases, you can connect with our tech expert and clarify your queries.

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