Irrespective of the size, success or popularity of a community, content moderators are, at all times, expected to exercise extreme care and caution to ensure every user-generated-content is reviewed before it goes live on a site. But there could be occasions when inappropriate comment can get posted on your site despite all the care taken by your moderators.
Of course it goes without saying that every effort should be undertaken by content moderators to skirt such a scenario, as it can be hugely embarrassing for a brand to see undesirable, abusive, libelous user-generated-content being posted on their site as it has the potential to have a detrimental effect on your brand in the long run.
But one thing that is of crucial interest to us is how effectively we can respond to such situations when undesirable user-generated content goes live on a site for a long period despite the best efforts of the moderators in a particular community.
Content moderators have to be on the ball all the time, in fact 24.x7 to be precise. So, given such a scenario where undesirable user-generated content gets posted live, moderators must quickly realize that something has gone wrong and promptly swing into action and adopt corrective measures and make sure the damage if any, is kept to a bare minimum.
Sample this: recently, a reputed newspaper grabbed eyeballs for all the wrong reasons when extremist racist comments somehow got through the moderation system and went live on the newspaper’s website and remained there for more than four hours before it was taken down.
Such a predicament should make brands, especially those which have user-generated comments posted on their sites, to tread carefully so that such a situation doesn’t become a regular feature.
One has to accept the fact that it may not be possible for us to exactly figure out how much damage such undesirable comments can do to a brand, the bigger concern is: such comments shouldn’t tarnish a brand’s image in the market beyond repair.