According to the Washington Post, content moderators call themselves the silent heroes of the internet, and with very good reason. Content moderation is the task of viewing content posted online and determining whether or not it should be allowed, under any given terms of service. This, of course, necessitates individuals to spend hours watching or reading content in order to determine if it adheres to the rules. The service of content moderation is being outsourced primarily to the Philippines, effectively making it the content moderation capital of the world, serving countless internet-related corporations.
An ever-increasing number of companies need this service, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Tinder, WhatsApp, Instagram, and more. Without content moderation, websites and online services would be plagued by content that either violates intellectual property rights or contain inappropriate content that may scare away users. Content moderation teams are necessary to prevent legal issues from arising, but they can simply provide a better service to users in the first place. Obviously, a company’s first priority should be ensuring its consumer public does not get bombarded with a sea of unsavory content. This moderation must also take place 24/7 in real-time. A user cannot be expected to wait hours before their content or message is posted. The entire point of using the internet is that it makes communication faster. However, the drawback is that communication is largely unsupervised. That is where content moderation organizations are here to help.
There is no escaping the digital age, so we need a service like content moderation to ensure a smooth transition. Global demand for this is due to the nature of all industry around the world. Here are some statistics, based on YouTube and Facebook data analyses: YouTube has 300 hours of video uploaded per minute. Facebook has 400 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day. In the United States alone, 16.4 billion display ads are served online each day.
This is an overwhelming amount of content from people all over the planet. So, many companies are outsourcing their content moderation services to the Philippines. Outsourcing providers have to provide constant content moderation, operating in many languages in order to adequately address global market needs. Companies are outsourcing these services to the Philippines because there is too much content for people without a dedicated moderation team to even address. The people who spend their days on the front lines of content moderation are really fighting an endless battle with the incoming waves of content, ever-growing. It is important for corporations to both protect their brand and their customers. Some of the largest and leading content moderation providers are based out of the Philippines and they are the experts thus far in an ever-growing, and ever more complicated world of internet content.
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