Content moderation API: How to Get Started

In a world where fake news spreads like wildfire, online harassment is rampant, and violent videos are a growing concern—moderating content is essential to creating a safe online experience.

Content moderation is one of the most challenging and crucial tasks for any business dealing with user-generated content, product reviews, and other third-party data that’s out of their control.

A lot of time and money is spent on manually moderating inappropriate content—such as sensitive images, hate speech, and more. Due to the changing online landscape, businesses need new solutions that can help them automatically detect risky or unwanted content before it reaches users.

Content moderation APIs work wonders for identifying potentially objectionable content and help businesses respond accordingly with context-sensitive actions. Let’s look at what content moderation is and how content moderation APIs keep your content clean.

What is content moderation?

Content moderation is the process of reviewing and filtering content to remove harmful or inappropriate references and ensure it’s suitable for your audience.

You can moderate content on a variety of platforms. For example, when used on social media, content moderation can filter out spam and offensive content and remove fake accounts and malicious commenters.

Content moderation can be textual, audio, or visual based on the type of content being moderated. One of the most common forms of content moderation is image moderation. It uses image classification datasets and Computer Vision algorithms to flag sensitive and offensive images.

What types of content moderation are there?

You can moderate content in many ways. Here are some common types of content moderation.

• Pre-moderation: involves ****reviewing content before it's published. It can be a time-consuming and expensive approach, especially if you have to hire staff to do it.

• Post-moderation: involves ****inspecting published content. This is often the best approach as it allows people to post whatever they want, but you would require a team to monitor and remove inappropriate content.

• Reactive moderation: takes place after a user reports content as inappropriate. It's commonly a form of content moderation used on social media platforms.

• Distributed moderation: involves community members who use a rating system to vote on content submissions. The average rating score determines whether the content aligns with the community rules, and according to this whether it will be seen by other users. This type of moderation can help improve the quality of content by controlling bias and removing ratings that don't meet a minimum standard.

• Automated moderation: this helps when a human moderator can't review a huge volume of data or complex data. It uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning models to detect, score, and take action on the content. Profanity filters on social media are a typical example of automated moderation.

What is an API?

An application programming interface (API) is a set of rules and standards that facilitate communication between software applications. APIs connect applications and help them work together. For example, an eCommerce website might use an API to connect to logistics software in order to receive inventory updates and ship products to customers.

Content moderation APIs connect moderation software to your content platform and analyze text, video, and audio to automatically filter and mark unnecessary or sensitive content using specific moderation rules.

Why use a content moderation API?

Content moderation is tedious and resource-intensive. The more content you have, the more work it takes to keep it clean and compliant. You can't hire enough people to do it all, and you can't automate everything—at least not yet.

Using an API can streamline your workflow and keep your content fresh and audience-appropriate. With a content moderation API, you can handle a much larger content volume from a centralized location without increasing your workforce.

How to use an API for automated content moderation

APIs allow you to integrate third-party software into your website or cloud-based system to automate moderation tasks.

For example, you can set up an API to receive notifications from a third-party content moderation system when a user or algorithm flags content. You can then moderate the content and decide whether to keep or discard it.

Top 3 Content Moderation APIs

All this sounds pretty good, right?

Thought so—here are three content moderation APIs to help you get the job done. They offer a variety of features and are easy to use.

1. Levity

Levity is a no-code tool that offers AI-powered content moderation. Its content moderation API can quickly scan through thousands of images and text, freeing your team to focus on other essential areas and drive value.

Here's how Levity helps moderate content:

• Automates the whole process: moderate unwanted or explicit content without needing a dedicated content moderation team. Use features like pre-filtering, tagging, and prioritization—set the rules and let them do the work.

• Offers ample customization: access and customize pre-built templates for your use case. Levity also allows you to upload your own training data for business-specific model training.

• Easy-to-use interface: the platform offers plenty of support for its users besides its simple interface. With tutorial videos to help you get started and a customer success team that is always available to help you, it has never been easier to automate your processes. If you need any extra support, you can even join the Levity Community to ask other users for input and share your work!

Moderate User Generated Content with Levity

2. AssemblyAI

AssemblyAI is an AI-backed content moderation tool that works best for audio and video content. Its moderation system allows you to set rules to monitor content.

The software pinpoints exactly what sensitive content was spoken and where it occurs in an audio or video file to enable organizations to take speedy action. Many companies use AssemblyAI to transcribe and moderate phone calls, for example.

Example of a transcription segment in AssemblyAI

3. Amazon Rekognition

Amazon Rekognition offers many text, image, and video moderation APIs for content analysis. It's commonly used to detect and label unwanted or inappropriate content—such as explicit nudity—across social media, broadcast media, advertising, and eCommerce.

Amazon Rekognition can be more expensive compared to other APIs. You also need to set up an AWS account ID and IAM user profile, which can be time-consuming and difficult to track.

Some content categories Amazon Rekognition moderates

Get started with Levity

A strong content moderation API gives you peace of mind that your brand is protected from sharing harmful content. That doesn't just apply to offensive content, but also sensitive information—like phone numbers and social security numbers.

Businesses need to streamline content moderation or they risk wasting valuable time and effort on a task that can be easily automated. Find out how Levity can help you monitor content and create a better experience for your customers.