Brand Protection Archives - Online Moderation

When the Outrage Isn’t Real: Bots in Your Brand’s Comment Section

Mark Somol — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 03:29:32 +0000

In August 2025, Cracker Barrel unveiled a new logo. Within days the online backlash was massive, and on August 26 the company announced it was bringing the old one back. From the outside, it looked like a textbook case of a brand misreading its customers and getting a handslap. A few weeks later, a media-intelligence firm called PeakMetrics published an analysis that complicated the story considerably.

PeakMetrics examined a sample of 52,000 posts on X from the first 24 hours of the backlash, flagging 44.5% of those posts as bots. Among posts specifically calling for a boycott of the brand, the figure was 49%. Across the full period it studied, more than two million posts from August 19 to September 5, roughly 24% showed markers of automation. And 70% of boycott posts used identical phrasing, which is a pretty clear a sign of templated content as you’ll find.

The report concluded that the bots didn’t initially cause the dissatisfaction, but they amplified the scale. The negativity campaign was seeded by a handful of popular real-human accounts, highlighting that real people were genuinely unhappy. Then the bots took that real unhappiness and blew it out of proportion, making made it look like a mass movement against the new logo.

Ignoring bots is a mistake

We all know that managing social media can be a tumultuous process. A massive amount of angry messages suggest upset customers. Sometimes, brands interpret that negativity as real feedback, and change directions to appease their fans. But if the negativity is engineered by bots, then you are misinterpreting the signal in the wash of noise.

Other times, brands choose to ignore the wave of negativity, thinking It’s just a bot campaign. When you dig deeper and find out that it was indeed bots, it’s easy to just dismiss the entire campaign as “it’s just bots, ignore it.” That’s a convenient narrative, with some confirmation bias, because it absolves anyone of having made a misjudgment.

But neither of these approaches actually aids in making a sound decision, because bots are nearly always involved in any significant online reaction at this point. Instead, the crucial question is to decipher what genuine individuals are trying to tell you, and, just as importantly, how many real people were involved. A bot score can address the former, but it can’t determine the latter.

Bots are very active on social media

Cracker Barrel’s situation captured attention because of its scale, but bots impact social media, every day, sometimes quietly and not some big crisis. Respondology, a company specializing in comment moderation, analyzed 168.8 million comments across 7.6 million posts from roughly 3,400 brand and organization accounts during 2025, spanning Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Threads, and paid ads on Meta and TikTok. Their report, released in April, detailed:

One in five comments (20%) exhibiting some form of spam, bot activity, or malicious intent.
Spam and bots accounted for 41.8% of the comments brands chose to hide.
Paid media was nearly twice as toxic as organic, with a substantial portion requiring hiding, 38.4% on TikTok ads and 34.1% on Meta ads.
On sports accounts, more than 80% of spam comments led to illegal streaming or ticketing fraud sites.
Only 3.5% of all comments received a response from the brands themselves.

Perhaps the most important figure for anyone managing a brand’s reputation is this: 47% of consumers associate negative comments with the brand itself. The automated post linking to a deceptive site might seem like a minor annoyance, but the problem is that have your audience interprets the bad site as an extension of brand.

The broader picture of web traffic echoes these concerns. Imperva’s 2026 Bad Bot Report showed automated traffic accounted for more than 53% of all web traffic in 2025, an increase from 51% the previous year. The financial services sector experienced 24% of all bot attacks and 46% of account takeover incidents, a sobering statistic for those overseeing social media for a bank, as the same actors often target customer accounts and simultaneously seed comment sections with “contact our support agent” links.

Academic scrutiny reinforces this trend. A recent paper in Public Relations Review (titled, rather aptly, “Somebody’s Poisoned the Water Hole!”) argues that the field requires new principles for gathering social media data, given the widespread contamination of the source material by AI-generated content. When researchers studying your audience question the reliability of the data itself, it’s a clear warning for those acting on it.

What the detection tools are genuinely good at

Bot detection stands out as a genuine success story within this field. PeakMetrics arrived at that 44.5% using software tools, as having humans review 52,000 posts doesn’t work at scale. Machines excel at high-volume, pattern-based work, spotting patterns like templated phrasing, unusual posting times, new accounts acting in concert, and scam links across millions of posts.

Platforms’ filters already catch a great deal of obvious spam before it even reaches you. Many of our clients already utilize their own detection and filtering tools, and we often work within those existing setups. The sensible approach is to let software manage the clearing of straightforward noise at a scale that a human team can’t match.

What the tools can’t decide for you

The core objective, then, is to understanding what the remaining feedback means. A detection tool might flag 44.5% of interactions as automated, yet it can’t reveal whether the remaining 55.5% holds significance. It can’t assess if those genuine customers in the discussion represent a small, vocal group or the start of something substantial, nor can it guide your response, determine what to say, or even confirm whether the initial decision that sparked the issue was flawed.

These decisions truly matter for your brand, because your choices on whether to respond or ignore the comments may impact real customers. During a backlash, you may have a strong urge to delete suspected bot comments quickly, but if your criteria for “suspected bot” are too broad (perhaps based on a new account, an angry tone, or wording similar to other posts) you’ll inevitably remove real people, too. Remember, the Cracker Barrel campaign was, in part, seeded by humans, and many genuine customers will repost language they’ve already seen. Deleting those comments is a mistake, which can backfire you, like the kind detailed in sentiment-based suppression we wrote about last week.

How to read a thread like a person

We’ve developed a checklist our team uses, recognizing that no single sign is definitive. Instead, it’s about spotting patterns and thoughtfully considering them all.

Leans automated	Leans real customer
Account created recently, few or no prior posts	Account with a history, including posts unrelated to your brand
Wording identical or near-identical to other comments	Specific details: an order number, a store location, a date, a product name, a staff interaction
It arrives in a burst	It arrives on its own timeline, and may reference an earlier interaction with you
Contains a link, especially a shortened one, or a “DM this account for help” redirect	Asks a question that expects an answer from you
No replies to anyone, or doesn’t engage when answered	Replies to other people in the thread, or responds when you respond.
Generic grievance that could apply to any brand	Grievance that only makes sense about your brand
Profile photo, name and bio that don’t match the posting pattern	Tone that changes (softens or sharpens) when someone engages

The most dependable test we’ve found is the last one listed on the right. Responding to the comment and observing the outcome reveals a lot because bots don’t continue the conversation, but people do.

What to do with what you find

A few practices consistently prove valuable in both crisis situations and regular operations.

Establish a baseline first. Recognizing an unusual spike requires knowing what’s typical in your social feed. That means tracking comment volume, sentiment mix, and spam rates across each platform. Experienced moderators often hold this knowledge in their heads, a benefit supporting continuity.
Before you make decisions, analyze the comments. When leaders ask “how bad is it?”The most useful response is, “We’re seeing about X genuine customers expressing Y specific concerns, against a backdrop of significant automated amplification.” That’s a figure that informs a sound decision.
Consistently remove clearly automated content under a defined policy. Spam floods, phishing redirects, and scam links should be removed consistently, regardless of the sentiment in the surrounding discussion.
Avoid bulk-deleting comments during a backlash. Any ambiguous comment should remain visible until a person has reviewed it.
Publicly respond to genuine customers. A specific, human reply within a thread full of automated messages sends the clearest signal, to the customer and everyone reading, that you can distinguish between the two.
Escalate based on the proportion of genuine customer comments, not the overall volume. An increasing share of comments from actual customers serves as an early warning, even if overall volume is decreasing. I’ll return to the role of human judgment once a situation escalates into a full crisis in a later post.

Where we land

The easy narrative suggests that bots are the issue, and improved bot detection is the answer. Detection certainly matters, and it continues to improve, but the real challenge is about understanding the sentiment of the actual people behind the comments.

That’s what we focus on. Our moderators average over eight years of experience, often tending to the same accounts for years, which allows them to learn the nuances of your community’s voice and recognize when something deviates. We provide coverage in five languages, with native speakers available around the clock, every day, because coordinated campaigns don’t adhere to business hours. And when we tell a client, “this appears largely to be bots, though there are approximately forty real customers with legitimate concerns,” there’s a person on the line who can explain exactly how they reached that conclusion.

If you’re interested in a broader view of where automated and human moderation excel, begin with Human vs. AI Content Moderation. For clarification on what “accurate” truly signifies in AI moderation, see this article. And if you’d like an independent assessment of the content within your comment section, talk to a human here offers that service.

Talk to a human about your brand →

An extension of your team. Real judgment, real brand voice, around the clock.

FAQ

How can you tell if social media comments are from bots?

When Comment Moderation Becomes Review Suppression

Mark Somol — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 18:14:57 +0000

One of our clients is a financial institution, who recently found themselves on the wrong side of new regulations around social media. Not long ago, the team managing one of their social accounts developed a routine of deleting direct messages in one of their social media accounts.

No one thought about the compliance matter at the time. They considered it a way to keep the inbox clear. However, a regulator noticed, and the bank was subsequently issued a formal warning, along with a chance to correct the issue before facing penalties.

Having moderated brand communities for over two decades, I’ve observed many well-intentioned organizations miss changes like this. Suppression of customer feedback has moved from a simple housekeeping matter to a potential compliance risk. In regulated industries, these situations could be a disclosure question, a record-keeping question, or both.

We’ll clarify the boundaries of these rules, identify which ones are truly relevant, and dispel some of the exaggerations surrounding this topic, so you have an accurate understanding of your responsibilities.

A new, important compliance rule

In October 2024, the Federal Trade Commission’s Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials took effect. Most of the coverage focused on fake reviews, which the rule bans outright. The relevant part for social media and moderation is a section on review suppression.

This rule prohibits two things.

The first is using an unfounded legal threat, a physical threat, intimidation, or a public false accusation to stop someone from posting a review (or to get one taken down). Most brands aren’t doing this.
The second is subtler and relevant to social media teams. If you display reviews, like on your website or promotional material, you must ensure they accurately reflect the aggregate reviews submitted, not some cherry-picked subset of reviews.

The rule then lists what you are allowed to remove. You can withhold a review if it contains trade secrets or confidential information; is defamatory, harassing, abusive, obscene, vulgar or sexually explicit; contains someone else’s personal information; is discriminatory about an intrinsic characteristic; is clearly false or misleading; is reasonably believed to be fake; or is wholly unrelated to what you sell.

Then the tricky thing is that those criteria have to be “applied equally to all reviews submitted without regard to sentiment.” You’re allowed to moderate, but you aren’t allowed to wholesale remove reviews. And, crucially, you’re not allowed to let whether it’s negative be the thing that decides.

A Case Study: Fashion Nova

The FTC took issue with review suppression before this rule was in place. In 2022, it reached a settlement with Fashion Nova for $4.2 million related to a practice that seems shocking in hindsight. Reviews scoring below four stars out of five were removed from the website, presenting a picture of perfect customer satisfaction.

It marked their first case addressing concealed negative reviews and resulted in the FTC distributing $2.4 million in refunds to 148,000 affected customers. What’s striking about Fashion Nova’s case is that it didn’t create fake reviews or bully people into changing their reviews. Instead, it established a simple threshold and allowed a filter to manage the flow of feedback.

The rule defines a consumer review as appearing on a “site or platform dedicated, in whole or in part, to receiving and displaying such evaluations”. A dedicated review page or a marketplace listing clearly fits the description. However, a comment under a product launch post on Instagram is in a grey area and the FTC’s guidance does not explicitly address social comments. Is it okay to hide Facebook or Instagram comments?

Let’s look at how this might apply to your brand:

Fashion Nova faced action under the general prohibition on deception in Section 5 of the FTC Act, long before this review rule came into being. The FTC’s own Q&A on the rule makes the same point regarding another practice, asking only satisfied customers for reviews, noting it “could violate the FTC Act” even though the rule allows it.
Enforcement now carries real financial weight. In December 2025 the FTC sent warning letters to ten companies about potential violations, citing civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation. Then, in July 2026, it finalized an order against TruHeight concerning fake and incentivized reviews: a $4 million judgment, with $750,000 payable. While that case involved fabrication rather than suppression, it shows that the FTC is paying attention to these review rules.
Comments on your social channels may function as reviews, even if unintended. “Does this actually work?” “Worst purchase I’ve made this year.” These are “reviews” and your customers perceive it as such, despite the lack of formal designation.
A screenshot doesn’t care about legal definitions. People notice when a comment disappears. They often repost it. “This brand deletes criticism” becomes a more compelling story than the original comment and risks going viral.

With all of this in mind, the sensible position is to moderate your comments as if adhering to a sentiment-neutral standard, because it’s the only standard that safeguards you across all four of these scenarios.

For a bank, a customer’s comment might be a notice

Financial services companies face challenges extending far beyond reputation management, stemming from a core issue in how they handle customer communications. Guidance on social media risk was jointly issued in 2013 by the OCC, Federal Reserve, FDIC, NCUA, and CFPB, through the FFIEC. Within that guidance is the observation that customers sometimes use social media to raise issues directly with an institution, citing examples such as error disputes under Regulation E and billing errors under Regulation Z.

Considering this from the perspective of someone managing an inbox, a message like “you charged me twice and I need to fix it” isn’t merely a complaint. Depending on its content and timing, the message could signify the beginning of a dispute, which the institution is legally bound to address. Deleting the message is discarding a formal notice. To be fair, the guidance also clarifies that institutions should properly handle messages received through channels they control, such as direct messages to official accounts.

In fairness, the same guidance is clear that institutions aren’t required to monitor and respond to every communication on the internet. The obligation is to properly manage what arrives in your earned channels, like a DM in your official Facebook account or page.

Coming back to my opening story, this is the situation that our customer had to learn from. The solution required recognizing when a customer communication falls under regulations. These messages need capture, routing, response, and record-keeping.

Be careful with hidden-word lists

Most platforms offer the ability to automatically hide comments containing specific words. The intent is to protect your community from inappropriate content, so sensible teams start with a reasonable filter list. This filter includes slurs, spam phrases, scam links, even a competitor’s promotional code. However, over time, additional words tend to accumulate. After a difficult period, someone might add “scam”, and then a string of others like “refund.”, “Lawsuit.”, “Fraud.”, “Cancel.”, “Worst.”, “BBB.”, and, for a bank, occasionally, “CFPB.”

Each addition might be justified in the moment, for some specific inappropriate comment, but collectively, these rules create a filter that unintentionally hides complaints. So, if you take away one thing from this, I urge you to review your hidden-words and keyword-filter lists on every platform, examining each entry closely to see if it catches abuse or suppresses expressions of unhappiness.

What a defensible standard looks like

This is the framework we use, built directly on the categories the FTC itself treats as legitimate grounds for removal.

Category	Examples	What to do
Remove or hide	Harassment, abuse, slurs, threats; obscene or sexually explicit content; spam, scam links, bots; someone else’s personal information; clearly false factual claims; content wholly unrelated to your brand	Remove under a written policy, applied the same way whether the comment is positive or negative. Log the reason.
Leave it up	Negative reviews of your product; frustration with your service; unflattering comparisons to competitors; criticism of a company decision	Respond if it helps. Don’t remove. This is the category a sentiment filter swallows.
Route, don’t remove	Account problems, billing disputes, refund requests, anything describing a specific error or loss; for healthcare, anything touching a patient’s care	Acknowledge publicly without specifics, move it to a private channel, and hand it to the team that can resolve it. In regulated industries, capture it before anything else happens to it.

A few useful operating rules:

Write the policy down and publish it. Community guidelines are a staple of good social media management and allow your audience to follow rules rather than moods.
Log every removal with a reason code. When someone asks why a comment disappeared (a customer, a journalist or a regulator) “it was abusive, comment removed” is an appropriate answer.
Prefer the reversible action. Hiding is usually reversible while deleting is sometimes permanent, so use the action that is appropriate for the comment.
Audit the filter lists regularly. Monthly is reasonable. Make sure every entry has a reason that’s appropriate (such as abuse, bullying, etc.)
Put a person on it, don’t fully automate. The clearly abusive and the clearly fine take care of themselves via filters and automations. But some comments are ambiguous, even if they come across as angry, they may still be a legitimate dispute.

Where automation fits

Automated tools genuinely excel at handling straightforward issues, like slurs, spam, and phishing links, and many of our clients utilize their own tooling in conjunction with ours. Attempting to manage that volume manually would be an inefficient use of resources. As I mentioned last week, automated moderation fails in two ways. A hidden-words list that has grown unchecked may quietly begin deleting complaints and look like suppression. A simple, cost-effective measure is to have someone review a sample of what your automation has removed each week, giving them the power to reinstate comments and messages as needed.

Where we land

Social media moderation practices can turn into compliance issues, completely unintended. The solution involves establishing clear, written guidelines, ensuring those who apply it understand its purpose, and maintain a record of actions.

That’s the service we provide. Our moderators operate within defined, client-specific guidelines, documenting their removals and the reasoning behind them, and escalating any potential disputes instead of deleting content outright. We monitor accounts constantly, around the clock, every day of the year, a crucial factor when a regulated notification arrives late at night or on a holiday weekend.

For a broader perspective on compliance within regulated social media platforms, consult our guide to social media compliance. Find information about our review and reputation management services at review management. And if you’d like us to review your current filter lists together, please see talk to a human here.

Talk to a human about your brand →

An extension of your team. Real judgment, real brand voice, around the clock.

FAQ

Is it legal to delete negative comments on your business’s social media?

What “Accurate” Actually Means When an AI Moderates Your Comments

Mark Somol — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:26:49 +0000

A few weeks ago I wrote about four AI moderation failures from this year and ended with a piece of advice: when a vendor shows you moderation statistics, ask what the error rate is.

Recent research shows that the error rate requires clarification as well. Specifically, you need to understand the error rate for two separate metrics, harmless items and potentially harmful items. The reason this distinction is important is because moderating out harmless content can hurt you (or annoy your customers), and leaving up harmful content can also hurt you (obviously).

Three research groups published work this yearr that provides metrics and analysis on this topic, which we will look at here.

Similar accuracy can mean different things

A recent benchmark, Safety-Flag, assessed the performance of large language models acting as content moderators across seven safety datasets. The test sets were designed to have a roughly even split between harmless and potentially harmful items, to evaluate the model’s ability to distinguish between the two types of content.

The reported results are striking. One model flags 85% of benign content while only missing 8% of harmful material. A different model misses 54% of the harmful content, while triggering a 10% false-alarm rate. If you used an LLM to flag content, your stuck between the first system, which would remove five out of every six ordinary comments posted, and the second, which lets more than half of the concerning content slip through. Depending on how the vendor presents the metrics, both models could be portrayed as performing well.

The paper’s core message is that aggregate accuracy doesn’t tell you about error direction.

The direction matters more for you than it does for a social platform

Error direction matters significantly more to brands than it does to platforms. When you operate a platform, a false positive simply generates a support ticket from a user who has limited recourse. It’s annoying, but manageable and absorbed across a large user base.

For brands, however, the two types of errors can result in very different consequences. People notice when comments vanish. Over-removal essentially turns a customer with a complaint into an even more dissatisfied one, and that experience spreads far beyond the original message itself “this company deletes criticism”. Leaving inappropriate content visible is a problem, because some people may interpret that as your endorsement.

Resolving this inherent difference takes some care. Lowering the deletion threshold to protect customers from losing their content allows more abuse to slip through. Raising the threshold to catch bad content results in deleting genuine customer comments. Challenging trade-off. We’ll come back to how to address it.

Models have an inherent weakness

The second research paper offers a solid basis for anyone assessing AI tools right now. Researchers at Oracle AI tested 53 models across 11 datasets, grouping them into four categories of harm, and released their findings last month.

The overall results are surprising. The top large commercial models (at the time the research was conducted), GPT-4o-mini, GPT-4.1, GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Command-A, achieved 75% to 77% F1 scores when classifying messages in isolation. Llama-Guard-3-8B performed best overall, reaching 78.6% F1 score when the model could also see the response to each message. (Note: F1 score is a statistical metric used to measure a machine learning model’s accuracy in classification tasks.)

However, the category of conversational and real-world safety presented the biggest challenge, with an average F1 score of only about 52%. The paper identifies this as the most difficult area and suggests that “real-world conversational safety remains unsolved across model families.”

This finding is important because a typical brand comment section is conversational, with people responding to each other, referencing previous comments, using sarcasm, etc.. These threaded, contextual, real-world dialogues are the area where tested models perform poorly, like a coin toss.

The benchmark also provided some encouraging, albeit limited, insights. No single model excels in all areas. Frontier models lead in some categories, but lag behind smaller, specialized ones in others. This finding offers genuinely useful guidance when building a layered system, but also serves as a warning against vendors promising a single solution for all needs.

“Harmful” is not a fixed target

The third piece of research is peer-reviewed, and it studies a more fundamental problem, that these systems offer differing interpretations of the question.

Neil Fasching and Yphtach Lelkes at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School tested seven systems: two OpenAI models, two from Mistral, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, DeepSeek V3, and Google’s Perspective API, across 1.3 million sentences covering 125 demographic groups. They published their results in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Where the systems broadly aligned was around hate speech aimed at sexual orientation, race and gender. But they diverged sharply with content about education level, economic class, and personal interests. As the authors put it, these systems recognize hate speech targeting traditional protected classes more readily than content targeting other groups.

For example, Claude and Mistral’s classifier flagged content that contained slurs used in neutral or reclaimed contexts. The other models were more likely to weight context and intent. It’s as if each model were good at one area with, in the researchers’ words, little middle ground.

The challenge when evaluating auto-moderation systems that use AI is that you, as the buyer, typically don’t know the inherent model biases as we’ve described here. And your end customers are in a situation where their comments get deleted and you don’t know why unless you have the capabilities to do this kind of model research.

For a brand with a distinctive community that you’ve worked hard to create and foster, you don’t want to entrust your community to models that provide seemingly random results. A gaming audience, a sports audience, a recovery community, a union shop, a fandom — every one of them has in-group language that reads as hostile to a general-purpose classifier and as perfectly normal to the people in the room.

What the platforms’ own numbers reveal

Meta’s Q3 2025 integrity report offers the most optimistic data currently available, as it comes from a company dedicating significant resources to addressing this issue. The report states enforcement precision exceeded 90% on Facebook and above 87% on Instagram.

It’s important to understand that these numbers are the best-case scenario from the most well-funded moderation operation globally. This level of precision means that roughly one in ten enforcement actions is incorrect. But at Meta’s scale, that still means that a substantial number of errors occur, some of which will affect your customers and your posts.

Don’t get me wrong, achieving above 90% precision represents an outstanding engineering accomplishment. But it’s a starting point that is still too far from the level of accuracy most people expect when a vendor claims “highly accurate”.

Five questions worth asking

When considering moderation tooling or a partner, it’s worth asking a few key questions. Most struggle to answer the second question, in my experience.

#	Ask this	What a good answer sounds like
1	What’s your false positive rate, separately from your false negative rate?	Two distinct numbers (harmful and benign rates). One combined “accuracy” figure is a non-answer.
2	Measured on what data, and who balanced it?	A named evaluation set with a stated harmful/benign mix. “Our production data” means the number is unfalsifiable.
3	How does it perform on threaded conversation, not single messages?	An honest vendor will tell you this is the hard part, because It requires measurement to determine the difference.
4	Show me ten things it removed last month.	Real examples, including borderline ones. This is the fastest way to find out whose definition of “harmful” you bought.
5	When it’s wrong, who finds out and how fast?	A named human, a queue with a service level, and a route back. “Users can appeal” is not a process.

Question five is the one I care most about and it relates to my article from last month. A system that is wrong 10% of the time is serviceable if someone catches it the same day. The same system without oversight is how you end up with two months of wrongful bans and no alarm.

Where we land on this, as a 100% people team

I run a company that moderates brand communities with people, so my bias clear.

I’m not telling you to rip out your automations. Quite a few of our clients run software and we complement those tools. Spam filters, keyword blocks, volume triage, routing, duplicate detection, automation is good at these, they’re high-volume and low-ambiguity, and doing them by hand would be a waste of everyone’s money. Or the social tools like Sprout, Brandwatch, and others.

The key question is, what is the software allowed to decide autonomously?

The research above is fairly clear on what works well. Unambiguous, single-message, high-volume classification is a reasonable thing to automate. But be careful with contextual judgment in a live conversation, in a community with its own language, where the cost of being wrong frustrates your customers and may result in a screenshot. That is the ~52% category, a coin flip.

People can help that later example. That’s what we do. Our moderators average more than eight years with us and they stay on the same accounts for years, which is how they come to know that a particular phrase is an in-joke in your community rather than an insult. We cover multiple languages with native speakers rather than a translation layer, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. When one of us gets a call wrong, there is a specific person who made it and can explain the reasoning, which is a thing you cannot get from a confidence score.

That’s not a claim that people are flawless. We’re not. It’s a claim about accountability at the moment of the decision.

If you want the longer version of where each approach genuinely wins, I’ve laid it out in Human vs. AI Content Moderation. If you’d rather just ask someone what your comment volume would actually cost to handle properly, talk to a human here.

FAQ

How accurate is AI content moderation?

Social Media Platforms Moderate for Themselves, Not for You. Here’s What You Need To Know

Mark Somol — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:46:27 +0000

When it comes to social media moderation, new clients frequently ask me questions like, “Doesn’t the social media platform company handle most of that?”

It makes sense. Meta, TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube all publish stats about content they remove or the number of content moderators they have on staff.

Their trust and safety teams are bigger than many companies. And since you are never charged for this kind of work, you might think moderation is just being “handled.”

The platforms do moderate, quite significantly, and they do it seriously and spend a lot of money to provide a better experience for their users.

But to be clear, they moderate for themselves, not for your brand.

Their moderation systems are designed to solve legal or regulatory problems, or to reduce reputational harm to the platform.

What doesn’t show up on their decisions? They don’t factor in your brand’s tone, your angry customer, your compliance needs, or your community’s rules.

We’ll discuss this moderation gap in this article, focusing on what platform moderation actually covers and what it leaves out. And a surprise finding, which is how automated moderation can make your team’s job harder.

What platform AI is actually optimizing for

Pay attention to how the platforms describe how they do moderation.

Reddit says AI has helped it increase enforcement actions on hate and violent content by more than 200 percent, reduce user exposure to potentially harmful content by more than 40 percent, and revoke close to two million fake votes a day.

Those are impressive numbers.

Now review the numbers again from the perspective of your brand. None of those figures tells you anything about your company.

They don’t describe whether a customer of yours got an answer, or a complaint under your post was handled well, whether your reply would satisfy a regulator, or whether the person managing your community made the right decision at the right time.

The numbers are measuring how the platform protects themselves.

The platforms have to manage their communities this way and that’s fine. And it’s fair to say that the platforms don’t promise that they’ll be responsible for your brand, just that they’ll make their communities safer and more compliant.

But when the platform removes content, they may remove data you need

Automated platform moderation works fairly well, sometimes missing content it should take down.

The real issue comes when the platforms remove content that you might actually need to make decisions.

A case from the limits of AI moderation, an article on ArsTechnica.com, shows how this happens.

Some subreddit moderators prefer banning users who post hate or violence instead of policing every comment. But when the platform’s AI deletes that content before a human sees it, the moderators can’t assess whether a ban is justified.

The comment is just gone and along with it, the basis for any decision.

How might that situation play out in your own social channels?

For example, a repeat harasser whose comments get removed by the platform, means you never see the pattern of complaints or the actual user information, so you cannot ban the account.

The risk can be substantial. Imagine if these removed comments were actually the early warning signs of a brand crisis, and you lost the signal.

A filter designed to catch policy violations clears out comments, the social queues look like they are in good shape, but are they?

I’ve seen this happen enough to know it’s real.

One client faced a live crisis at 9:30pm. Our team was already on it and in the course of our work, we found 18 accounts impersonating the organization’s leadership.

A system tuned for policy violations probably doesn’t detect those imposters because it wasn’t looking for them. We do look for them.

And sometimes it removes things it shouldn’t

The second order problem is over-removal.

In other examples from earlier in 2026, permanent bans were issued for harmless images posted on Reddit. Those bans removed a decade of expert contributions from a community in just one afternoon. And the way Reddit set up their auto-moderators, the account ban couldn’t be appealed.

I’ve written that up separately in what AI moderation got wrong in 2026.

The short version: the same automation that under-serves your brand makes mistakes at machine speed. When it deletes a real customer’s real complaint, that customer notices. The error becomes public. It becomes content about you.

Visualizing the content moderation gap

Here’s the division of content moderation actions: the left column is what platforms genuinely do well and at a massive scale, and the right column shows what brands need to own, whether or not you’ve staffed for it.

What needs doing	Does the platform’s AI do it?	Who actually owns it
Removing illegal content	Yes. This is the core mandate	Platform
Blocking spam and bot networks	Largely, at scale	Platform
Enforcing platform-wide rules	Yes	Platform
Deciding what’s off-brand but perfectly legal	No	You
Answering a customer’s actual question	No	You
Replying in your brand’s voice	No	You
Knowing your community’s own norms	No	You
Documenting a response for a regulator	No	You
Judging a live crisis in your community	No	You
Spotting a pattern before it becomes a crisis	No, and may remove the evidence	You

Most of the damage I’ve watched brands take over the last 10 years happened in that last row.

We see very little of the kind of content that violates any platform rule.

Reddit can be the hardest to manage

Every platform has this content moderation gap. Reddit might be the worst, because of how Reddit manages and runs the communities, Reddit’s automated moderation, and a unique combination of:

Each subreddit sets its own rules
Volunteer moderators enforce them, no oversight from Reddit’s systems
Volunteers have no brand-safety role. No commercial link to you. Their culture resists corporate involvement.

To top it off, Reddit threads rank high in Google and AI assistants frequently reference Reddit posts and comments.

Because of this, when someone mentions your brand on Reddit, that might end up being the first thing a buyer sees.

So on the platform where brand reputation is most at risk, moderation is done by outsiders, people who don’t work for Reddit or for you.

You can’t fix that with a filter.

We’ve written more about how brands should respond in Reddit is shaping what AI says about your brand.

Even the platforms are putting humans back in

The platforms that automated content moderation are the ones that are most aggressively rebuilding human control into their systems.

Reddit is expanding testing of a tool set called Rules Hub, which lets human moderators choose which rules get enforced automatically, decide what happens when one triggers, send to a review queue, filter, or remove, preview the behavior before switching it on, and audit the logs afterward. Reddit expects it to replace its older keyword-based Automod.

That means that Reddit believes that humans should decide what the automation is allowed to do, and should be able to inspect what it did.

That’s a meaningfully different philosophy from “let the automation tools handle it.” It also matches the conclusion Scharon Harding reached in the Ars Technica piece: moderation can’t succeed without “human judgment at the forefront.”

What covering the moderation gap actually looks like

This brings us to a practical questions: who moderates and when?

Human judgment is still relevant, especially with the nuances in public social media.

For a large media company, we moderate community discussions across their social channels, including political and news content that generates fast, hostile comment volume all day.

Most of what damages a news brand are corrosive comments that may not violate platform rules, but they still damage the community. Telling the difference takes a judgment call, even better by someone who actually knows that community.

It’s about accountability where it’s regulated.

For a financial services company, moderation must meet compliance rules in addition to brand standards. A platform won’t document your responses for your regulator, and if it removes a comment, the record of it may be gone before your team can save it.

Recordkeeping is your responsibility. Keep the supervised judgment entirely within your control. We go into more detail in this article: social media compliance for banks.

And it’s about being there.

Most of the moments in a slow forming trend happen outside nine to five. They happen at night, on weekends, over holidays, which is why we cover content moderation and social customer service 24/7/365.

By all means, use automation to help you with social media moderation. Just be clear about what you can automate effectively and where you should still use humans. Human vs. AI Content Moderation: Where Each One Wins.

The short version

The platform is moderating content, it’s just not moderating for you.

It will remove what threatens the platform and leave everything that threatens your brand, and on a bad day it will quietly remove the evidence your team needed to act.

Be clear about the division of labor for social media moderation and make sure someone who knows your brand is actually covering you.

Talk to a human about your brand →

An extension of your team. Real judgment, real brand voice, around the clock.

Frequently asked questions

Does Facebook moderate the comments on my brand’s page?

How to market on Reddit without getting banned

Kate AlShafie — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:38:45 +0000

When businesses first come to us about managing their Reddit presence, we often hear the same request: “We just want to post about our product.” It’s understandable—you’ve built something great, and you want people to know about it. But unfortunately Reddit doesn’t work that way.

Unlike other social platforms where promotional content is expected, Reddit operates on a completely different set of rules. The community values authentic conversation, helpfulness, and transparency above all else. Jump in with a sales pitch, and you won’t just be ignored, you’ll face downvotes, harsh criticism, and in many cases, an outright ban from the subreddits you’re trying to reach.

Over time, we’ve learned that success on this platform isn’t about promotion, it’s about participation. It’s about earning trust before you ever mention what you’re selling. When you approach Reddit the right way however, it can become one of your most valuable marketing channels.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the essential do’s and don’ts of Reddit engagement, so you can build genuine connections with communities instead of burning bridges before you even get started.

Find Your Niche

Before you post anything, you need to find where your potential customers hang out. Reddit’s power lies in its highly specific subreddits. Think beyond broad categories. If you sell sustainable running shoes, you won’t just look at r/running. You’ll explore communities like r/BarefootRunning, r/trailrunning, and r/sustainability.

Use Reddit’s search function to find subreddits related to your industry, product, or customer interests. Once you find a few promising communities, take the time to observe.

Read the rules: Every subreddit has a sidebar with specific posting guidelines. Some explicitly forbid self-promotion, while others have designated threads for it. Ignoring these rules is the fastest way to get banned.
Understand the culture: What kind of content gets upvoted? What topics spark the most discussion? Is the tone humorous, serious, or highly technical? Lurking before you leap helps you understand the unwritten rules of engagement.

Become a Redditor First, a Marketer Second

The golden rule of Reddit marketing is simple: provide value before you ask for anything. Redditors appreciate users who contribute to the community, not those who just drop a link and leave. This is where the 9-to-1 rule comes in. Aim for at least 90% of your activity to be genuine, non-promotional engagement. The remaining 10% can be reserved for thoughtful self-promotion.

What does genuine engagement look like?

Answer questions: Share the knowledge you’ve gained building your business. Answer questions thoroughly in your area of expertise. Create content that would be valuable even if it never mentioned your company. For example, if you’re a coffee expert, weigh in on debates about the best brewing methods in r/coffee.
Share interesting content: Post articles, videos, or images that are relevant to the community, even (or especially) if they aren’t from your own brand.
Participate in discussions: Upvote good content, leave thoughtful comments, and become a familiar, helpful presence. When you post something, stick around to answer questions and engage with comments. This shows you’re there to contribute to the conversation, not just drop a link and disappear.
Do be transparent about your affiliation: Redditors respect honesty. If you’re sharing something related to your business, say so upfront. A simple disclosure like “I work for X company” or “Full disclosure: this is my startup” goes a long way toward building trust.

Building this foundation is not an overnight process. Being successful on Reddit is a long-term strategy. Think of it like making friends in a new city. You wouldn’t walk up to a group of strangers and immediately start selling them something. You’d get to know them, share common interests, and build trust over time. Only then would a recommendation for your product feel natural and welcome.

The Art of Subtle Self-Promotion

Once you’ve established yourself as a credible community member, you can start weaving in promotion. The key is to be subtle and ensure it always adds value.

Run an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA)

Hosting an AMA in a relevant subreddit can generate significant brand awareness. This works especially well if you have a unique story or specialized expertise. The founder of a lab-grown diamond company could host an AMA in r/jewelry, answering questions about the science, ethics, and cost of their products. This positions the brand as a transparent industry leader.

Share Case Studies and Success Stories

Instead of directly promoting a product, share a story about how it helped a customer. A software company could post in r/smallbusiness with a title like, “How we helped a local bakery increase online orders by 200% with a simple inventory tool.” The post would focus on the bakery’s journey and offer actionable advice, with a mention of the tool as part of the solution.

Navigating the Minefield of Feedback

Reddit is a place for honest, unfiltered opinions. This means you will eventually encounter negative feedback or reviews about your business. It’s a daunting scenario: a critical post about your brand is gaining traction, and you feel the urge to delete it or argue.

Here’s what you need to know: you cannot simply have a negative review removed. Attempting to do so can backfire spectacularly. Instead, you must manage it carefully and transparently.

Acknowledge and Empathize: Respond publicly to the comment. Start by acknowledging the user’s frustration and thanking them for their feedback. A simple, “I’m really sorry you had this experience, and thank you for bringing it to our attention,” can de-escalate the situation.
Take it Private: Offer to resolve the issue through a private message (DM). This shows you’re taking the complaint seriously while moving the specific details of the resolution out of the public eye.
Learn from It: Negative feedback is a gift. It highlights blind spots in your product or service. Use it to make genuine improvements, and if appropriate, follow up on the original thread to share how you’ve addressed the problem. Turning a negative experience into a positive change can win you more fans than a flawless review ever could.
Move On: Resist the urge to go back to the thread and try to address it. Many times, your best bet is to let a thread die out and move into the archives.

Making Reddit Work for Your Business

Reddit rewards authenticity, patience, and genuine contribution. You can’t hack your way to success here, and that’s actually what makes it valuable. The businesses that succeed on Reddit are those that take the time to become real members of the community.

Start small. Pick one or two relevant subreddits and commit to participating regularly for a month before you ever mention your business. Answer questions. Share insights. Be helpful. When you’ve established yourself as a valuable contributor, you’ll find the community surprisingly receptive to hearing about what you’re building.

The key is remembering that Reddit isn’t a broadcast channel. It’s a place for conversation, connection, and community. Approach it with that mindset, and you’ll discover one of the most engaged and passionate audiences on the internet.

When Professional Help Makes Sense

Managing Reddit marketing effectively requires significant time investment, deep platform knowledge, and the ability to engage authentically across multiple communities. Many businesses find that the expertise required to navigate Reddit’s complex culture while maintaining genuine engagement exceeds their available resources.

If your company lacks the time, expertise, or personnel to develop a comprehensive Reddit marketing strategy, consider reaching out to us at Online Moderation. Our team understands the nuances of Reddit’s community-driven culture and can help you build genuine relationships while respecting the platform’s unique dynamics.

The post How to market on Reddit without getting banned appeared first on Online Moderation.

What Is Brand Sentiment Analysis on Reddit?

Kate AlShafie — Fri, 23 May 2025 21:34:14 +0000

What Is Brand Sentiment Analysis on Reddit? A Complete Guide for Businesses

Redditors are actively discussing your brand in threads you didn’t even know existed. Some are singing your praises, while others are pointing out areas where you could improve; or worse, some are outright trashing your brand. Unfortunately, you’re completely unaware. Sounds like a missed opportunity, doesn’t it?

Understanding brand sentiment on Reddit presents an opportunity for you to uncover what users truly think about your brand in an unfiltered, authentic way. Reddit, often called “The Front Page of the Internet,” is a goldmine of discussions across communities (called subreddits), making it a unique space to gauge genuine opinions.

But how does sentiment analysis work on Reddit? What are the benefits for businesses, and how can you get started? This guide will answer all of these questions while showing how sentiment analysis can give your brand a powerful competitive edge.

Understanding Brand Sentiment Analysis on Reddit

Brand sentiment analysis is the process of evaluating what people are saying about your brand, product, or services online and determining whether the opinions are positive, negative, or neutral.

On Reddit, this involves analyzing vast amounts of user-generated content—including product reviews, criticisms buried deep within threads, and raw frustrations . Unlike other platforms, Reddit’s structure fosters in-depth, meaningful conversations, making it a treasure trove for honest feedback.

Why is Reddit unique for sentiment analysis?

Authenticity rules: Redditors are famously candid, with minimal fluff.
Niche communities: From r/technews to r/vegan, Reddit enables brands to pinpoint conversations in hyper-targeted, relevant spaces.
Engaged users: Reddit ranks as one of the most engaged platforms, with users spending an average of 10+ minutes per session.

Brand sentiment analysis here offers a window into unfiltered opinions––a rare chance to see how your brand is perceived without the sugarcoating.

Benefits of Sentiment Analysis for Brands

1. Stay Ahead of Problems

Think of sentiment analysis as your early warning radar. If negative perceptions start surfacing in specific threads, you’ll catch them before they spiral into a larger PR issue. Stay proactive––not reactive.

Example: A food brand detects rising concerns about the packaging quality in r/food. By addressing these concerns openly, they prevent potential backlash from escalating.

2. Spot Emerging Trends

Reddit users often predict trends before they hit the mainstream. Analysis helps brands identify these opportunities early.

Example: A skincare company notices spikes in “hyaluronic acid” mentions in r/SkincareAddiction. This insight enables them to advertise their new hyaluronic product to an already-engaged audience.

3. Refine Marketing Strategies

Looking to build campaigns that actually resonate? Use insights from Reddit conversations to shape your messaging, tone, and offers.

Example: A fitness gear company spots glowing reviews of its durability in r/Fitness but mild complaints about design aesthetics. Their next campaign highlights a new, sleek design while reinforcing durability.

4. Authentic Engagement

When you engage with Redditors based on their feedback, it builds trust and rapport. Nothing screams “we listen” like taking direct action on real customer input.

Example: Mint Mobile has established itself as a trusted and approachable brand on Reddit, particularly through its active participation in discussions on the r/mintmobile subreddit. The company takes a lighthearted and helpful approach, providing answers to user questions about phones, coverage, troubleshooting, and more. Their strategy emphasizes authentic engagement, quick responses to feedback, and a willingness to participate in relevant threads without overt marketing. This approach has fostered a loyal following and positioned Mint Mobile as a brand that listens and responds, earning positive sentiment from Reddit users.

How to Get Started

Not sure where to begin? Start here!

1. Gather Tools and Resources

While manual analysis may feel like a tempting option for small businesses, analyzing volumes of Reddit threads can get overwhelming fast. Leverage tools like Keyhole, Semantria, or Brandwatch for efficient data collection––and don’t forget to bring in the human touch for added context.

2. Identify Relevant Subreddits

Dive deep into spaces where your audience hangs out. If you’re a tech company, think r/technology or r/gadgets. If you’re food-focused, r/cooking could be your sweet spot.

Tip: Don’t overlook smaller subreddits. Though niche, they often have high-quality, focused discussions.

3. Establish Goals

Decide on goals like tracking user sentiment over time, measuring campaign impact, or even identifying competitors’ weaknesses. Establishing KPIs aligns your analysis with actionable outcomes.

4. Refine Based on Feedback

Use actionable insights drawn from sentiment analysis to improve your offerings. For example, if customers often mention your delivery delays, consider optimizing your logistics chain.

PRO TIP: Pick a team of Reddit Experts

Handling manual analysis internally might seem appealing for small businesses, but digging through countless Reddit threads can quickly become overwhelming. While AI can assist with data aggregation, it often falls short when it comes to detecting subtle nuances.

External analysts have access to advanced tools and frameworks that make it possible to track trends and gather data across multiple subreddits efficiently, something that might be costly or time-consuming for companies to replicate in-house.

They can provide you an unbiased perspective, free from internal assumptions or company politics. These experts also understand the intricacies of Reddit’s culture, subreddit dynamics, and community-specific nuances, knowledge that takes years to develop.

By outsourcing this task, your internal teams can concentrate on creative strategies and execution, while also benefiting from reliable, objective findings that hold greater credibility with stakeholders

Case Study: Purple Mattress

Purple Mattress created its own subreddit, r/LifeOnPurple, which serves as a hub for customers and prospective buyers to share reviews, ask questions, and discuss their experiences. The company actively engages in these discussions, offering support and running giveaways to encourage participation. Their openness to feedback and willingness to address concerns directly in the community have built trust and goodwill, with users appreciating the brand’s transparency and responsiveness.

As the following post shows, the Reddit community appreciated a personal review. In addition, the community asked follow up questions (e.g. “How did XYZ pillow compare”, “How big are you”), which generated more interest in the PurpleMatress pillow.

In addition, Redditors added their honest criticism: “It is so comfortable but I can’t get past the smell. Its been 2 weeks and I still smell it through the included case and a cotton case over that.”

Harness the Power of Reddit Sentiment Analysis

The conversations happening on Reddit right now could define the next phase of your brand’s strategy. But without the right tools or expertise, it’s easy to miss critical insights.

That’s where we come in. Online Moderation combines advanced tools with human analysis to ensure no detail goes unnoticed. From analyzing Reddit threads and providing actionable insights to helping redefine your brand narrative on the platform, we’re there every step of the way.

Want to see how sentiment analysis could reshape your brand strategy? Contact Online Moderation today and get ahead of the conversation.

The post What Is Brand Sentiment Analysis on Reddit? appeared first on Online Moderation.

When AI Customer Service Goes Wrong

Kate AlShafie — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 11:59:46 +0000

When AI Customer Service Goes Wrong: The Case for Humans on the Front Line

By Katharina Alshafie · Last updated June 2026

Imagine a customer reaches out to your company with a question. Maybe they’ve just lost a loved one and want to understand your bereavement policy. Your AI chatbot jumps in, responds immediately with total confidence, but it’s wrong. The customer trusts the answer, acts on it, and only later do they find out the chatbot got it wrong.

So who owns that mistake? Not the chatbot. You do.

This isn’t just a thought experiment. This happened to one of the world’s leading airlines. The results were costly and the message from the court couldn’t be clearer. AI in customer service is blazing fast. It’s always on and, for certain jobs, it really is useful. But when it gets something important wrong, the fallout lands squarely on the brand. Let’s break down why automated customer support fails in these moments, why responsibility sticks to you, and why you still need real people on the frontlines.

This conversation is just a piece of a bigger puzzle—knowing when AI makes sense and when you need human judgment. If you want the bigger picture, see Human vs. AI Content Moderation: Where Each One Wins.

AI is answering your customers now, that’s the exposure

We’ve moved way past the days where AI quietly filtered content in the background. Chatbots field questions, draft replies, and resolve simple requests at a scale and speed no human team can match. For high-volume, low-stakes questions, such as store hours, order status, password resets, that’s a reasonable use of the technology.

But the minute a conversation goes off-script, you’re exposed. Maybe the customer has a unique situation the chatbot can’t compute. Maybe the policy is more complicated than the bot can grasp. Or maybe someone’s struggling and needs empathy; a certain, but slightly off, answer just makes things worse. AI doesn’t second-guess itself. It answers everything with the same bold certainty, right or wrong. That’s exactly what makes its mistakes so risky.

When the chatbot is wrong, the brand is liable

Nothing shows this better than the 2024 Canadian tribunal case, referenced in the opening paragraph. After his grandmother passed away, a man went to Air Canada’s chatbot to ask about bereavement fares. The bot told him he could get a reduced fare after booking, within 90 days of his trip. That advice? Totally wrong. A complete contradiction of Air Canada’s real policy. When he tried to claim the fare, they refused.

So, he took Air Canada to tribunal. Their defense? The chatbot was somehow a “separate entity, responsible for its own actions.” The tribunal didn’t buy it for a second. They nailed Air Canada for negligent misrepresentation and told them to pay up. The judge’s bottom line is one every company should remember: “Air Canada did not take reasonable care to ensure its chatbot was accurate.”

The lesson isn’t “AI is bad.” The lesson is that you cannot outsource accountability to a machine. From a customer’s , and a court’s, point of view, the chatbot is the brand. Whatever it says, you said. That’s a very different risk profile from a tool that quietly filters spam in the background, and it’s why the front line of customer conversation is the wrong place to remove the human.

Why AI customer service goes wrong

The Air Canada case is just the headline-grabbing example. These weaknesses play out in much less dramatic ways every day:

Confident fabrication. When a model doesn’t know, it often doesn’t say so. Rather it generates a plausible answer anyway. A human rep who’s unsure asks a colleague or escalates. A bot just pushes out its best guess.
No feel for the exception. Real customers live in the policy gray areas. AI applies the standard rule, even when a real person would absolutely make an exception.
Missed context and tone. Sarcasm, frustration, or emotional moments—a bot processes words, not feelings, and customers notice. It ends up feeling like your brand just doesn’t care.

None of this is rare. These are the situations that make up real customer service—and they’re where automation is weakest and your risk is highest.

The accountability gap automation can’t close

There’s a simple difference: one thing is producing answers, another is being responsible for them. AI can do the first, but not the second.

In regulated industries the gap is not just reputational, it’s legal. Banking, insurance, and healthcare brands operate under rules about what can be said to customers, and about supervising and retaining those communications. An automated reply can produce words, but it can’t exercise supervised judgment, document why a sensitive matter was handled a certain way, or stand behind the answer to a regulator. (We cover this in our guide to social media compliance for banks.) When a human is on the front line, someone is genuinely answerable for what your brand said, which is the whole point.

What works: humans on the front line, AI in support

Used well, AI belongs behind the front line, not on it. It can triage incoming messages, surface what needs urgent attention, draft a starting point, and handle the genuinely routine. For anything where your brand is on the line, such as complaints, edge cases, emotional conversations, situations where a mistake is costly, a seasoned pro steps in.

That’s how we handle things. We work with whatever tech stack you’ve got, but when it comes to the actual response a customer sees, a human who understands your policies and tone makes the decision. Our clients ask for this model and it’s at the core of how we do social customer service. (It’s the heart of our social customer service offering.)

The bigger picture

AI isn’t going anywhere in customer service, and for the day-to-day stuff, that’s fine. But for moments that put your reputation, relationships, or compliance at risk, you still need a person who stands behind the answer.

That’s the thread running through this bigger conversation—understanding exactly where AI belongs in your customer engagement, and where you absolutely need a human touch.

Talk to a human →

Frequently asked questions

Is AI customer service safe to use? For routine, low-stakes questions — hours, order status, simple FAQs — AI is a smart tool. The risk rises sharply for anything involving exceptions, sensitive situations, or policies a wrong answer could misrepresent, because the brand is accountable for whatever the bot says.

Can a company be held liable for what its chatbot tells a customer? Yes. As noted in the article, in a 2024 Canadian tribunal ruling, Air Canada was found liable for negligent misrepresentation after its chatbot gave a customer incorrect information. And the tribunal rejected the argument that the chatbot was responsible for itself. From a legal and customer standpoint, the chatbot’s words are the brand’s words.

Where does AI customer service most often go wrong? By confidently guessing in situations it shouldn’t, ignoring exceptions, and missing emotional cues. These aren’t rare edge cases—they’re everyday realities.

What’s the better approach, AI or human customer service? Use AI to handle the basic, repeat questions. Put real, accountable humans in charge for everything else, anything where your customer will see it as your brand speaking. For a full breakdown of where each one wins, see our human vs. AI content moderation guide.

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4 Pro Tips to Build Your Brand on Social Media

Kate AlShafie — Tue, 16 May 2023 02:53:57 +0000

Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives. They offer a platform to connect with people, share ideas, and promote businesses. Social media has come a long way from being just a place to post updates about your life; it now offers a marketplace for businesses to engage with customers, showcase their products and services, and build brand loyalty. Building your brand on social media requires more than just setting up accounts and posting content. It takes strategy and effort to make a lasting impact on your target audience. In this blog post, we will share 4 tips to help you build your brand on social media.

1. Identify Your Target Audience:

The first and most important step in building your brand on social media is identifying your target audience. Your target audience are the people who are most likely to be interested in your products and services and become loyal customers. Through market research, you can identify key characteristics that describe these individuals, such as age range, gender identity, income level or occupation type – all of which shape their interests and preferences in order to best meet their needs. Understanding this highly specific group will help you tailor your messaging and content to appeal to them. Additionally, it will help you identify which social media platforms to focus on.

2. Create Consistent Content

Creating consistent content is key to building your brand on social media. Your content should be aligned with your brand’s message and mission. It should be relevant, informative, and engaging. Consistency in content creation helps build brand loyalty as it gives your followers a reason to come back to you regularly.

PRO TIP: consider your brand’s tone of voice – it’s what makes you unique among thousands of other brands on social media. Your tone should communicate your brand’s values, goals, and personality. Establish a tone that reflects your brand’s voice – be it professional, witty, funny, or friendly. Use language that is simple, clear, and concise – people have a short attention span on social media, so make sure your message is direct and to the point.

3. Engage with Your Followers

Engaging with your followers is crucial to building your brand on social media. This means responding to comments, DMs, and engaging with your followers on your content. Engagement strengthens the relationship between your brand and your target audience; it creates a sense of community and fosters brand loyalty. Engaging with your followers also gives you valuable feedback that you can use to improve your brand’s messaging and content.

PRO TIP: Consider outsourcing this task as it can be very time-consuming. Social customer service professionals are highly skilled at engaging with customers and potential customers. They can manage reviews, respond to questions and concerns and even generate leads for you – all while adhering to your social media guidelines.

4. Set social media goals

This will help you to measure your success and track your progress. Your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Define what you want to achieve on social media and set milestones to help you get there. Goals can range from increasing your followers, driving traffic to your website, or generating leads.

Conclusion

Building your brand on social media requires time, effort, and strategy. Identifying your target audience, creating consistent content, and engaging with your followers are effective ways to build your brand on social media. However, it is also essential to measure your results, track your metrics, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Building your brand on social media is a marathon, not a sprint, and with the right strategy, effort, and consistency, you can make a lasting impact on your target audience.

At Online Moderation, we are here to help you grow your business. Our team of social customer service professionals will protect your brand, build trust, engage customers and provide real time support so you can focus on other tasks. Feel free to reach out, we would love to hear from you!

The post 4 Pro Tips to Build Your Brand on Social Media appeared first on Online Moderation.

Social Customer Service and Moderation Trends for 2023

Kate Leighton — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 16:33:33 +0000

Consumers made a drastic change to online shopping and online engagement with brands over the past few years. As a result, companies are seeing an ever-increasing need to meet customers’ expectations for excellence in customer service with speed, availability, and efficiency more than ever.

Online Moderation is the leader in professional moderation and social customer service, and what we see for the year ahead comes down to this – it’s time to re-evaluate how well you are handling your overall online presence with your customers and potential customers.

Increased Lead Generation or Increased Loss of Sales?

Relying on a ‘shop now’ button on a Facebook ad is simply not enough anymore. What happens under those ads is where the magic happens. Trends are showing that consumers are relying on the comments and interactions, as a community, to help them make their decisions to make purchases. They might ask others what their experiences were and read positive and negative experiences before and after purchases were made. They also read about what people think of the brand’s sales teams, customer service, repairs, deliveries, and other important personal experiences – and THEN they decide whether to follow through with a purchase or getting a quote.

At Online Moderation, we view these small discussions as micro-communities that can influence any brand’s reputation and sales in powerful ways. It is more important than ever for brands to consider having trained social customer service teams taking a strategic approach to managing their social platform engagement.

Quality! Quality! Quality!

Consumers engaging with brands online are savvy, and they can pick out a bot or canned response in a heartbeat. “We are seeing our clients’ customers letting us know how much they appreciate speaking to a friendly, real person, “ says Kate Leighton of Online Moderation. “One of the great things that makes our team stand apart as the go-to choice of so many brands is the way we engage with our clients’ customers. They know we’re real, we care, we’re efficient, we keep the brand voice, and we are part of
their customer care team making sure the customer experience is always excellent.”

We’ll say it again – it’s all about quality. Brands with an online presence are recognizing the importance of high-quality social customer service. Automation may be great for scheduling ads and promotions, but when it comes to creating loyal customers and engagements that create paths to lead generation, the quality of your social customer support is simply more important than ever. This will set your brand apart from your competitors who are, by ignoring interactions on their social platforms, shutting the door in their customers’ faces.

Prevent Damaging Customer Support due to Staffing Shortages

Customer service is about people. We all know that. It’s about engaging with customers and potential customers in a way that creates the best possible authentic experience. As a result, this may lead to leads, increased sales and customer loyalty and referrals.

Today large companies are facing staff shortages either by choice or circumstances, but there are still customers to take care of and a reputation to uphold. The belief that consumers will rely on self-service when it comes to online customer support may be a mistake. We know people want to speak to people. It’s what customer service is all about. An FAQ on a website may be helpful, but who do customers turn to when they have questions that need answering, or when they are angry? They turn to social media and post comments on the brands’ websites, Facebook pages, Twitter, and other social platforms, as well as review sites.

“That’s why Online Moderation is the best,” says Kate. “We are there to protect the reputation of our clients, make sure their customers are taken care of, and give their customers the type of experience the brand wants them to experience. Ignoring social interactions and comments by customers is literally damaging to their business. We are here to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

According to Hootsuite, only 21% of marketers feel they do a good job of servicing customers on social channels

The Phygital customer world expands

What is Phygital? Phygital refers to consumers existing in both the physical and digital world, engaging with brands in both places.

An example of this is a brand that sells a product or service in real life or a brick-and-mortar setting, but they also promote, gain leads, and service customer needs online. Marketers are starting to realize that the physical and digital presence is a combined experience for their customers. Imagine someone shopping for a car online, choosing the car, dealing with customer service online, and then going to pick up the vehicle in person at a dealership and dealing with customer service in person. This is Phygital.

So how does it affect the brand online and the customer journey? Consumers will visit read reviews, read comments from other customers and individuals who have had experiences with the brand on social media platforms such as Facebook or even TikTok, and who have actually seen, touched, and purchased the actual products offered by brands. They read about the digital-to-physical experience others have had – and in 2023 this trend is going to be bigger than ever.

At Online Moderation, we have clients who put a great deal of time and focus on the way their brand is perceived online and offline, and the way their social customer service is handled. They recognize that every post, every comment, every interaction is a potential lead. Together with our professional team of social customer support specialists, we have elevated their customer experience to outstanding levels.

The online moderation and social customer service world continues to evolve, and Online Moderation will always be the industry leader in supporting companies and organizations.

If you would like to schedule a consultation with our team, we would be happy to meet with you at your convenience.

The post Social Customer Service and Moderation Trends for 2023 appeared first on Online Moderation.

Is your business on TikTok? You need moderation- TODAY!

Kate Leighton — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 21:54:14 +0000

TikTok is growing – and if your company is using TikTok to reach potential customers or deliver a message to your community, you know about the growing need to manage the flow of comments coming into your TikTok account.

More than 85% of businesses are using video as a marketing tool. Today more businesses are realizing that they also need to be on TikTok, the hottest platform for instant visual gratification by viewers. Videos run from five to sixty seconds long, have brilliant filters, special effects, a music library, and a culture of almost anything goes – as long as it’s done well. TikTok users do not like to feel like they are being advertised to. A smart marketing strategy on TikTok will get you the leads you’re looking for while making you part of one of the most interesting and thriving communities online.

TikTok is Growing.

As of February 2022, the app has been downloaded more than 1.65 billion times with viewers opening the app more than eight times each day. The largest demographic is 18-24 years old, followed closely by 13-17 years. Clearly any place online that has that large of an audience in that age range needs to be closely moderated for the well-being of the users.

TikTok Moderation Generates Leads.

While videos and ads create interest, just like on Facebook and other platforms, there are consumer questions and customer service issues that need to be monitored. Online Moderation moderators are there to capture lead information and get it to the business, respond to inquiries, and handle the social customer service issues that inevitably arise. “Our clients have seen general questions posted on their social media posts turn into hot leads because our moderators have nurtured them and delivered them right to our clients’ inboxes.” says Mark Somol. “This doesn’t just happen. Our moderators are trained to recognize every situation, from lead generation to interventions during potential PR crises – and handle them accurately, efficiently and quickly. It’s why we’re considered the best in the business.”

How Online Moderation Can Help You.

TikTok Online Moderation Moderators:

Answer customer and potential customer inquiries
Handle customer support situations such as complaints
Nurture potential leads
Prevent bullying and social unwellness among viewers
Prevent potential PR crisis situations
Create the best customer experience possible by engaging with your TikTok audience

Savvy businesses now realize that advertising on TikTok and having a TikTok account to post regular content means the potential of thousands of viewers. Brand takeover ads, for example, are the first thing users see before they see any other content. Advertisers can link the ad to a landing page on their website where exclusive offers can be made.

Sponsored hashtag challenges allow businesses to sponsor a hashtag and advertise on the Discover page, again giving them the opportunity of increased engagement for their brand.

Native ads and branded lenses are also available for businesses to increase engagement and exposure for their brand.

Under every advertisement or TikTok video your business creates, there will be comments, questions and potential leads. Considering the culture of TikTok, it is important to make sure your comment section is moderated on a daily basis.

“We have seen comments on a relatively harmless business TikTok video start out fairly general, and turn into a storm of arguing and bullying.” says one of the Online Moderation TikTok moderators. “We’re there to shut down that negativity and protect the integrity and reputation of our clients, and to make sure that the purpose of their video stands out.”

The Importance of TikTok LIVE Moderation.

TikTok LIVE streams are taking off like wildfire! These sessions are amazing opportunities to connect with target audiences.

TikTok has added live-stream moderation tools to help those businesses who are recognizing the value of live streaming. So what does this moderation look like? Simply put, Online Moderation live moderators are available to be on duty during live broadcasts to manage the comments, remove trolls, and assist with customer service inquiries. TikTok LIVE allows creators to allow up to 20 moderators moderate live events. A live event may be anything from a debate, a lecture, or discussion, all the way up to celebrity interviews and concerts.

Take for example a company that may be doing a live demo on a home renovation using tools and techniques that would be of interest to consumers. During the live event trained moderators ensure unwanted comments and interactions are shut down quickly, while relevant questions are responded and potential valuable leads are nurtured and captured for the business.

A new setting in the LIVE launch screen allows hosts to turn off comments completely, avoiding all engagement, or add up to 200 words and terms into a keyword filter. One addition hosts and moderators alike will find valuable is the ability to add words to the filter while the live event is happening.

We could go on and on about this incredible platform but one thing is for certain – if your business is on TikTok you need to speak to the best team online. It’s time to talk to the team at Online Moderation about the moderation of your account.

The post Is your business on TikTok? You need moderation- TODAY! appeared first on Online Moderation.

Brand Protection Archives - Online Moderation

When the Outrage Isn’t Real: Bots in Your Brand’s Comment Section

Ignoring bots is a mistake

Bots are very active on social media

What the detection tools are genuinely good at

What the tools can’t decide for you

How to read a thread like a person

What to do with what you find

Where we land

FAQ

When Comment Moderation Becomes Review Suppression

A new, important compliance rule

A Case Study: Fashion Nova

Does any of this apply to comments on your social channels?

For a bank, a customer’s comment might be a notice

Be careful with hidden-word lists

What a defensible standard looks like

Where automation fits

Where we land

FAQ

What “Accurate” Actually Means When an AI Moderates Your Comments

Similar accuracy can mean different things

The direction matters more for you than it does for a social platform

Models have an inherent weakness

“Harmful” is not a fixed target

What the platforms’ own numbers reveal

Five questions worth asking

Where we land on this, as a 100% people team

FAQ

Social Media Platforms Moderate for Themselves, Not for You. Here’s What You Need To Know

What platform AI is actually optimizing for

But when the platform removes content, they may remove data you need

And sometimes it removes things it shouldn’t

Visualizing the content moderation gap

Reddit can be the hardest to manage

Even the platforms are putting humans back in

What covering the moderation gap actually looks like

The short version

Frequently asked questions

How to market on Reddit without getting banned

Find Your Niche

Become a Redditor First, a Marketer Second

The Art of Subtle Self-Promotion

Run an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA)

Share Case Studies and Success Stories

Navigating the Minefield of Feedback

Making Reddit Work for Your Business

When Professional Help Makes Sense

What Is Brand Sentiment Analysis on Reddit?

What Is Brand Sentiment Analysis on Reddit? A Complete Guide for Businesses

Understanding Brand Sentiment Analysis on Reddit

Benefits of Sentiment Analysis for Brands

1. Stay Ahead of Problems

2. Spot Emerging Trends

3. Refine Marketing Strategies

4. Authentic Engagement

How to Get Started

1. Gather Tools and Resources

2. Identify Relevant Subreddits

3. Establish Goals

4. Refine Based on Feedback

PRO TIP: Pick a team of Reddit Experts

Case Study: Purple Mattress

Harness the Power of Reddit Sentiment Analysis

When AI Customer Service Goes Wrong

When AI Customer Service Goes Wrong: The Case for Humans on the Front Line

AI is answering your customers now, that’s the exposure

When the chatbot is wrong, the brand is liable

Why AI customer service goes wrong

The accountability gap automation can’t close

What works: humans on the front line, AI in support

The bigger picture

Frequently asked questions

4 Pro Tips to Build Your Brand on Social Media

1. Identify Your Target Audience:

2. Create Consistent Content

3. Engage with Your Followers

4. Set social media goals

Conclusion

Social Customer Service and Moderation Trends for 2023