This article was published on September 25, 2013

Livefyre adds real-time image and ‘human’ moderation tools so brands can better curate social content


Livefyre adds real-time image and ‘human’ moderation tools so brands can better curate social content

Social media conversation curation service Livefyre added today a suite of moderation tools designed to help administrators manage their communities. Available to all of its customers, this new toolkit includes automated image filtering, “human moderation services”, and something that the company calls ModQ, an dashboard interface that allows admins to prioritize questionable content for review.

Implementing moderation features is a much needed feature in Livefyre’s stack of tools. With Storify, a startup it acquired earlier this month, its Native Ad platform, its commenting service, and StreamHub product, the company is processing quite a bit of social data. Now, as with any rights management tool, Livefyre’s Advanced Moderation Suite could help brands and journalists offer a well-rounded picture of topical conversation without including profanity, inappropriate or graphical images, hate speech, and more.

Company founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer said in a statement:

The engagement benefits of real-time social applications are clear, but companies need to feel secure that offensive user generated content won’t negatively impact their brand.

Publishers and brands will be able to use Livefyre’s real-time image moderation to parse out all graphics containing nudity, competitive logos, products, and gestures through the service’s algorithm. Its human moderation service enables admins to customize moderation capabilities to suit the tone of the brand.

With ModQ, this dashboard gives a glimpse of what’s happening in terms of social activity and offers admins a list of comments and images that require moderation, sorted by severity. It will only display content that requires moderator action, which Livefyre thinks will help reduce the amount of time admins need to spend reviewing content across their sites.

The true usage of these tools is with Livefyre’s Native Ads, especially as it hopes to become the DoubleClick of social advertising. As most people know with user-generated content, you take a gamble when you use other people’s uncensored content. One only need look at Skittles as a prime example — in 2010, the candy company rolled out a new website that offered up an unfiltered stream of social chatter about the brand.

Including moderation tools will also help Livefyre better appeal to investors, especially as it inches towards a potential IPO — nothing has been said definitively about the company’s public offering plan, but as the company scales and serves more than 1 billion monthly page views, by not enabling admins to control what goes on their sites or applications, that would be a big mistake. Today has certainly remedied that.

Photo credit: Thinkstock

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.

Published
Back to top