Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts

Author:Sarah T. Roberts [Roberts, Sarah T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, E-Commerce, Internet Marketing, Computers, Web, Social Media, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780300235883
Google: 3-aaDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0300235887
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Social Media Expertise as Brand Protection

Although the firm began as a strictly commercial content moderation operation, offering its services to news and media companies challenged by the comments sections of its online properties that could quickly devolve into unusable hostile zones, the business quickly expanded into other areas of social media management as quickly as the need for it arose. OnlineExperts focused its services on companies that did not have expertise in social media and whose primary business was something other than social media or technology in general. For this reason, the firm saw an opportunity to expand its own services to meet the needs of companies that wanted a presence across many social media platforms (for example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) but lacked the expertise and knowledge to properly manage their brand identities in all of these spaces, particularly in the event of a crisis precipitated by a social media flare-up or unexpected reaction to a campaign. Rick described where OnlineExperts fit into a client’s business model and what it provided: “That’s sort of the way we identify ourselves: brand protection. More brand protection, but also brand management. And many of the brand management—we’re actually hired by advertising agencies, so the agency manages the brand and, in many cases, they’ll supply us with a calendar of content or, you know, they work with us to create content for specific sites.”

Not only were OnlineExperts’ content moderation employees responsible for monitoring and taking down problematic content that might pose a threat to a brand, but they also actually created new content, seeding sites with messages and discussion points designed to encourage customer participation and engagement, and to bring a positive face to the brand or product. All of this activity was done surreptitiously, without OnlineExperts’ employees ever identifying themselves as such, instead posting under the moniker of the company or brand, or even posing as other regular, unaffiliated consumers. As Rick put it:

We’re posting on behalf of the brand. We’re engaging with consumers, and so on. We still do a lot of moderation, all the sites require moderation, but it has expanded to a lot more: analysis and reporting, what is going across, what are people saying about your brand across the whole social media spectrum, and sentiment analysis, whether the comments are positive, negative. People call us in for a crisis. We’ve never worked with some of these clients before and suddenly somebody does something stupid at the organization and their Facebook page blows up and they call us in for a crisis. Here’s a perfect example of the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard, but a snack food company, a year ago or so, posted a pro-LGBT image . . . and within four hours they had over twenty thousand comments on their Facebook page, many homophobic rants and so on. Why people are doing that on a snack food brand’s Facebook page, I have no idea, but they called us in to help manage that, and so that kind of thing goes on fairly regularly.

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