Our Top Tips for Fair Virtual Audience Content Moderation

Audience content moderation is a BIG job. There’s a lot riding on content moderators — they’re expected to filter out inappropriate…

Audience content moderation is a BIG job. There’s a lot riding on content moderators — they’re expected to filter out inappropriate questions, keep a steady pace to the presentation, and provide critically important structure to an entire event.

The importance of audience content moderation

As more panels, forums, and other events are turning to a virtual format, audience content moderation remains just as important.

Whether you’re moderating audience content virtually or in-person, your overall responsibility remains the same: you need to moderate audience content!

At the same time, your moderation needs to be fair and transparent. Otherwise, audience members lose trust, get frustrated, or tune out entirely.

Audience content examples

Here are just a few forms of audience content you might be tasked with moderating:

• Questions for panel members

• Audience responses

• Questions or content shared on social media

Virtual audience content moderation

Each of these formats can come with their own particular challenges.

Here are some of the challenges you might come up against when you’re moderating a virtual audience:

• Repetitive questions

• Prioritizing which content should be displayed first

• Profanity or inappropriate questions/comments

• Your audience is asking too many or too few questions

• Audience members are asking irrelevant or unimportant questions

In a previous post, we’ve discussed how the right tech can help you overcome all kinds of challenges you’ll face as a moderator. Before you dive into the rest of this post, take a look at why the right technology is so important for audience content moderation.

Pre-screening audience content

While pre-screening audience content is an invaluable tool, your audience also needs to know the screening process is fair. So, what can you do to make sure your moderation is transparent and fair?

First, let’s talk about what it looks like when audience content moderation is not done fairly:

• Filtering questions you simply don’t like are removed

• Removing content that would be challenging for the speaker to answer

• Filtering questions that don’t align with your personal beliefs or values

• Filtering questions from certain groups or demographics

Your first step to ensuring audience content moderation is fair and transparent is to do your best to keep your personal biases and opinions out of things. Instead, focus on the desired outcome of the presentation and what would serve the audience best.

Preparing the audience

There are also ways to make your job as the moderator easier and the process more transparent at once.

Are you filtering out certain words, including profanities or other terms?

Make sure your audience knows this ahead of time!

Otherwise, audience members might be skeptical if their content isn’t shared. But once they know certain words or phrases will never be displayed with the rest of the audience, they’ll have a better understanding of your process.

What about managing repetitive questions?

Talk to the audience ahead of time about how part of your job as a moderator includes filtering repetitive questions. So while they might not see their exact question displayed, they’ll see something similar.

How about what happens to unanswered questions?

You’ll also want to explain what will be done with unanswered questions.

That way, audience members know that while their question or comment might not be displayed live, the presenter can get back to them after the presentation.

Putting it all together

As you probably noticed, making sure your audience content moderation process is fair comes down to sharing it with your audience!

When your process is clear to your audience, they’re not left wondering why their content was filtered or why certain questions and comments were prioritized over others.

Taking just a few minutes before your presenter starts speaking or Q&A period begins will save you a lot of trouble as a moderator.

To summarize, here are important points to cover when you brief an audience about your content moderation process:

• If profanities will be filtered

• How unanswered questions will be handled

• How audience content is prioritized

• Repetitive or offensive questions will be filtered

You can also allow your audience to upvote the questions they like most. Once they see that a particular topic got a lot more interest than another, it will be clear to them why that content was prioritized over others.

On a final note, don’t be afraid to enable anonymity features for the audience.

If you’re struggling with an audience that isn’t keen to speak up, giving them the option to ask questions without sharing their identity can help engagement rates skyrocket!

Now we want to hear from you! What are the biggest challenges you face with audience content moderation? Share with us in the comments below!

Learn lots in this post? Here are three more you might like:

How to Host a Virtual Quiz for Family & Friends

The Framing Effect & How to Use it in Your Next Presentation

5 Tips for a More Engaging Online Presentation