Moreover, irrespective of how big or small, every brand wants to create positive and anti-discriminatory sentiments among its target audience. However, many of them often fail at recognizing the role of their website in boosting communal and racial harmony online.
It's pertinent to mention that it's not a cakewalk to prevent or curb online racism on your website. Here you'll find some invaluable tips on how to prevent the occurrence of online racism on your website.
Cut short your search to find ways to curb online hate on your website, and check out some of the best content moderation tools on this https://viafoura.com/content-moderation/.
What Is Online Racism?
Any discrimination, antagonism, or prejudice against an individual or group belonging to a particular colour, race, or ethnicity is racism. The minority or marginalized groups are the most common victims of racism.Racism is a hate-driven force that makes racist individuals or groups believe that they are superior to the people who belong to specific ethnic groups that possess distinct characteristics, the outrageous outcome of which is racism.
Sadly, racism isn’t limited to a definition, group, or place. It can be a joke, verbal abuse, a cartoon, imagery, or even slang that infuses hostility and hate against a race or ethnicity. Furthermore, when such hostile comments are posted online, it leads to cyber-racism or online racism.
How To Prevent Racism On Your Website?
Manually moderating the content on an online platform is an uphill task. Moreover, it'll take absurdly long for even a team of experts to manually moderate the content. However, a content moderation tool can perform all the heavy-duty work and keep your website free of hateful and racial content.Moderation tools use ML (Machine Learning) based artificial intelligence (AI) to evaluate and moderate content while it's being posted, after it's posted, or at both stages. Here’s how it works:
Pre-moderation stage
Once the content is posted, the AI will check the content before it's made visible to the users. Then, if it passes through all the pre-defined parameters, it's made visible to the users.However, if it fails to pass these parameters, it is deemed harmful and thus not posted/ removed from the website.
In case the AI algorithms are unable to reach a conclusion, the content is flagged for a human review.
Post-moderation stage
When a user reports content to be racist or hateful, it's reviewed by the AI model. Like the pre-moderation stage, the AI will then evaluate the content and flag it as either safe or harmful. If found harmful, moderation will delete the content. Note that moderators will initiate a review in person if the AI cannot reach a conclusion.The AI uses a combination of various ML techniques to determine if the content is safe or not. Here’s how it ensures that the content posted on your website is free of racial abuse:
Text Moderation
The AI moderates text-based content to ensure that no harmful content makes its way to your website through:- Natural language processing (NLP): NLP mainly uses keyword filtering techniques to identify objectionable words or comments. Long story short, it's the computers' way to comprehend human language.
- Sentiment Analysis: This technique helps the computer identify the text's context and sentiment–whether it's sarcastic, hateful, abusive, etc. It helps AI moderate and remove racist content.
- Knowledge bases: AI uses databases, i.e., known information, to predict which article, comment, or word is likely promoting racism. Accordingly, it prevents such posts from being visible to the users.
Image And Video Moderation
- Object detection: AI uses image detection analysis techniques to determine if an image or video has the object, signs, or text that promotes racism. If detected, the video or imagery will be removed by the AI.
- Scene Understanding: With evolving machine learning AIs can now understand the context of what is happening in a video scene. It enables the moderation tools to make a more accurate decision if the video has racist content in it.
Why Do You Need To Keep A Check On The Racism On Your Site?
The main reasons why you need to keep a check on the racism on your website is:Hatemongers can operate anonymously
Racist people often attempt to operate anonymously, as it helps them hide their real identity. They can evade the associated risks and consequences of being involved in racist activities such as job loss, unpopularity, potential arrest, etc. However, if you keep posted content under thorough check, you can evade this risk.
Hate can reach a broader audience
Racism can be infectious, especially if it finds a way to propagate through a channel that connects like-minded people who consider themselves superior to other races and ethnicities. The only way to curb the spread of racism through such channels is to censor the potentially harmful content at its source.Passive hate-mongering
Racism is often propagated through humour on online platforms. It acts as a slow poison and guides more people towards racism by demeaning and degrading a particular race. It ultimately makes the platform a base for racist and hate-mongering content.
Fundraisers
Given the benefits of anonymity and the capability to reach a broader audience, it becomes easier for hate groups to raise funds for their cause. Thus, censorship and content moderation are the only ways to prevent racism and activities that promote it.Endnote
It's tough to keep your website free of content that promotes racism and hate, and the sad part is that it's not getting any easier. But with due diligence and correct moderation tools, you can surely keep them to the minimum.Eliminating racism is the need of the hour! Not only will it establish a transparent and unbiased image for your brand, but it'll also help encourage communal and racial harmony in the online world.