Every online community that features user-generated content is ultimately prone to harmful content and malicious behavior. Virtual municipal communities are no exception. Using a combination of good moderation processes, crowd wisdom and artificial intelligence, we seek to prevent this problem in emerging virtual municipal communities.
In this collaboration, KInIT has teamed up with a growing Slovak startup Simplicity. Simplicity’s mission is to unify communities, organizations and residents of cities under one app, to effectively convey relevant local information. In the Simplicity app, the user has access to all important notifications, ranging from municipal officials, police departments to local associations and businesses.
As the Simplicity app slowly opens up to more content creators and user interactions, the risk of potential harmful content and malicious behavior rises. Such content and behavior, even if present on just a small scale, can quickly deteriorate the perception of trust and safety that any responsible social platform should aspire to. It is therefore Simplicity’s policy to mitigate the appearance of such phenomena.
To reach this goal, KInIT contributes with its extensive know-how in tackling harmful content. In a joint project with Simplicity, we are working on establishing sophisticated moderation processes. These processes will effectively utilize human moderators through the use of a priori trust levels of users and efficient moderation user interfaces.
To further support the moderators, the communities will be engaged as well through a reporting functionality. Users will be able to report content that they find inappropriate. The reporting functionality will thus enable the moderators to identify problematic content faster.
Last but not least, we are collaborating on creating a multi-modal, multi-faceted automatic malicious behavior and harmful content detection mechanisms. These detection mechanisms will further help moderators to focus on the truly “suspicious” content created by the community.
Andrej Krupa, Co-Founder
Simplicity Tech Inc.
