The Basic Right to be Safe Online

The digital world has become a much scarier place. Over the years, the rise in social platforms and other public online forums has created an attractive frontier for bad actors to cause harm.

That is why we founded ActiveFence – to safeguard platforms and their users from malicious behavior and content. We believe every user has a right to be safe online. And that content moderation is not a privilege reserved only for Trust and Safety teams that can afford it.

That’s why ActiveFence is proud to announce that any organization, large or small, can get access to a moderation platform for free, ensuring a safe online environment for all.

The perfect storm

The internet is experiencing a perfect storm.

Disinformation campaigns are being professionalized, spreading like wildfire, and extremist groups are using social media to recruit new members and incite violence. Child sexual abuse materials are being created, traded, and distributed online, putting children at risk of exploitation and trafficking.

Additionally, with the introduction of generative AI, bad actors can now conduct this abuse at better quality, quicker, and with fewer resources than ever before. As we reported last month, we have seen a 172% increase in the volume of AI-produced CSAM, with 80% of predators expressing interest in or already using genAI to harm children.

The same is true for disinformation. What used to take days to write and perfect has been sped up by 90%. It now takes a simple prompt and several minutes of processing to compose multiple well-written variations of a disinfo article – ready to be shared, virtually undetectable, across social media. This ability to impact elections is especially dangerous given that there will be over 60 elections in 2024.

If that’s not enough, this high volume of sophisticated abuse is now being handled by recently downsized trust and safety teams, which were affected by the economic downturn.

Mounting regulations

As new global regulations aimed at promoting online safety are passed, Trust & Safety teams face the daunting task of dealing with harmful content online while navigating increased legal pressure and compliance issues.

The Digital Services Act (DSA) has come into effect in Europe and is impacting the world. It mandates social media and online platforms to increase transparency around content moderation practices, including new reporting requirements. Failure to comply could result in hefty fines, putting companies in a precarious legal position.

In the United States, officials are becoming increasingly focused on the issue of online child safety, leading to state-level legislation such as California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, which will take effect in 2024, and proposed federal legislation like the 2023 Kids Online Safety Act that would hold social media platforms accountable for harmful content involving minors.

For Trust & Safety teams, staying on top of these legal developments is critical. Not only do they need to be able to identify and remove harmful content, but they also need to be aware of evolving legal requirements to protect their companies from liability.

The right to online safety

At ActiveFence, we believe that trust and safety online is a fundamental human right.

Having witnessed the changes taking place in the digital safety world, we are in a position to offer some help.

Over the years, we have collaborated with some of the world’s largest Trust & Safety teams, supporting them as they scaled their efforts and expanded their teams. We have developed a deep understanding of these teams’ challenges, from detecting and analyzing harmful content to creating and enforcing content policies, all the while while being as efficient and effective as possible.

That’s why we are launching a free content moderation platform to help organizations of all sizes and budgets tackle online abuses more effectively. Our platform uses cutting-edge technology, including AI and machine learning, to proactively identify and flag harmful content in real-time, before it impacts users.

Introducing ActiveOS

We are thrilled to introduce ActiveOS, the operating system for Trust & Safety. ActiveOS manages the entire trust & safety operation from one place. It lets moderators quickly prioritize and respond to violations with custom moderation queues and actions to streamline the decision-making process, which increases moderator efficiency. The platform includes codeless, drag-and-drop workflows, allowing trust & safety managers to update policies in seconds, eliminating the need for engineering resources.

ActiveOS leverages ActiveScore, ActiveFence’s contextual, AI-driven content moderation API, which provides abuse-specific risk scores, taking into consideration the metadata surrounding the flagged item to determine its risk level. It can flag, review, and classify online content, enabling teams to make better decisions when identifying potential threats or other violative content.
Best of all, ActiveScore can be used within ActiveOS or plugged into an existing platform, again ensuring that any organization can protect their platform and users starting at no cost.

Looking ahead

Ensuring user safety in the ever-evolving landscape of harmful content demands companies to adopt creative thinking and take calculated risks. As the pioneer in this endeavor, we are delighted to offer ActiveOS free content moderation platform and ActiveScore AI-driven APIs to all companies. Our goal is to guarantee the legitimacy of every online interaction and the security of every online user.

Register below to discover ActiveOS.