Privacy and security
Good strategies for managing user-generated content
User-generated content can come from anywhere around the world and at any time. As your site or app grows, you might experience more user-generated content submitted than it's feasible for any single person to review.
Here are some suggested strategies and solutions:
Write and publish a content policy so your users know what’s allowed and what’s not.
Consider where user-generated content might appear on your site or app, and what risks to your site or app’s reputation might occur from malicious user-generated content. Ensure you mitigate those risks before enabling user-generated content to appear.
Set aside some time to regularly review your top pages with user-generated content. Make sure what you see complies with all our program policies.
Next to each element of user-generated content, add a "Flag" or "Report a violation" link that allows your users to report the content to you as potentially problematic. Make sure you regularly review and act on those reports.
Before users can submit content, ensure that they’re human beings and not bots by using a Captcha. One popular system is Google’s reCAPTCHA.
For new users who don’t have a history on the site or app, review their submissions before allowing them to appear. As users prove their trustworthiness, increase the trust you extend to them by allowing their posts to appear.
For a variation of this, limit the types of content non-trusted users can submit; e.g., allow text but not images or links.
As your site or app grows, a community will develop around it. This community, because they use your site or app, wants to see your site or app flourish. Recruit user-moderators to review content and help you maintain a high standard of community discourse.
You can also consider employing human content reviewers or moderators to review the user-generated content on your site or app.
If a post hasn’t been reviewed yet and approved, allow it to appear, but disable ad serving on that page. Only enable ad serving when you’re sure that a post complies with our program policies.
As you learn the type of content violations your site or app most often experiences, you can craft a content filtering system to automatically detect the violations and disable ad serving on such content. Learn more about content filtering.
Instead of building your own in-house commenting system, you can use popular third-party tools or plug-ins to run commenting for you. Many of these systems have robust moderation and content filtering built-in.
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