A Moderation Guide for Successful Brand Livestreams and Digital Events

Welcome to our talk, which is a moderation guide for successful live streams and brand events. Uh we have a lot to go through. So, I'm going to like go through them like this. So, hopefully, if not, you do not like catch anything, don't worry. We'll throw it up online. You'll be good. So, super brief, we'll do intros. Yeah. So, oh oh. Here we go. Um so, I'm Kat Lo. Um I'm a content moderation lead at Me Dan, which is a technology nonprofit in human rights. Uh and a research affiliate at UC Irvine. And I'm not going to read out the entire organiza- the center. Um but, researching like tools and processes for content moderation and computer uh com- uh community moderation and general online harassment. I'm also the producer for Hbomberguy and a lot of other like miscellaneous YouTubers, uh including assembling and running the mod

team for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a lot of her streams and a few other uh US politicians. Um and I just want to emphasize I am not speaking on behalf of any of these people. Um Do not yet Do not take it like Do not run out and tweet about how I'm not going to use any names cuz I don't want to encourage you. But, yeah. Uh essentially, I do not speak on behalf of these people. And a lot of this art is like general trends of uh what we've been doing. And um yeah, I've just been obsessing with like online moderation for about like 15 years. And I It's It's enough time to form a lot of opinions. So, yeah. Yeah, and I'm Victoria Tran. I'm the community director at Innersloth. I speak for all crewmates and impostors. Uh I also am the wholesome I'm an I am a wholesome games organizer. There we go. Uh so, I work with the wholesome direct um and all of that kind of thing with our live streams and the games, all that kind of thing. So, uh one thing before we really get

into this is that I don't I want to say that this talk isn't necessarily for streamers, though it can definitely be useful. It's more a call to action to any brand, studio, company, organization, or I don't know, lizard society that wants to utilize live streaming for events, but isn't really aware of the nuances of it. So, it's not supposed to be a takedown of anyone, even if we use specific examples here. The internet itself is wild. I don't I don't think anyone can fix it in a day. Um and the ongoing pandemic obviously wreaked a lot of havoc on events, and people did their very best. But from these experiences, it really shows us a gap in something that we can do better, and we want to share resources that will help organizations and event planners use live streaming in a way that is most advantageous and ethical to them and their audience. Uh we want there to be some sort of industry standard when it comes to live stream usage, so this is our first kind of stab at it. All right. But why should you even care about moderation? And I'm glad you asked and are willingly here and have to sit through this talk. So, I'm going to I'm going to talk about it a little bit

more. So, let's say let's start with a little role-playing scenario, you know, we're in games. It'll help you out. Uh to help you understand where we're coming from. So, this is your company. This is you, and you have a very cool thing that you've made. Maybe it's a game, maybe it's a charity event, I don't know, maybe it's a political live stream. No idea. Anyways, you being hip and with Gen Z, and you know, you have rays and all of that, you've seen how successful live streams are. And so, you plan a live stream. It will have a bunch of your company's games, some famous hosts, you have sponsors, you spent thousands in special effects and animations, and you're ready to go. I'm very proud of you. So, you start the stream, thousands are tuning in, and all looks well until someone types an ASCII dick in chat. Okay, no? Don't panic. It's fine, you can cover it up. You'll cover it up, no one will see it, no one will even know it was there, and you'll remove it until someone types some racist racist in chat. Um and now you know, there are troll faces.

This is really awkward. Oh god. Uh it keeps going. You it won't stop. It's fine. Okay, no, never mind. It was really bad. It was really bad. And then you realize for all of your meticulous planning and technical difficulty issues that you were prepared for, you were not ready for the internet. So, live streams are wild wild places. Anytime you can have near instantaneous interaction with anyone around the world, there's bound to be chaos like we see here. Uh but we do need to be we do need to care about this because this can affect things like overall well-being. So, like the safety, security, well-being of an audience, your staff, your talent, advertisers, and sponsors. I don't know, we're in a business. You want to create a more desirable advertiser-friendly environment. Moderation is key. Uh word of mouth. So, the point of a live stream is to be hype and you know, chatter about its content rather than something happening in the stream itself. Brand sentiment. You want people to think well and remember your brand in a positive light. And of

course, press. You want your event press. You want your event press to be about the event and not about the chat. And to be honest, this was partially inspired by Cat and I watching E3 2021 and other live streams and seeing articles like this come out uh and wondering why didn't seem like anything was being done. And again, I know the pandemic continues to be a tough time on events and a lot of us, and that doesn't mean we can't strive to make them better, especially when there are tools at the ready. So, let's dive deeper into the specific problems you might face because there are an endless number of them. So, the most common issues you might face. One, chat volume. So, that's just the sheer number of people participating in chat, usually a lot of them. Two is you have the spam. So, that's the copy-pastes, people pasting huge messages, um repeated messages, noise or nonsensical chat. You have raids, so takeovers by groups or bots. You have the actual bots, so advertisements, fake chatters, links, that sort of thing. Harassment, aggression towards the

content hosts, other chatters, audience, and toxicity, arguments, insults, or other negativity in chat. And with these issues, you may ask, well, like who cares? How does that affect the audience and what will they do? Uh you may find that I actually do a number of things. So one, they might leave the stream entirely. They'll miss out on any announcements and merely look for a recap somewhere else or not even bother to go and see what happened, which is a thing that I have done many a time. Uh they might close the stream chat entirely and you might think this is not a big deal, they're watching the stream after all, whatever. Uh but you do lose a lot of social influence with this. People don't come together, they won't come together to be hyped and goad each other on with more hypeness. Uh now they'll feel they're more in a vacuum and aren't part of your community and making them less likely to come back. You can think of this like a sporting event, so part of the fun of attending sporting events is to be in a community of like-minded people, to have fun and cheer something on together. Sometimes they won't even engage with your announcements and instead focus on the negative. They're going to social

media and become detractors or vocal critics, which means, you know, less about your actual show and most worryingly, they may develop a negative impression of your brand's values or competence. If it appears as if you're attracting a toxic audience, that will be reflected on your company and it's hard for your game's community as well. Anyways, that was really bleak. Sucks. Uh and I said nothing can be perfect and the internet is a wild place. Does that mean we should give up? No, obviously, unless, you know, we are ending this talk really quickly. Um but it's okay, we can improve, we can try and that's really valuable. So tackling the problems you may face on a live stream and how to fix it is super important. So first, you do need to pick your platform of choice. While they both have moderation tools, Twitch is more robust in terms of automod, moderation capabilities, and what you can do on the back end, plus having custom bots you can use for further moderation. YouTube is still kind of building out its system, and in order to make up for this, you will very much need a lot more moderators. But, the choice is yours. And no matter which platform you choose,

it is totally fine to just get confidence with it and try it out yourself. So, the main things that you want to have ready, this is for any audience size, but especially in a large corporation with a large following, you want to be super prepared with a code of conduct and rules, bots, emergency shutoff like an emote-only mode, a moderation guide and run sheet, and moderators. We will dive a little bit more into this with Kat, um but just as a quick overview. And do make sure you do a test run. This You can have everything in place, but if you have mods and you have no idea how to access the tools or your toolbox, it is totally useless, especially when you're in a moment of panic. And do it on an account that's not your main profile. And do it on an account that's not your main profile, because people will find it, and I have made that mistake before. Don't worry. Um and to quickly clarify the kind of beginning part, uh the code of conduct and rule set is really important in your context or your streams. Even if they don't read it, and they usually don't

read the rules, okay, that's fine. Uh but even if people don't read it, it sets the stage for the chat, the kind of vibe you're looking for, and can be easily referenced. It sets up more positive norms and neg- and, you know, lets you know which of the negative ones are, which can be really important when you have a really large global group. All right. So, Kat, it's your time to shine. Okay, so this is where I get really into the weeds, and hopefully it isn't really boring, because there are a lot of rules, and there are a lot of things that moderators need to do uh to keep a a place safe. So, the big question when you think about the code of conduct is well, like how do you know what's bad for your stream in the first place? And how do you actually make this code of conduct actionable for your moderators? Cuz this is pretty vague or wait, no. Hold on. A lot of these things are pretty vague and I don't think they're actually helpful for somebody trying to make decisions about whether to take things down and leave them up. Um and so yeah, you will have to ask yourself like

what counts as toxic to you? What counts as too controversial? Spam, disruptive, off-topic, or if it's just really really bad. Like I I don't think anybody wants slurs in their stream, hopefully. Um so then how do you decide what is exactly in your code of conduct? Um and I think a lot of people find it very clear when content is bad. Like it's just like how the US Supreme Court has defined the test for what counts as obscenity in in the 1960s. And the phrase is I know it when I see it. Um and it was specifically said by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart trying to find an objective way to tell if something is hardcore hardcore pornography. I really had to pronounce that. Um and so it seems pretty straightforward, right? Um no. Uh it's completely wrong. It is the opposite of that. It's not right at all. Um if you ever done moderation, like Honestly, once in your life. And I'm really sorry if you haven't, you haven't. Well, you should be embarrassed is the point. If you don't understand

this, shame on you. And I guess I wouldn't respect you a lot. Uh so I really should have switched switched to another slide. Good moderation like inherently takes deliberation and iteration. Like you will never have like a standard code of conduct and like set of rules that will never change. Um that's that's I think that's just bad practice. And you will not ever have objective answers. Um so if you have a moderator who thinks that moderation is objective and straightforward, then chances are they're not that experienced. Or maybe they're lying to you to sabotage your crew or something. Um Uh Victoria, what's the What's the word for that? Imposter. Yeah, okay, imposter. Um so uh again, so the right moderation decision is not always obvious, and this is my way of representing a lot of it as a gray area. And you can disagree a lot. And so it's like how you define what content has a bad impact on your stream, like what are these categories, what are the tradeoffs that you have to navigate

um when you're thinking about what's harmful versus what kind of freedom you want people to have in your chat. Um and then you have the next step of like, okay, we've decided what's bad, but does this specific comment or message fall under that category? It's often not very clear. Um and I think a good example is the Pepe emote. Um so it's been around since 2005, um and in 2015 it was co-opted by a lot of alt-right groups. So a lot of people have certain associations with it. Uh and so I see Discords and Twitch chats, some of them will fully ban the Pepe emote. Others think of it as just like a normal part of gamer culture. And I've been in a lot of arguments on my mod team about this. Respectful debates, I guess. Um and so this is why the foundation of a good moderation team is a robust moderation guide. Um So moderation guidelines um are basically I guess like a document. Um and and so you basically need to develop this guide

very deliberately to make sure the moderation in your uh chat or stream uh reflects the values and the needs of your brand. So um And I would actually say that building the guide itself forces you to define what you want from stream chat, what boundaries you have for your content, and how you actually want to run your moderation team. Um so you should do it even if I don't know, even if you aren't shoving it at your moderators, it's just a good exercise. Um and so a good moderation guide should identify how the code of conduct is applied in like much more detail. Um I think it's a really important to have examples and occasionally explanations. Um especially when maybe some of your mods are not um very familiar with like identity-oriented bigotry and and dog whistles and stuff like that. Um and so I think you should essentially create an action matrix of what actions to take in response to what violations. I actually don't think action matrix is the right word, but uh somebody in one of my teams called it

that, so I uh went with it. And so you can see that we have escalating levels of code of conduct violations with the action that we take against it. So there's like level zero through four. Um and so the first one being I'll I'll take you through a couple of examples, actually. So level zero is the no action section at to indicate what shouldn't be taken down. And I actually think this is a really essential part of a moderation guide um because it gives you a good sense of like contrasting like what you should take down versus what you should not. Like it's a much more concrete um you get much more concrete understanding understanding and and I think it makes things a lot more explicit for discussion. So like, okay, profanity. We know profanity um we're okay with it uh or criticism of the game or criticism of the streamer as long as it's not harassy or something. Some people might actually have a different idea where they say like, uh we don't really want a negative vibe, so we're actually going to take down some of this criticism, which you know, has its own implications.

Um and then level one uh we have as I typically have as escalating timeouts, so it's like um if you want to ban somebody for text 10 seconds, 10 minutes, an hour, and so on. Um you kind of have to figure it out maybe with your team or by yourself like the amount of time that you uh time people out or ban them. Um but one example of of something that would have like maybe a hour-long timeout, I would probably timeout way longer than some of my mods for like sexualizing messages, like unsolicited sexualizing message. Uh, especially when it's a woman, unfortunately. Um, you get a lot of that. And so I think that's why I end up being really strict to establish these norms of like this is not acceptable. And it it actually does make a difference. When you are really on it, I think people see that they can't say those things or they're not say seeing other people saying those things. So you're actually making your job easier. So going back to this whole um action matrix. I You have no action,

escalating timeouts, I'll talk about second opinions, and then you have permanent bans, and uh level four, which is ban and take it to threat escalation, I think is always really nice when you have especially large streams, uh which is like do you see a safety threat in the channel and have a dedicated space for that, especially when you have you know, the production team for for the stream and everything. So, um you have to make more boring documents, I'm afraid. So you want to organize a live stream event. Um, first you need to triage your stream essentially pre-event to assess your risks. Um, so you can make informed decisions about what you want to allow in the chat, and then even just to define the vibe. Uh, so you know, there you can ask questions like are there any sensitive topics or words related to the stream that you want to avoid? Are you using the chat for just cheering or feedback or interaction with the host and so on? Um, and so after you do this triage, you should put together a run sheet or run book, uh which is basically a document that lays out the

basics of an event. Um, I think a lot of producers will probably know what this is. Um, and so it's just basic stuff, like event times, who the hosts are, the stream schedule, um who the mods and bots are. And this is By the way, this is internal. This is for you and the mods and your and your team. Um, yeah, the kind of atmosphere, uh, the contact details. So, if the mods are like, "Oh, shoot. Who do I Who do I talk to about this?" Um, you know, they There's a go-to person. And, um, after all of this, I really recommend a debrief, especially if you're going to do uh future events. Um, and so, yeah, one of these triaging um One of the important elements of triaging is, are you going to put your Twitch chat on the screen at a live event? Uh, you should account for that. Or, decide not to do that. Um, if you are doing that, you should probably have like a 30-second or 15-second chat delay, where your moderators see the messages 15 seconds before it actually gets posted. So, this doesn't happen. Uh, so, um,

this slide I actually am not going to go over too much. Please feel free to take a picture of this, um, or download the slides later. But, it is a sample of like proactive and reactive steps you can take to manage some of these common problems, uh, on stream. And And I I like to make the distinction between proactive and reactive, cuz there are a lot of things that you can do up front. Um, and it's often much harder to be reactive. Um, all right. Good looking at that slide. Okay. Um, so, now that you have everything set up, um, all right. I'm going to go faster. Uh, so, uh, now that you know, who Who actually matters? It's the moderators. Uh, I originally had 20 slides of falling off the text stuff, and Victoria continues to remind me that doesn't fit into 5 minutes. So, I'll hit on some basic considerations with the moderators. Also, I'm sorry, I really like JoJo's Bizarre Adventure lately. And so, this is a a reference, cuz Dio keeps coming back, much like the trolls. Um,

so, recruiting and training moderators. Um, I basically have a list like a subset, like a small sample of questions you should be asking yourself. Um, and I honestly think it's really helpful just to make like a j- a job description for your moderators so you know like their their roles are clearly defined, who they report to, who makes the final call, and so on. Um and so yeah, in this case it's like how many moderators do you need? What's the size of your audience? The identity of your streamer and so on and what kind of commitment? Is this many events? Is this going to be a 7-hour long stream? Uh and you know, stuff like that. And so some quick tips, uh experience matters a lot. Um so I guess those are people with beards. Um uh especially being fluent with bots and other tools. People experienced with bots are gold. Like you have to find them and keep them. Um and so you really need one or two seasoned moderators who have specifically worked bigger events on your team.

Um also more mods aren't always better. You don't want too many cooks, especially if you have a lot of inexperienced people who you who you kind of have to corral um and who are probably making mistakes that it I don't know, it's just annoying. Um and and oh, except if it's YouTube because YouTube stream moderation tools are the worst thing I've ever seen. They are absolute garbage. So just get as many moderators as you can for YouTube live streams. Um so uh one important thing with um these uh I keep looking at the time now. Um one one important thing uh that I emphasize for everybody is to have a really explicit open communication channels with your moderators. Especially because this is a live event. Like things are like happening moment by moment and you have to have people on calls to respond to this stuff. Um and you need the stream producers. There's nothing more frustrating than a mod team that doesn't know what to do about a situation but nobody from the like the company is a is present to talk to them. And so then you

get yeah, a lot of miscommunications or something's on chat that shouldn't be. Um and is also less stressful. So uh, this is actually a set of, um, example channels that approximate some of the Discords. I I really recommend just having a Discord. Um, and so it's like, okay, announcements from the from the the company, the head mods, uh, for discussion, general. I think it's actually really nice to have social channels. Um, I'm going to really belabor like making your hot mods happy later. Uh, and then there's like, yeah, threat escalation and then second opinions, which I still will come back to later. Um, and so this is where your your mods can respond quickly to surprises, hand off moderation shifts to each other, especially if it's long, and and clarify like what should be moderated. And I honest- I think this is a really important courtesy to moderators, uh, who have to make these decisions on the fly, and they're accountable to you. So, you want to have a good back and forth here. Um, and then finally, I think it's really important to have a an initial onboarding meeting. I prefer to do it over voice chat, but

you can just have like a set time, everybody's there. You run over everything with the runbook, and you know, uh, moderator guidelines, go Q&A, and, uh, then and then you can sort of send them off. Okay, there we go. Um, so, wait, yeah. So, the second opinion, uh, channel. So, I I I I basically over time we've established this idea of a second opinion protocol, uh, with a dedicated Discord channel. So, this is the chat where moderators paste screenshots of messages where they're not quite sure if they should ban them, or if they should ban them or time them out, um, how long should it be, and so on. And sometimes those uncertainties end up turning basically like into policies, cuz if we see enough of these edge cases, we're like, oh, we haven't accounted for this. So, we, uh, we make new rules based off of that. Um, and so I like going back to earlier, it's like this is one of the key parts of deliberation and iteration, uh, and

moderation. And so, um, I mean for example, uh I we've learned some interesting lessons. Uh and so in the uh Second Opinion channel, I'll say stuff like this. It's like, "Oh, it turns out uh only people are saying OnlyFans with a space between the only and fans and we apparently didn't account for that." Uh so then we added it to our blacklist. And so yeah, some things that work for some brands won't work for others cuz maybe somebody is an OnlyFans creator. But if somebody's like a politician uh and a woman like talking about does she have an OnlyFans is kind of you know, sexualizing, sexist, and disruptive. Um and so a lot of these blacklists will be pretty plug-and-play, but they won't be fine-tuned to your needs um and the challenges that you would want to encounter. Um oh, also by the way, I think I didn't put this example uh with feet, but uh feet is I don't never mind. I don't want to discuss it. Never mind. Uh feet is a very fraught topic. Um and so depending on your stream, if

people love talking about feet and it's relevant to the game, you probably shouldn't blacklist it. But a lot of people blacklist the word feet. Never mind. There are a lot of reasons. Uh anyway, so how do you make your moderators happy? Um So you like you know, money. Money is a big thing that we think about. Like do you pay your moderators? And I think like from an advocacy advocacy perspective, I think it's really important to to compensate your moderators in some way. Um but it's really difficult because having moderators as on as contractors logistically can be tough. Some people don't want to be paid cuz they don't want that burden of basically being uh paid staff. Uh so one thing that I really like is crediting. So the New Vegas Fallout New Vegas actually credited their forum moderators in like the main credits. Um and I think that's just incredible. Um and so it can be in the game, it can be in the stream. Like at the end be like, "Hey, thanks for our

thanks to our moderators and so on." Because honestly, moderation is such an invisible job. Like and nobody notices if things are going well, but they love to tell you when they don't think things are going right. So, moderators like often kind of get the short end of the stick. So, you know, celebrate your moderators. Uh and finally, merch. Um this wonderful person named Victoria sent me some really nice Among Us merch. And um I've treasured I use that blanket every day. It's a soft blanket. Um but yeah, so I think it like makes people feel a lot more appreciated, connected to your company, and in some ways I actually like it more than money. Well, never mind. I think that from a labor rights perspective, that's maybe a little bit weird. But, I feel like people really really appreciate that. And there's even like a sense of exclusivity to it. Anyway, finally, be grateful to your moderators. I like I I people just don't treat them very well or take seriously the expertise that it takes to moderate things. Like they are better than any of us as people. And actually, I just realized

I'm a moderator, but I'm talking about other moderators who are not me. Um and yeah, people make mistakes and you know, again, it's very iterative and it's about establishing these norms. And and you know, if you moderated Twitch chat well, your job will become easier. And oh, research. If we can't if we still can't convince you that this is important, this is like the last shot we've got. Um oh, shoot, we have 3 minutes. Okay. So, how much of a difference does it make? A lot. So, the Anti-Defamation League did a report analyzing the AOC chats and all of the chats that my team moderated, and then the stream chat of the Jimmy Fallon charity stream. And they were like, "Yeah, the AOC chat like had like almost like almost nothing. Like maybe I actually don't remember the specific words. I don't have time to go over that. But, you know, we had for the AOC streams, we had 430,000 concurrent viewers. Um and like a lot of that stuff wasn't found in the Jimmy Fallon stream. Like literally Engadget was like, "It is overrun with uh conspiracy theories and

negative comments, emotes tied to racism." And it didn't even meet its charity fundraising goal. Anyway, so um you can see like this kind of embodies some of the difference. So there's the AOC uh chat mod list of a lot of cool, experienced people in the Jimmy Fallon list. And I just realized that like I had realized that they didn't add I don't know. I got cut off. So I'm at the end there. Yeah. Um so yeah, Victoria, you should talk about the like Wow, super quick. Okay, so there are a ton of ridiculous brand loyalty and sentiment things that are really important when we look at the research and we want to pay attention to because being a culturally relevant studio means having to understand the culture. Uh so whatever Gen Z marketing things like I know it pisses some people off, but it's a good temperature check on what's happening in the world. And this is from McKinsey & Company uh in Brazil and it kind of speaks to how global it is. But basically, people care and will mobilize around products or brands that they care about. So while your own content might not be racist, homophobic, whatever, the feelings from reading chat and the kinds of audience that you gather around your event will reflect poorly on how it

handles these kinds of situations. Uh this is why advertising companies don't like to be associated with certain things even if they're not advertise or directly sponsoring that. And importantly, I will leave you with the idea of crush culture. So even if someone doesn't initially look at the social impact or know all the facts uh before or when they make a purchase, as soon as they have a reason to believe that your game or brand is not in line with their values or virtuous, they will leave, swear off the game, and essentially crush you by seeking out com- competition instead. On the flip side, if you prove to be aligned with positive social values, then usually Gen Z, whatever, uh will rally hard for you whether by word of mouth, content creation, so on. So contradictions will be noticed and condemned and I have noticed those, uh which is how the live stream chat moderation kind of goes into this. You can't tout one thing and then kind of leave your chat to be horribly toxic. All right, we made it to the end sort of. Uh, I hope this has helped you understand the importance of how to moderate and all that kind of thing. There are a lot of links. We will again this horrible messy links that we could not find shorter ones for and yes, we could put it in a link shortener and

that's technically my job, but that's fine. I didn't do that. Uh, so here is one slide we have about further learning. We will share it online again. It'll be easier to click there. Thank you.