OPW - May 15 - Please see the attached two analyses on Fraud Detection and User Generated Content review services that are in use by the dating industry.
For Fraud Detection, we took a look at, and recommend you take a look at: Kount, iovation, Sift Science, and ThreatMetrix.
For UGC Review, we identified the following companies that were serving the dating industry: Besedo, Crisp Thinking, Crowd Flower, Foiwe, Scamalytics, SightEngine and WebPurify.
ALL media is biased. But, GOOD media will tell you exactly where they are biased. We are biased with Kount, Besedo, Scamalytics and WebPurify. We have been retained by them in the past for help getting the word out to the dating industry.
Besedo and Scamalytics will both be attending the June 12-13th iDate in Los Angeles, so you can catch them there, btw. See you there hopefully.
OPW - Feb 4 - Last month, Besedo, the content moderation provider, hosted a "Romance scam webinar". They discussed which types of romance scams exist and how they are carried out, which dating scams are on the rise, the future of scams and how content moderation and AI can help you combat current and future scams to keep your users safe. The recording from the webinar is now live.
BESEDO BLOG - Jan 26 - According to one study in Australia, the harassment of women online has become a 'digital norm' with nearly half of all women experiencing abuse or harassment online – including 76% of those under 30. As more women take a stand on harassment, inappropriate comments are going to be called out more frequently. Companies have a huge social responsibility and need to weigh in too. Dating and classified sites can help protect their users via content moderation; an effective way of monitoring, flagging and removing inappropriate images and messages. Not only does it counter sexual harassment, it'll reduce user churn too.
PRWEB - Oct 26 - Besedo, the content moderation expert, analyze global classifieds to identify a "swear word index" to help online marketplaces protect users from common cyberbully attacks. Here are the most used swear words:
B****
F*****g/Idiot
A**hole/F***
F*g/Sh*t/Stupid
D*ck/Slave/Son of a b***
Percentages of people experiencing cyberbullying has doubled between 2007 and 2016. Besedo works to protect users and owners of online forums, dating sites and online marketplaces. Their filter automation tools give site owners a sturdy base when beginning in content moderation practices. Besedo customers can build custom filters to target and repeal unwanted content.
BESEDO - Sep 12 - Scammers are one of the biggest threats to maintaining trust. "Trust is a feeling and a feeling can never cause a behavior. Instead, previous experiences can influence future behaviors," said behavioral psychologist and business consultant, Sara Ingvarsson from Waldine Consulting. If you are shopping online without worrying, it is because your previous experiences hasn't included encounters with scammers. We can spot trustworthy people in real life, but online a lot of the signs such as facial expression or body language aren't there. Reviews and recommendations are a powerful tool. "It is the power of many" says Sara "You might not trust the word of one stranger online, but when we see a pattern of many strangers agreeing in their reviews of something, then we are likely to trust it." If a user has been scammed they are as such much more likely to spot scams or see low quality content and assume that it is fraudulent. "It's a tough stigma to overcome and there's really no other way to tackle it than to do better next time. One bad experience needs 10 good ones to balance it out." says Sara. In short, if you want people to fearlessly transact with each other on your site, then make sure that they always have positive experiences when doing so.
WEBWIRE - Sep 28 - Edouard Clep, automation implementation manager from Besedo, will speak on a panel that discusses fraud detection and automation. Every year Besedo review and moderate ~570M pieces of content, respond to ~1M user support inquiries and block ~40M fraud and scam attempts. The iDate (Internet dating conference), being held this week in London (Oct 3 - 4), is the largest event and trade show covering the online dating business.
OPW - Sep 30 - We work so hard to make our dating sites fulfill their promise to users. Then they occasionally get hit by scammers, spammers, the obscene and the obnoxious. It's at least horribly annoying and can be downright life threatening in extreme cases.
Generally speaking we have three lines of defense:
Automatic review - think A.I.
Manual review - real people in customer service, abuse teams and user-generated content review.
User-flagging - but this is really a last line of defense. It's a shame when it gets this far really.
Wayne May from Scam Survivors will represent insights from scam victims. Besedo has served Match Group (for 5 years) and the dating industry and now offers a combination solution of A.I. and manual moderation. They're sending their machine learning implementation manager to talk to us. Professor Monica Whitty brings us the perspective of academia. Scamalytics serves White Label Dating and others and Dave Wiseman will give us some of their observations from their considerable experience in the dating industry.
Let's see if we can raise the collective bar on how we deal with rogue actors on dating sites, in 2017-2018.
OPW INTERVIEW - Sep 18 - I've known of Besedo for several years now. They've been diligently serving the dating industry for all those years, and have recently merged with IOSquare to provide a more intelligent and cost-effective means of doing User Generated Content review. Of course, this is a high priority for dating sites to clean up profiles and photos, and protect against abuse, scammers, spammers, the obscene and the obnoxious. Users want a high quality experience without the surprise of finding noxious profiles and content and communications. So Besedo is doing well and have managed to service and maintain the loyalty of Meetic (Match Group) for 5 years, no less. Here's my interview with the CEO, Patrik Frisk. (Full Disclosure: Besedo is a Courtland Brooks client) - Mark Brooks
What does Besedo do? Besedo is a company that was founded on the principle of helping our clients create trust between their users. Essentially what we do is we help clients with content moderation and customer support. We’ve been doing that for over fifteen years.
What is your founding story? The principle has always been that we are wanting to help our clients to generate trust between their users. Our founder started the company over fifteen years ago here in Sweden. We have always been working in the marketplaces and with dating companies. We have been quite focused on classifieds. That's how we got started; that's how we got into the business. Over the years, the red thread has always been content moderation, creating quality content, making sure that we fight fraud, and all the issues around that. That's what we've been focusing on. We have been working quite anonymously over the last several years; focusing quite a lot on bigger players. Over the last two to three years, we have opened our product strategy and are focusing on smaller clients. I hope we make a lot more noise over what we do and what we know about.
How have things improved and changed? If we go back, we started by doing services, manual moderation primarily. We did manual content moderation before it was even a term out there. Over the years, we added a lot of technology to support our manual services. Over the last two to three years, we have had a hard focus on building a technology platform that helps us to be even more efficient.
Who are your testimonial clients? Within the dating world, we have quite a few clients. The most notable ones are Match Meetic Group and Affinitas.
How long has Meetic been with you? Meetic has been with us for years. (5 years and 1 month in total)
What is the sweet spot, in terms of client size, for Besedo? The good thing now, Mark, is that we have the capability to handle a variety of clients. We are a company of roughly 600 people. A lot of those are moderators and agents. We also have a lot of analysts and various other roles, including trust and safety experts. We can really form ourselves around the client's needs. We have products that are suited for the large players with huge volumes, and we have products that are also suited for the smaller ones. Our focus is marketplaces and dating companies; companies that really want to make sure that they have quality content and have created a user platform that is built on trust.
What is your price spectrum, roughly? We're probably not the cheapest out there, but we are very affordable for the quality that you are getting. We are not competing primarily on cost. We are competing on the quality that we provide, and the comprehensive services that we provide. We are leveraging the experience we have gained over fifteen years, all the data that we sit on, and the collective number of clients that we have.
Over the next year or so, what are your goals for the dating industry? For the dating industry, we want to continue to develop our services and adapt them to specific problems they face. To that end, we will place a lot of focus on dating-specific services. That is one of our goals. We want to grow, as any company wants to do. We also value the relationship we have with our clients, so we cannot grow too fast. However, we are looking to expand. We are very strong in Europe, Asia, and South America. The U.S. is very interesting and will be a focus for the coming year.
BESEDO.COM - Aug 21 - Kevin Martinez is a filter manager at Besedo, the content moderation company that is working with dating sites, including Match.com.
Q: Tell us more about what you do. A: I make sure that our clients' filters are working as well as they should be. I assess decisions that our automated moderation tool Implio has made. I take a sample of content that's been approved – items that have been filter-rejected and filter-approved – and identify if any mistakes were made. I then learn from these mistakes and make appropriate adjustments to the filter.
Q: What kind of things are you looking for? A: Typically, we're looking for false positives in filters: terms that are correctly filtered according to the criteria set, but aren't actually prohibited. For example, firearms brand Beretta. Weapons are prohibited for sale online in some nations, but not in others. So, for many sites a filter rejecting firearms would make sense. However, there's another Italian brand called Beretta – but this company manufactures water heaters. So, lots of research is needed to ensure that a Beretta water heater parts ad isn't mistakenly rejected from an online marketplace.
Q: What's the overall effect of a 'bad' filter, then? A: It depends. If the filter is set up to auto-reject matched words and phrases, it leads to a bad user experience as genuine ads might get rejected.
Q: Which rules are hardest to program into a filter? A: Scam filters are the most complex to implement; mostly because scams evolve and because scammers are always trying to mimic genuine user behavior. To solve this, we monitor email addresses, price discrepancies, specific keywords, IP addresses, payment methods – among other things.
Q: What does it take to be a good filter manager? A: You need to have a curious, analytical, and creative mind.
BESEDO.COM - Aug 28 - International news has recently been inundated with stories following the events of "Unite the Right rally", in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists marched while chanting hateful slogans. In the face of this, Bumble and OKcupid have stepped up and made it clear that hate speech is not going to be accepted on their sites. In a recent survey, Besedo - the content moderation and fraud fighting company, found out that 72% of users who see inappropriate behavior on a site will not return. Catching hate speech is never easy. With properly applied content moderation measures you can keep the tone civil and your users safe from cyber-bullies. Make use of the following methods:
Automatic filters (set up profanity filters, including lists of all the common words used by hate groups and extremists)
Machine learning models (using AI moderation, powered by machine learning)
Human expertise (a team of experienced content moderators should be applied)
Once you have put the right moderation processes in place, ask your users to report anything they see that they find is offensive. Review and react to these reports.
OPW - Aug 26 - Besedo does content review for some of the big names in the dating industry. They're based in Stockholm and have offices around with the world, including a big support group in Malta. 550 people in all. I paid their Stockholm office a visit to learn more about their services. It was fun. More soon. Here's my personal vlog on the visit.
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