FAQ
What does Social Protect do?
Social Protect monitors comments made on your social media posts for racist, sexual or offensive language, spambots or scams. When Social Protect finds a match, it deletes the comment in real-time, protecting you and your followers from abuse.
As well as monitoring for a growing list of abusive terms, Social Protect includes artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to learn new abusive terms and combinations of words to ensure we stay one step ahead of abusers.
Social Protect also provides access to the latest education and tips on online safety and privacy through an in-app Education Hub.
Who developed Social Protect?
Social Protect was developed by eShield Pty Ltd, an Australian profit-for-purpose company. We are a group of passionate individuals committed to providing people with tools and technology to support safer online interactions. Since launch in 2022, our solution is being used around the world.
Why does X (formerly Twitter) say “Contact for Pricing?”
While various social media platforms have restrictions or limitations on their APIs, X is one of the platforms that has decided to monetize access to their API.
This means in order to protect our users on X, we are required to pay X to access its API.
Details of X API pricing are available at: https://docs.x.com/x-api/introduction
We urge our users to join us in requesting access to the necessary API tools to moderate accounts and protect our users from hatred and abuse.
We are able to provide access to removing abusive content on X should you be willing to cover the associated cost from X.
How does Social Protect work?
Social Media Platforms and APIs
Before we talk about how Social Protect works, it’s important to understand how social media platforms work.
Each social media platform operates slightly differently, but for us to integrate Social Protect, the platform must have an API. API stands for application programming interface, which is a piece of code allowing third-party apps and tools, like Social Protect, to integrate with the platform.
Critically, each platform controls what their API allows third-party tools to do. Some have the ‘hooks’ required for us to collect comments and delete them, others do not. Some don’t have an API relevant to content moderation at all.
This is the key limitation of Social Protect; that we rely on the platforms to have an accessible, functional, stable and affordable API (more on that soon).
Are there alternatives to APIs?
Yes! However, they come with substantial risks, which is why Social Protect does not use them.
First is a process called ‘scraping’ . This uses a variety of methods, with or without the social media platform’s approval, to gather content from a platform. There are two major issues with this approach:
- If the platform hasn’t approved the data collection, you are in breach of the platform terms of service, which has legal consequences.
- Scraping does not let you interact with the data on the platform. You can collect it, but you can’t delete or hide it from the platform.
This is what the solution used by the IOC at the Paris Olympics was doing: scraping, but not deleting. But is it really protection if athletes and followers are still exposed to constant barrages of abuse? And if those comments are still there today?
Second is a process called ‘spoofing’. The provider uses a technical set-up to imitate the user, using their credentials (username and password) to log into the social media platform.
This gives full access to any feature available to a user of the social media platform, including removing and reporting content, blocking people, liking comments etc.
This process is in breach of most social media platform terms of service and can result in your account being suspended or banned, as they restrict you sharing accounts with others.
There is also a broader risk of either your credentials being improperly protected by the third-party, used for non-authorized purposes, or hacked.
At Social Protect, we believe you should never share your social media credentials with anyone.
Our solution is an app that has been approved by each of the social media platforms we connect to. By using the platform APIs, we are operating with the authorized framework provided by each platform, protecting our users from penalty.
While this may restrict the range of platforms on which we can protect users, we strongly believe in operating within the frameworks set by the platforms.
We address platforms who do not provide APIs (or poor APIs) by:
1. Advocating for platforms to create better, accessible APIs.
2. Providing our users with education and training on how they can use the limited features built-in to each platform to enhance their safety and security.
We welcome the support of our users in joining us in asking all platforms to make public APIs available and to allow moderation to help create a better social media environment for everyone.
Our process creates a triangle between the social media platforms, you (the user) and Social Protect. We can only operate on your account if you tell the social media platform that we can,
which connects us via the platform API.
You can revoke this permission at any time through the Social Protect app or through the social media platform.
What can’t Social Protect do?
We don’t have a copy of your password, can’t sign into your account, can’t read your DMs, post as you or do anything other than delete comments.
Our permissions are limited to those authorized by you and available within the social media platform API.
The only data that we collect and keep are comments that match our keywords (or keywords you’ve added), which we store to an evidentiary standard in case law enforcement intervention is
required (for example, someone criminally threatens you).
Unless agreed to in advance as part of a client engagement, we do not take action on items in the Quarantine Zone without the express permission of our users.
Monitoring the Quarantine Zone for threats or other comments requiring further action is the responsibility of the client unless previously agreed with Social Protect.
What are the different types of Social Protect accounts?
Social Protect Free
Our mobile app is available free of charge for iOS and Android devices. The free version allows you to connect your TikTok account and provides access to the Education Hub.
Social Protect Premium
The Premium upgrade (available through in-app purchase) allows you to connect to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Discord, and Facebook Pages.
Social Protect Premium also allows access to the Quarantine Zone and Education Bot, and allows users to manage keywords and add custom keywords as needed.
Social Protect Pro
Our Pro platform is designed for businesses, schools, sports teams, and other organizations and provides users with all of our Premium features, along with:
- Pro Dashboard to monitor deleted comments, targeted users, platform statistics, and more
- Personalized Onboarding providing custom setup, configuration, and training, available both online or in-person
- Custom Education Hub to include organization-specific information like support articles and points of contact in the Pro Education Hub
- Abuser ID to investigate and identify the owner of abusive social media accounts
- White Label options available to match your branding
- Safety Consulting to provide guidance and education to ensure your team’s safety online
For more information about Social Protect Pro, please contact our team.
Will anyone be able to see the Global Keywords list?
No. We keep the keywords and phrases list private to prevent abusers from trying to manipulate the system. However, users will be able to search within the Global Keywords list to see if a word is there as well as disable any words they don’t wish to include.
What happens to the deleted comments?
Social Protect includes a feature called the Quarantine Zone where deleted comments are kept. This allows our users (or their representatives) to review them, as well as enabling preservation in the event law enforcement assistance is required.
While it’s always available to Premium and Pro users, we recommend avoiding the Quarantine Zone because it includes all of the abusive content that has been deleted. Instead, we provide an Analytics page to display the numbers of comments removed, the number of abusers, the categories the abusive comments fall into and other important statistics.
What if someone is abusing me on multiple platforms?
SocialProtect works across multiple platforms, with more platforms being added. Social Protect will delete any offensive post on any platform on which we offer coverage, whether the abuser has the same username or not.
If it contains abusive content, it will be deleted – and you only need to manage one solution to cover all supported platforms.
What if someone I’ve blocked creates a new account to abuse me?
Social Protect deletes any comment from any account that contains abusive words or phrases. So even if an abuser creates a new account, if their comment is abusive it is going to be deleted. We delete much faster than they can create new accounts.
If an abuser tries to change language to get around our keyword and phrase list, our AI engine will learn (with help from our users who can report new terms appearing through their ‘My Keywords’
list) and the abuse will be blocked.
What about freedom of speech? Is this censorship?
Social Protect doesn’t limit someone’s right to a view or even their right to express it. We just limit what they can do on our users’ pages.
While we’d love to remove racial abuse from the internet, if someone wants to express that on their own page, site or account, that is a matter for them. Social Protect works to protect our users
from having those comments made on the public pages of our users.
If it’s your social media page, you have the right to control what is said on it. If an individual or group wants to post something on their own page about you, your team or your company, that may be their right, but they don’t have a freedom of speech to abuse you on your page.