LiveMe Launches Safety Advocate Program to Empower Community Moderators in Fight against Online Abuse
Live broadcasting app's new community-driven safety initiative aims to tackle online abuse and grooming to ensure a safer, more positive community
LOS ANGELES(13 Jun 2018)
Today, Live.me Inc. announced the launch of the Safety Advocate Program, a community-driven effort to tackle and deter all forms of online abuse on its popular live broadcasting app LiveMe. The new initiative reaffirms the company's long-standing commitment to building a safe and positive environment for users and empowers the community to help moderate user broadcasts.
As social media platforms around the world grapple with cyberbullying, sexual harassment, and online grooming, LiveMe is broadening its fight against online abuse and recruiting 1,000 Safety Advocates across the globe.
Safety Advocates are sourced from within LiveMe's user community and granted limited administrative privileges to help the company more quickly flag and remove content violating the app's Community Guidelines. Any LiveMe member can apply to become a Safety Advocate but all applicants are carefully screened based on their user activity and community standing. Selected applicants that make it past the initial screening will also undergo an extensive third-party background check.
As the program develops, LiveMe will reward Safety Advocates with various in-app incentives, including awards, virtual gifts, and badges based on their contributions to protecting and maintaininga fun and friendly community. A majority of active LiveMe users are invested in the growth of the app's virtual gifting ecosystem, a mechanism that allows users to generate significant income through the app, so the upcoming safety incentives will further align the interests of the community.
"Having a global footprint in 120 countries allows us to enrich the lives of people all around the world but it also presents logistical challenges. There are now more than 10,000 live broadcasts at any given time and users create 600,000 hours of content daily, so traditional methods of monitoring are no longer enough," said Khudor Annous, Head of US Operations at LiveMe. "To create a safe environment where people of all backgrounds and lifestyles can freely express themselves, we're turning to our most valuable asset: our community."
The Safety Advocate Program supplements LiveMe's existing safety protocols, which includes internal teams of human moderators and artificial intelligence (AI) software working to monitor content 24/7. Annous adds, "The new influx of human moderators will also provide valuable training data for our machine learning software, allowing it to better identify local slang and other cultural nuances that may have been missed by our filters in the past."
Any users found in violation of LiveMe's policies are immediately banned from the app and their virtual assets forfeited. The program is already seeing success, with 5,000 Safety Advocate sign-ups within the first 72 hours of user submissions. In the last 90 days, LiveMe's existing safety protocols resulted in the company banning 15,000 accounts and seizing $35,000 in virtual currency. Seized funds under the new project will be donated to various non-profit organizations including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and The Trevor Project.
About Live.me Inc.
LiveMe Inc. is the mobile app developer behind the popular live broadcasting platform, LiveMe, and is focused on developing content-based applications for the mobile-first generation. Its flagship app LiveMe has amassed more than 50 million users and distributed millions of dollars to broadcasters through direct virtual gifting. Live.me Inc.'s portfolio also includes Cheez, a social short video app highlighting the power of creativity in 17 seconds.