Safety Net: AI-powered content moderation

Inappropriate content is a significant barrier to effective online learning. When you give children access to the internet and ask them to learn, you are bound to end up with inappropriate content. This content can be distracting for fellow students and burdensome for the teachers policing it. We’re not going to change kids. We’re not going to change the internet. Teachers have enough on their plates. This is why we’re introducing auto-moderation.

Auto-moderation powered by Safety Net will police padlets so that teachers don’t have to.

How Safety Net works

When you turn on auto-moderation in your padlet’s settings, Safety Net uses AI to read every new post and determine whether the post contains inappropriate content. If Safety Net deems a post inappropriate, it will block the post and send you an email requesting a final decision. You will then decide whether to publish the post.

Safety Net blocks egregious violations but gives teachers the final say

Safety Net will flag posts with content like bullying, violence, drugs, hate, self-harm, weapons, profanity, and more. We tried to tune Safety Net to block everything genuinely unsuitable for school without limiting productive engagement. For example, Safety Net will not block any mention of drugs, but it will block text that explicitly promotes, advertises, or encourages drug use. Safety Net will not block calls for military action, but it will block serious and realistic threats of violence.

We can’t guarantee that Safety Net will catch every inappropriate post and we can’t guarantee that every post it flags will be inappropriate. These decisions can be complex and we don’t all share the same standards. This is why Safety Net always asks you to confirm its choices.

If you don’t like Safety Net’s decisions, you can always turn off auto-moderation and allow every post. You can also require approval for every post. Your padlet. Your rules.

Safety Net will save time for teachers

Safety Net will block posts immediately that teachers would have had to find. Safety Net will do the tedious job of reading every post while teachers can focus on teaching.

How to turn on auto-moderation

Turn on auto-moderation in the Content section of your padlet's settings.

Padlets within school organizations will also have an additional setting where Safety Net will only moderate student posts.

What’s next?

In a future version of Safety Net, we hope to save teachers even more time by blocking all inappropriate thoughts from the minds of children. We’re discussing the feature with our legal team but until then, Safety Net will only block inappropriate posts.