Since the inception of OpenWeb, we have aspired to build communities where content creators, users, and readers feel safe and included. Fostering safe communities for publishers through moderation of comments is what we do.
Publishers, advertisers and the communities they serve need more from the web. Their demand for expanded digital trust and safety has powered our growth at OpenWeb.
To meet that demand, we acquired two companies, AdYouLike and Jeeng, to diversify monetization channels for our publisher partners. By doing so, we’re supporting publishers with not only community safety — the backbone of our mission — but also with growth opportunities.
With these acquisitions, we are working to apply our Global Publisher and Moderation Policies to the acquired entities. Fundamental to our mission is to enhance community safety and encourage civility on the web.
Our Policies and Enforcement
In 2021, in partnership with civil societies and industry associations, we released Publisher and Moderation Standards to ensure a civil and inclusive OpenWeb network of publishers partners. We use our Publisher Policy to align with our partners, identify gaps to improve, and use our Moderation Policy to enforce those improvements. We support our partners to prevent and remedy content in the commenting space that involves:
- Illegal acts;
- Hate speech;
- Violence;
- Pornographic content;
- Doxxing;
- Content that knowingly spreads disinformation;
- Defamation;
- Any content directed at children under the age of 13 that does not comply with national laws aimed at protecting the online privacy of minors (i.e., COPPA in U.S.A).
We enforce the Policies through our Trust and Safety Team leveraging artificial intelligence with humans in the loop. The improvement we see every day drives us to take on more partners and more moderation challenges.
Our partnerships with publishers are typically positive and collaborative. However, at times, when necessary corrections to improve civility and safety are not implemented by the publishers, we end our partnerships with them.
Business Evolution and its Impact on Trust & Safety
The acquisitions of Adyoulike and Jeeng provided opportunities to extend our impact of driving digital trust into the realm of advertising.
While Jeeng and Adyoulike work with organizations like The Conscious Ad Network and GeoEdge to ensure a baseline of quality partnerships, we are in active review and integration to ensure OpenWeb has an evolved set of products, processes, and policies to govern the new partners we work with.
We aim to release and begin enforcement of updated Publisher, and Moderation policies by the end of Q2 2024 across OpenWeb’s entire network, including acquired business units.
Outlook
In building an inclusive and diverse web, it is the improvement of civility, not the exclusion of viewpoints that will get us there. We are here, committed to building a better web. We are investing in three key initiatives:
- Expanding our policies to newly acquired entities;
- Building large language models for moderation to help our partners tackle GenAI-induced challenges; and
- Building our Trust and Safety team and inviting our community to report partnerships or affiliations they believe violate our standards directly to us at OpenWeb.
If you have any questions, you can reach us at trustsafety@openweb.com.
