Platform Governance Template for Product Strategy

Start with your governance principles and rank them. If "safety first" is your top principle, then potentially harmful content gets restricted even when the intent was legitimate expression. If "creator freedom" is your top principle, you accept more risk of harmful content in exchange for less restriction. Neither answer is wrong, but you must choose and be consistent. Most platforms choose safety for content viewed by minors and freedom for adult-only sections.

Automate clear-cut violations: known CSAM hashes, exact-match spam, keyword-based scams. Use humans for context-dependent decisions: satire versus harassment, newsworthy violence versus gratuitous violence, criticism versus defamation. A good target is 80-90% automated by volume, with humans handling the 10-20% that requires judgment. Track automated accuracy to ensure false positive rates stay below your threshold.

Create a dedicated legal intake process. Log every request with: requesting entity, legal basis, specific content, date received. Evaluate each request against your policies and local law. Comply when legally required. Publish aggregate statistics in transparency reports. For borderline cases, consult legal counsel before acting. If you operate in multiple jurisdictions, be prepared for conflicting requirements (content legal in one country, illegal in another). Geo-restriction is often the middle ground.

Between 10-25%. Below 10% suggests your appeals process is rubber-stamping original decisions (not genuinely reconsidering). Above 30% suggests your initial moderation quality needs improvement. If the overturn rate is high, investigate whether moderators need better training, clearer policies, or better tools. Track overturn rate by policy category to identify specific areas of inconsistency.

Three levers: (1) Automation handles increasing volume of clear-cut cases. Invest in ML-based detection for your most common violation types. (2) Community moderation empowers trusted users to flag and triage reports. (3) Tiered review ensures only complex cases reach your most experienced (and expensive) reviewers. Most platforms at scale use all three. Budget for moderation at 5-10% of engineering headcount for trust and safety. ---