Blibli builds a content moderation framework to provide a safe & secure experience for its users

With over 125k listings of a vast variety of items being uploaded on a daily basis by merchants across Indonesia, Blibli has implemented a rigorous moderation process. This has been of utmost importance to provide only high quality & original products, remain compliant with platform policies, government regulations, and their own policies as well as to ensure a safe and secure experience for all its users.

The dynamic and rapid growth of the content landscape in the e-commerce industry and an extensive daily upload of a large number of merchant listings (of new types and variants of products) posed a two-pronged challenge for Blibli:

1. The sheer volume of listings uploaded involved detecting listings that were irrelevant, inappropriate, obscene, illegal, harmful, or defamatory in nature.
   
2. The process of content moderation, as a result, became time consuming, repetitive, and prone to errors.

Blibli thus began working closely with the Google Play Policy Experience team to find solutions to the above challenges, setting off a robust moderation model to enhance the content moderation process.

Blibli worked closely with the Google Play Policy Experience team to build a robust framework which served as a pre-moderation step in the overall content moderation system.

Blibli’s framework is essentially a moderation strategy for securing marketplaces which consists of 12 distinct filters that automatically detect and weed out merchant listings that are irrelevant, inappropriate, obscene, illegal, harmful, or defamatory. After this pre-moderation process is implemented, Blibli moderators are left with only a handful of listings (that managed to slip through the cracks) to review afterward.

Blibli saw considerable positive impact as a result of implementing this pre-moderation framework:

1. Improved moderators’ productivity
As a result of the pre-moderation framework, Blibli moderators could now focus only on those items that truly require human review, instead of getting overwhelmed handling a tsunami of irrelevant and inappropriate information.

This new pre-moderation framework has led to an improvement in moderators’ productivity with a 4% improvement in time taken for Blibli moderators to review merchant products, one of the most critical aspects of maintaining user trust and safety! This, in turn, has led to an 11% increase in product impressions, i.e., the number of times the merchant product was shown in the Blibli app.

Over time, the pre-moderation process has also been improved by enhancing several detection and filtering models in terms of overall speed, efficiency, and accuracy. Through continuous feedback and input, the moderators' work processes have been improved along with the overall image detection system.

2. Enhanced safety & security for users
In addition to improving moderator productivity, Blibli has also enhanced its user trust and safety in its search functionality for content moderation by working closely with the Google Play Policy Experience team.

As a result of this, the number of people who submitted 5-star reviews has increased by 5% and the number of people who submitted 1-star reviews has reduced by 3% from 2022 to 2023. This means that these users have had a better experience on the app since the content moderation implementation.

Blibli has also effectively integrated the ‘Brand IPR’ models for top brands to deter counterfeit products on Blibli.com.This initiative has helped significantly boost customer trust in the authenticity of their purchases.

Additionally, through multiple initiatives, Blibli has been able to improve the Time to Live (from SKU creation to Live) by 10X, thus significantly improving the seller satisfaction index.

"Through our collaboration with Google, Blibli is redefining marketplace safety and efficiency in Indonesia. Enhancing content moderation, we've elevated user trust and policy compliance. This partnership represents our relentless pursuit of excellence, ensuring a secure, trusted and seamless shopping experience for all."

Edward Kilian Suwignyo, CMO, Blibli

The rapidly evolving content landscape and technological advancements have made managing content more difficult now than ever before. Taking into consideration the fact that merchants across Indonesia update more than 125k listings for different items every day on Blibli's platform, automating time-consuming, repetitive, and error-prone tasks has been an assured path to greater efficiency and productivity in content moderation.

Blibli has managed to make significant progress in this area, and we hope many more developers get inspired by Blibli’s framework for their own content moderation processes!