Our mission at Fizz is to create safe, authentic communities built by students, for students and we achieve this through our moderation policies.. We’ve designed a three-part unique system that leverages the latest advances in AI, human judgment from our central Trust & Safety team, and a dedicated group of trained student moderators to translate our Community Guidelines to the unique needs of each Fizz community.
Here’s how we keep Fizz users safe:
Our Community Guidelines are the foundation of moderation – Across all our communities, our Guidelines take an active and strict stance against bullying and harassment and are designed to foster safer connections online. We follow a straightforward set of eight principles.
No personal attacks or bullying ever. Fizz is a community and students are required to respect the dignity of their peers.
Hatred and hate speech have no place on Fizz. We create communities for all students and prohibit hate speech defined as engaging in prejudice based on race, class, age, body type, ability ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation
We emphasize authenticity and prohibit misinformation. Students come to Fizz to be who they truly are, which means there’s no place for lies or false information.
Fizz communities are designed to be useful and respectful. There is no room for spamming or trolls in a Fizz community.
We comply with any and all legal regulations. Fizz explicitly prohibits discussion of illegal activities, including illegal drug use and solicitation.
We’re here to support those in need. Glorification and / or endorsement of self-harm is not permitted. When we encounter such content, we remove it and direct users to the appropriate mental health resources, including the Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Crisis Text Line.
Fizz should be a place where everyone feels comfortable. Therefore, explicit content related to sex, violence, or gore is never permitted.
Violence has no place on the Fizz feed. Encouraging or sharing violent material is forbidden anywhere on Fizz.
For more information, see our complete list of Community Guidelines here.
Our trained volunteer moderators are a key differentiator from other social platforms – We supplement our central Trust & Safety team and our tech-enabled moderation tools with small teams of student moderators at each campus who voluntarily devote their time and energy to keeping their peers safe. These students are hand-selected to apply for a moderation position based on their good behavior and active involvement in their Fizz community. If approved, they undergo our training program to help them understand our values and guidelines. It is only after this intensive selection and training process that we enable moderator powers which include the ability to remove content directly from the feed and to vote on whether content reported by users should be removed from the feed. No one moderator can ever unilaterally make a content decision, and the central Fizz team always has the final say.
Our central Trust & Safety team rigorously monitors community activity – With over 250 active Fizz communities, our dedicated Trust & Safety leaders leverage custom, quantitative methods to detect changes in content and violations across the Fizz network. When we see a spike in reports, violations, or even just content creation in a given community, we quickly deploy our team to investigate what’s happening and help our student moderators address the situation before it gets out of hand. This is the bedrock of our moderation system to ensure our student moderators feel supported.
We leverage AI to remove >75% of offending content before it hits the feed – Fizz utilizes the groundbreaking innovations in AI over the last two years to capture nearly all offending content before any human ever gets exposed to it. Our custom-built moderation pipeline uses a proprietary combination of large language models (think ChatGPT) and keyword analysis to remove the vast majority of content before a user can ever interact with it. This includes everything from nudity and violence to more nuanced violations like bullying and hate.
We empower our users to enforce their own community norms and personal preferences – One of our proudest developments at Fizz is our User Report feature. Any user can tap on any post or comment and report it to our student moderator team directly from the feed. Moderators are then instantly notified of the report and vote as to whether the content should stay or be removed. Our median response time for content removal is under 2 minutes, and thousands of users leverage our report feature every month. Moreover, users can also block other community members, meaning they will no longer see, interact with, or be contacted by the blocked student under any circumstance.
Punishment for repeat offenders – We work to eliminate the impact of repeat rule violators on their communities through punishments like mutes and suspensions. Our punishment system analyzes the holistic history of a user’s behavior and violations of our community guidelines. Repeat violators can be subject to a mute, meaning they can no longer post content to the feed, or a suspension, meaning they can no longer view or interact with any part of the Fizz community. These punishments progressively increase in severity depending on violations from hours to days to permanent mutes or a ban from Fizz. If a user is banned from a community, they are banned for life and will not be able to rejoin the community at any point.
The most important piece of moderation is our approach to iteration. We connect with our users, moderators, parents and educators to gather feedback and improve our overall system. We understand each community is different, and we know we’ll need to continue to be responsive to the concerns and needs of our community members as we expand to new schools. Throughout it all, our core mission is ironclad: safe, authentic communities for students, by students.
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For more information about moderation, please visit our Community Guidelines and Community Moderation pages.
If you have any ideas, questions, or comments, we want to hear from you! Email us at info@fizzsocial.app with your feedback.