A Finnish AI company is pre moderating messages on Momio, a ”kids’ Facebook”, in real time to ensure that inappropriate messages aren’t getting through undetected.

The giants of social media could do much more to avoid online grooming, says Mari-Sanna Paukkeri, CEO for Finnish AI house Utopia Analytics. For example, popular kids’ social media service Momio lets Utopia AI moderate about one million messages sent and received via the platform every day.

Utopia AI reads every message and filters those which breach the rules of the service.

“Utopia AI Moderator is a general tool which is trained to moderate like a human. The tool can be used almost in any social media platforms”, Paukkeri says.

“Utopia AI Moderator is a guardian in social media. It increases safety and decreases abuse”, she adds.

CEO Mikael Jensen from Momio says that Utopia AI Moderator detects inappropriate messages with more than 99 percent accuracy. Manual moderation of a million messages a day in real time would be impossible.

“Utopia AI allows us to react to ongoing messages in our service in real time. We want to provide our users with a social media platform as safe as possible, especially since our users are kids”, says Jensen.

“Utopia AI Moderator is a general tool which is trained to moderate like a human.”

Grooming is a manipulative process of befriending and establishing an emotional connection to a victim to lure the victim into sexual abuse. For example, in Finland, the Oulu Police Department has warned especially young girls and their parents to exercise extreme care with social media after several recent cases where men have persuaded underaged girls to meet them. Police say some of the cases have resulted in serious sexual crimes.

Utopia Analytics is an AI house which specializes in analyzing text in any language or dialect. Founded in 2014, Utopia currently has about 20 employees. Utopia AI Moderator is the flagship product of Utopia. It is used for automatically moderating user-generated content on Momio, and also on the largest discussions forum in Finland, Suomi24.fi, popular online marketplaces such as Finnish tori.fi and the popular Swiss tutti.ch. Also news houses in the frontline, in Finland and elsewhere, use Utopia’s AI Moderator.
Momio is a Danish social media platform with users also in Finland, the Nordics, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, and Poland. The service has more than 600 000 monthly active users. Utopia AI Moderator moderates messages in the Momio platform in seven different languages.