DeepModGuideAPI Reference

Core Concepts

Understanding the fundamental building blocks of DeepMod will help you create effective content moderation policies and interpret results accurately. This section explains the key concepts, terminology, and relationships that power our moderation system.

The Policy Hierarchy

Policy

A policy is the top-level container that defines your complete content moderation approach. Think of it as a comprehensive rulebook that determines what content is acceptable for your specific use case. Each policy contains all the rules, settings, and configuration needed to evaluate content consistently.

Policies can be created in three ways:

  • From Templates: Clone from 18+ pre-built, industry-specific policies (Social Media, E-commerce, Gaming, Healthcare, etc.) available at Policies → Templates

  • Automatic Generation: AI-extract policies from your existing documents (see Automatic Policy Generation)

  • Manual Creation: Build policies from scratch with complete control

Key characteristics of policies:

  • Name and Description: Human-readable identifiers that help you manage multiple policies

  • Friendly Identifier: A unique string that you can use for API calls instead of numeric IDs

  • Status: Either "Active" (can process content) or "Inactive" (disabled)

Rule Group

Rule groups provide logical organization within your policy, allowing you to categorize related rules for easier management and understanding. This organization helps both humans and the AI system process your moderation logic more effectively. Rule groups have names and descriptions, and you can create as many as needed to organize your policy clearly. The system evaluates all rule groups when processing content, so their organization is primarily for human management convenience.

Common rule group patterns:

  • Safety: Rules protecting users from harmful content like harassment, hate speech, or violence

  • Legal: Compliance-related rules covering copyright, privacy, regulatory requirements

  • Brand: Guidelines maintaining your brand voice, preventing competitor mentions, ensuring appropriate messaging

  • Spam: Detection rules for promotional content, repetitive posts, or suspicious patterns

Rule

Rules are the specific conditions that content must satisfy during moderation. Each rule represents a single, testable requirement written in natural language that both humans and AI can understand.

Rules have two main components:

  • Name: A short, descriptive title for the rule

  • Content: The detailed description of what the rule evaluates

Rule Examples

Effective rules are:

  • Specific: "Must not contain personally identifiable information" rather than "must be appropriate"

  • Actionable: Clear about what content should or shouldn't include

  • Focused: Each rule addresses one specific concern rather than multiple issues

  • Testable: You can easily determine whether content passes or fails the rule

Moderation Mechanics

Confidence Threshold

The confidence threshold is a crucial setting that determines how certain the AI must be before making a definitive decision. This numeric value (between 0.0 and 1.0, expressed as a percentage) acts as a sensitivity control for your entire policy.

How confidence works:

  • When the AI evaluates content against a rule, it provides a confidence score indicating how certain it is about the result

  • If the confidence score meets or exceeds your threshold, the system makes a definitive decision (Success or Failure)

  • If the confidence score falls below your threshold, the result becomes Ambiguous

Threshold tuning strategies:

  • Higher thresholds (80-90%): Fewer false positives, more ambiguous cases requiring human review

  • Lower thresholds (60-70%): More automated decisions, higher risk of false positives

  • Start conservative: Begin with higher thresholds and adjust based on real-world performance

Review Mode

Review mode determines what happens when the AI encounters ambiguous cases - content where rule violations might exist but confidence falls below your threshold. Choose your review mode based on your risk tolerance, content volume, and available human review capacity.

No Review Mode:

  • All decisions are made automatically based on confidence thresholds

  • Fastest processing with full automation

  • You will need to handle ambiguous results yourself (in your webhook handler)

Human Review Mode:

  • Ambiguous cases are flagged for human reviewers

  • Content evaluation pauses until a human makes the final decision

  • Higher accuracy for complex or nuanced content

  • Requires a dedicated QC team

Policy Chaining

Policy chaining allows you to run a single piece of content through multiple policies sequentially, creating sophisticated multi-stage moderation workflows. Instead of applying just one policy, you can chain up to 10 policies together to create comprehensive evaluation processes.

How Policy Chaining Works

When you submit content for chained moderation:

  1. Sequential Processing: Each policy in the chain is applied one after another

  2. Early Termination: If any policy in the chain flags the content as a failure, the chain stops and remaining policies are marked as "abandoned"

  3. Single Webhook: Instead of receiving multiple webhooks, you get one consolidated webhook with results from all executed policies

  4. Unified Results: The final result reflects the outcome of the entire chain - success only if all policies pass

Chain Results

Each policy in a chain can have one of four results:

  • Success: Policy passed (content is acceptable)

  • Failure: Policy failed (content violates rules) - chain stops here

  • Ambiguous: Policy result unclear - may pause for human review if enabled

  • Abandoned: Policy was not executed because an earlier policy failed

Example Use Cases

Content Progression Pipeline

Safety Policy → Legal Compliance → Brand Guidelines

Content must pass basic safety checks before advancing to legal review, then finally brand compliance.

Tiered Moderation

Basic Spam Detection → Advanced Content Analysis → Contextual Review

Quick spam filtering first, then deeper analysis only for content that passes initial screening.

Regional Compliance

Global Standards → Regional Laws → Local Guidelines

Apply universal standards, then region-specific requirements, then local community guidelines.

Benefits of Chaining

  • Efficiency: Stop processing as soon as content fails any stage

  • Organization: Separate concerns into focused, single-purpose policies

  • Reusability: Mix and match existing policies for different workflows

  • Clarity: Each policy addresses one specific area of concern

Review in Policy Chains

When using policy chaining with human review enabled:

  • Chain Pauses: If any policy returns an ambiguous result and requires review, the entire chain pauses

  • Resume on Review: After human review completes, the chain continues with the next policy

  • Failed Reviews: If a human reviewer marks an ambiguous result as a failure, the chain stops and remaining policies are abandoned

Result Types and Outcomes

Every piece of content processed by DeepMod receives one of three possible outcomes, each with specific meaning and implications for your content workflow.

Success

Success indicates that content has passed all applicable rules within your confidence thresholds. This means:

  • No rules were violated with sufficient confidence

  • Content can proceed through your normal workflow

  • No human intervention is required (regardless of review mode)

Failure

Failure means content has violated one or more rules with confidence at or above your threshold. This indicates:

  • Clear policy violations that require action

  • Content should be blocked, rejected, or flagged according to your workflow

  • High confidence in the decision means minimal risk of false positives

Ambiguous

Ambiguous results occur when potential rule violations exist but confidence levels fall below your threshold. This represents:

  • Borderline content that requires human judgment

  • Cases where the AI isn't certain enough to make an automatic decision

Moderation Runs

A moderation run represents a complete evaluation of content against a policy, creating a permanent record of the decision process and results.

Run Components

Each moderation run contains:

  • Content: The original text that was evaluated

  • Policy Reference: Which policy and rules were applied

  • Overall Result: Success, Failure, or Ambiguous outcome

  • Detailed Results: Results for each rule evaluation

  • Confidence Scores: Both individual rule confidence and overall confidence

Run Lifecycle

  1. Submission: Content is submitted for moderation via API or dashboard

  2. Processing: AI evaluates content against all policy rules

  3. Decision: System determines Success, Failure, or Ambiguous based on confidence threshold

  4. Recording: Run details are stored for audit and analysis

  5. Notification: Results are sent via webhook (if configured)

  6. Review (if applicable): Human reviewers process ambiguous cases

Metadata and Tags

Metadata and tags provide essential context and organization capabilities for your moderation runs.

Metadata

Metadata is custom key-value data that you attach to moderation requests to provide context and enable downstream processing. Common metadata includes:

{
  "userId": "user_12345",
  "postId": "post_67890",
  "source": "comment",
  "region": "Europe",
  "contentType": "user_generated"
}

Metadata benefits:

  • Context Preservation: Maintain links between moderated content and your application data

  • Downstream Processing: Use metadata in your webhook handlers to route or process results appropriately

  • Analytics: Filter and analyze moderation patterns by custom dimensions

  • Audit Trails: Maintain complete records for compliance and troubleshooting

Tags

Tags are predefined labels that you can attach to moderation runs for categorization and filtering. Unlike metadata, tags must be created in your organization before use.

Tag use cases:

  • Content Categorization: "product_review", "user_comment", "forum_post"

  • Regional Filtering: "us", "europe", "asia_pacific"

  • Priority Levels: "high_priority", "standard", "low_priority"

  • Source Systems: "mobile_app", "web_portal", "api_integration"

Benefits of tags:

  • Queue Filtering: View specific subsets of moderation runs in your dashboard

  • Analytics Segmentation: Compare moderation patterns across different content types or sources

  • Performance Analysis: Identify which content types require more human review or policy refinement

Webhooks

Webhooks provide real-time notifications when moderation is complete or when moderation fails, enabling seamless integration between DeepMod and your applications.

Webhook Functionality

When content moderation finishes, DeepMod sends an HTTP POST request to your configured webhook URL containing:

  • Complete moderation results (Success, Failure, or Ambiguous)

  • Detailed rule results and confidence scores

  • Attached metadata

  • Run identification for tracking and deduplication

Integration Requirements

  • Endpoint Accessibility: Your webhook URL must be publicly accessible and accept POST requests

  • JSON Processing: Handle JSON payloads containing moderation results

  • Response Codes: Return 2xx status codes to confirm successful receipt

  • Idempotency: Handle duplicate deliveries gracefully using run IDs

  • Security (Optional): Verify webhook signatures using provided secrets

Webhooks are configured at the organization level and provide the primary mechanism for integrating moderation results into your content workflows.

Understanding Relationships

These core concepts work together to create a flexible, powerful moderation system:

Policy → Rule Groups → Rules creates the hierarchical structure that organizes your moderation logic clearly and maintainably.

Confidence Threshold + Review Mode determines how the system handles uncertain cases, balancing automation with human oversight.

Success/Failure/Ambiguous + Moderation Runs provide detailed, auditable records of every moderation decision with complete reasoning.

Metadata + Tags + Webhooks enable rich integration possibilities, allowing you to categorize, route, and process moderation results according to your specific business requirements.

Understanding these relationships helps you design effective policies, interpret results accurately, and build robust integrations that scale with your content volume and complexity.

What's Next

With these core concepts understood, you're ready to explore more advanced topics:

These fundamentals provide the foundation for everything else in DeepMod - from creating your first policy to scaling content moderation across complex, high-volume applications.

Questions about core concepts? These fundamentals are essential for effective moderation - contact our support team if you need clarification on any of these concepts.