Azure Content Moderator

Azure Content Moderator is Microsoft's automated content review service for text, images, and video, built to flag adult content, hate speech, personal data, and spam at scale. Instead of a binary allow or block decision, it returns confidence scores for each category, letting platform teams set their own thresholds and send only the ambiguous cases to human moderators rather than reviewing every upload by hand. It plugs into Azure AI Services alongside custom term lists and image lists, so operators can tune it for platform-specific slang, banned imagery, or repeat offenders.

It's aimed at platforms with high volumes of user-generated content, like marketplaces, forums, gaming communities, and social apps, where manual review of everything posted isn't feasible. Typical use cases are pre-screening uploads before they go live, triaging reported content, and reducing the review queue moderators have to work through manually.

Microsoft has deprecated Content Moderator in favor of Azure AI Content Safety, which extends the same idea with newer models, broader language coverage, and additional detection for things like AI-generated content and prompt injection risks. New projects can no longer be created on Content Moderator, and existing deployments are set to be retired in March 2027, so teams still on it are expected to migrate to Content Safety.