Design a content moderation system

Q: Design a content moderation system

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in designing large-scale content moderation systems, covering distributed architecture, scalability and latency engineering, policy outcome modeling, abuse-resistance considerations, human-in-the-loop workflows, auditing and traceability, and operational trade-offs.

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Question

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Design a content moderation system for a large-scale product where users can submit content (e.g., text posts, images, videos, comments, or messages).

Your design should cover:

What is being moderated: user-generated content before/after publishing.
Policy outcomes: allow, block, label, downrank, age-gate, or send to human review.
Scale/latency goals: handle high QPS; some content needs near-real-time decisions.
Abuse resistance: adversarial users trying to evade detection.
Human-in-the-loop: reviewer tooling, queues, SLAs, and escalation.
Auditing/appeals: traceability and user appeals.

Provide an end-to-end architecture and justify key trade-offs (precision/recall, latency vs. quality, cost, and reliability).

Design a content moderation system

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