Reactive moderation means content is only reviewed after a user reports it. If nobody flags a post, nobody looks at it.

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‍Why it matters

It's the cheapest model to run, because review effort scales with the number of reports and not the amount of content. It also puts the burden on users. Harmful content that nobody reports, or that only people who don't care about it see, can stay up indefinitely. Report quality varies too, so reviewers spend a lot of time on reports about content that's perfectly fine.

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‍How the workflow runs

A report enters a queue, gets sorted by severity, and goes to a reviewer who checks it against policy. The decision is applied, and good setups tell the reporter what happened. Severity sorting matters most. A report about a threat should never wait behind a hundred reports about a rude comment.

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‍When reporting gets abused

Because reports trigger action, they can be used as a weapon. Coordinated mass reporting is a known tactic for getting someone's legitimate content removed or their account restricted. Platforms that rely heavily on reactive moderation usually need a way to weigh reports, for example by considering the reporter's track record, and to make sure a pile of reports isn't treated as proof of a violation on its own.