On May 26th, what began as a moment of celebration for Liverpool FC fans turned tragic when a car drove through the club’s Premier League victory parade on Water Street injuring 79 people including four children.
As the news came out, videos and posts of eyewitnesses flooded social media. Moments like these bring more than a safety crisis, they create a digital emergency that Trust & Safety teams must face in real time.
The Important of Responding Quickly
When emotionally charged events unfold, the online aftermath can rapidly spiral into secondary crises. The Liverpool parade tragedy illustrates how quickly social platforms can become inundated with sensitive or harmful user-generated content, amplifying the initial harm if moderation isn’t swift and precise.
History provides clear lessons. Consider the May 2022 Buffalo, NY supermarket shooting, livestreamed by the attacker. Within minutes, graphic footage from the event jumped from niche platforms like 4chan to mainstream sites such as Twitter and Reddit. Thousands of re-uploads followed, flooding platforms with violent, traumatic content faster than moderators could remove it.
In July 2024, when a teenager attacked a children’s dance class in Southport, UK, misinformation rapidly took hold. False claims that the attacker was an asylum-seeking migrant went viral, leading influencers to call for extreme actions like military rule and mass deportations. These misleading narratives quickly turned into offline violence, sparking anti-immigrant riots and the attack on a Manchester mosque.
Similarly, following the October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, there was an immediate and alarming surge in antisemitic hate speech across UK social media. Antisemitic incidents jumped 589%, with online abuse soaring 257% compared to the previous year. Extremists leveraged the crisis to spread harmful, divisive messages at unprecedented scale.
These events underline a crucial truth: Trust & Safety teams cannot rely solely on reactive measures. When a crisis hits, content moderation strategies must be proactive, flexible, and instantly deployable. Speed and precision in moderation aren’t just beneficial, they’re essential to prevent digital emergencies from compounding real-world harm.
While platforms may hope these spikes remain isolated, Trust & Safety teams know better – incidents like these often escalate quickly if not moderated fast and accurately. So how can Trust & Safety teams stay ahead when every minute counts?
Enter: Self-Serve Queue Management
In such moments response time is everything. But on many platforms, creating or adjusting moderation workflows depends on engineering teams, configuration changes or support cycles.
Self-Serve Queue Management eliminates this bottleneck. It gives Trust & Safety teams full control to create, edit, archive or restore queues instantly all without needing backend support.
This means when some tragic or viral incident occurs – your team can:
- Launch keyword and LLM tags to identify trending content – Add new keywords like “Liverpool,” “Water Street,” “Ford Galaxy,” and “Premier League” to tag priority content after the event. Add a new LLM classification label to grab references or speculation about the event to catch references that keywords may miss (e.g. ‘Scouse horror show’).
- Create bespoke queues instantly – Route content with your new keywords and your violent imagery labels for priority review. Take action on violating content quickly one by one or in bulk.
- Dynamically adjust reviewer criteria – Identify new types of harm as the conversation evolves to identify things like harassment or misinformation (e.g., false claims about the driver) while deprioritizing benign celebratory posts.
- Spin up immediate automation within your emergency queues – Launch a new bot within minutes and assign it to your new priority queue. Give the bot additional instructions and let it work through cases to help you handle the volume.
- Manage graphic content exposure – Cap per-moderator exposure to disturbing media, protecting wellbeing while ensuring urgent items are addressed.
How Self-Serve Queues Can Help
When moderation processes lag, the consequences rapidly escalate, from overwhelmed moderators to traumatised users and confused reviewers. Here’s how Self-Serve Queue Management directly addresses these common pain points, enhancing the speed, accuracy, and effectiveness of your crisis response:
| Pain Point | Outcome With Queues Self Serve |
| Moderator backlog balloons, with review times exceeding SLAs. | Custom queues reduce event-related signifcantly; reduce average review time |
| Graphic content slips through, distressing users. | Dynamic filters block violent frames before public exposure. |
| Conflicting priorities (e.g., hate speech vs. misinformation) confuse reviewers. | Sub-queues by harm type boost combined accuracy scores . |
| Execs lack real-time crisis insights for stakeholders. | Live dashboards provide queue health metrics, enabling data-driven responses to press and regulators. |
Not every crisis leads to harm across platforms, but waiting to act until it does is a gamble. By proactively setting up issue specific queues Trust & Safety teams can monitor content trends, catch harmful patterns early and act before things spiral.
In Summary
The Liverpool parade incident was a stark reminder that platforms don’t get to choose when a crisis strikes but they can choose how well they respond. With Checkstep’s Self-Serve Queues Trust & Safety teams don’t need to wait for approval, code pushes or help desk tickets to protect users. They get the power to act fast, responsibly and independently. Because in this industry, “prevention is better than cure” isn’t just a cliché, it’s a survival strategy.