Check a sample of moderation decisions by hand

Human review sends a random share of each project's automated decisions to reviewers you invite, who confirm each one or change it with a note.

An automated policy makes every decision the same way, which also means it repeats the same mistake. The usual way to find those mistakes is to look at a sample of decisions by hand: some of what was allowed, to catch harm that got through, and some of what was restricted, to catch content removed for no good reason. Release 2026.7 builds that into CalmLens as human review.

Choose what share is sampled

Each project has two sampling percentages, from 0 to 100:

Separate rates let you sample the two kinds of outcome differently, such as a small share of allowed decisions and a larger share of restricted ones, depending on how many reviews your team can keep up with.

Both rates start at 0, which samples nothing; 100 samples every eligible decision. The rates apply to new automated decisions, and each asset joins the queue at most once. Project owners and administrators set them.

Sampling never delays or changes the automated decision. A sampled asset is delivered according to its automated status, the same as any other, until a reviewer changes it.

Reviewers need the content to judge it. When a project doesn't keep content after processing, a sampled asset's content is held for reviewers, never delivered, until the review is decided or for at most 14 days, and is then removed as usual. Automated purges, assets under a safety hold and child assets, such as text extracted from a document, are never sampled.

Invite reviewers

Reviewers are a project role. A reviewer sees the human review queue and their own account, and nothing else: no assets, folders, settings or API keys, and no downloads. That lets you bring in a contractor or a volunteer moderator without giving them the rest of the project. Owners and administrators invite them from the members page, and can later promote a reviewer to editor or remove them.

Owners and administrators can work through the queue too, as can members with custom permissions that include viewing and deciding reviews.

The queue shows the oldest pending asset first, one at a time. Reviewers read the text of a sampled text post and view a preview image of other assets.

Confirm or change each decision

A reviewer confirms the asset's decision by choosing the same status, or changes it to another: allowed, limited, age-restricted, blocked or purged. Changing it requires a note of up to 1,000 characters explaining why; confirming takes an optional one. If two reviewers decide the same asset at once, only the first decision is saved.

• Confirming leaves the asset as it is and records the review in classification.moderation.manualReviews with appliedToAsset: false.
• Changing sets classification.moderation.status to the reviewer's decision and records the review with appliedToAsset: true. The policy's own assessment stays in classification.moderation, so you can still see what the policy decided.

Purging deletes the stored content after an explicit confirmation, and nothing can restore it afterwards. Reviewers can't purge; only people who can also delete assets, such as owners and administrators, can. Blocking keeps the content, so a later review can still restore delivery.

Events and history

When an asset joins the queue, CalmLens sends asset.review-requested, with the sampled status in its automated-outcome fact. Subscribe a connector to it to tell your team when new work arrives.

A changed decision sends the usual status event, such as asset.allowed or asset.blocked, with decided-by set to reviewer, the reviewer's user ID and their note. The reviewer's name stays in the portal: webhook, Slack and email deliveries and the events feed leave it out. Your existing status handler picks it up with no new code. Confirming emits no event, since the asset hasn't changed.

The reviewed list shows each decision with its reviewer and whether it confirmed or changed the decision it reviewed, along with how many were changed. Decisions stay with the project when a reviewer leaves.

Using what reviewers find

Reviewers judge single assets. Their decisions don't change the policy or how later uploads are moderated. When reviewers keep changing the same kind of decision, that is a sign the policy needs adjusting: edit it, then test the draft against the assets they changed before saving.

The human review guide covers permissions, retention and every event fact.