Patent ID: 8281361

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for enforcing parental-control policies on user-generated content, at least a portion of the method being performed by a computing system comprising at least one processor, the method comprising: identifying a web document, the web document comprising user-generated content that is not authored by an entity that publishes and/or hosts the web document; identifying a subset of links in the web document that are related to the user-generated content in the web document by: 1) parsing the web document to identify a set of links in the web document; 2) identifying, within the set of links, one or more links which are related to the user-generated content by determining that the one or more links refer to the user-generated content, by determining that the user-generated content includes the one or more links, and/or by determining that the one or more links refer to a content-generating user responsible for generating the user-generated content; 3) excluding, from the subset of links, one or more links identified in the set of links that were not determined to be related to the user-generated content in the web document; 4) including, in the subset of links, the one or more links that were determined to be related to the user-generated content in the web document; for each link in the subset of links: identifying a target web document of the link; determining a parental-control rating for the link based on the target web document; generating a composite rating of the web document based, at least in part, on the parental-control rating of each link in the subset of links; and enforcing the parental control policy based on the composite rating of the web document.