Short answer: for media support tickets that include an image, keep classification, policy enforcement, and tenant cost accounting as three separate steps. Send the image to a multimodal chat model with a strict JSON Schema, validate the returned object locally, and send invalid or uncertain cases to review. The fallback is a queue, not a guess.

That design matters because a support agent is usually triaging a complaint, not publishing a photo. The same upload might be evidence of a violent broadcast, a screenshot containing a hate symbol, or an ordinary account avatar. A boolean called safe throws away the context that the agent needs.

Keep it boring.

How can a Node.js image moderation flow classify risky uploads without trusting JSON?

Start with a versioned taxonomy. For this media workflow, I would keep nsfw, violence, and hate_symbols as separate observations, add uncertain, and retain a short evidence string. The model describes what it can see; application code decides whether a ticket is visible, blocked, or waiting for a human. This boundary also makes an eval harness useful: a prompt change can be tested independently from the enforcement policy.