CONTRIBUTORS, BLOGGERS AND MEMBERS RULES

 

The Website facilitates the sharing of insights, perspectives and experiences from a diverse community of contributors, subscribers and readers, and offers you a platform to reach this community with your content. To enable and maintain this community, and provide everyone a safe and welcoming environment to engage in meaningful and civil conversations, we have Rules as described below. Everyone in our community is responsible for adhering and maintaining these Rules. By using the Website, you agree to follow these Rules. We reserve the right to review your account and content at any time, remove your content, or suspend or delete your account for any violation of our Rules. 

 

Restrictions

• We prohibit and restrict accounts, articles and/or posts that engage in the following:

  • Facilitation of copyright violation.

  • Facilitation of illegal sexual services.

  • Facilitation of gambling or betting.

  • Facilitation of buying or selling social media interactions, including off-platform.

  • Facilitation of Multi-level marketing.

  • Promotion of harmful conspiracies.

  • On-platform, off-platform, or cross-platform campaigns targeting, harassment, hate speech, violence or disinformation. 

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Violations

• Privacy - we prohibit the following: 

  • Content that violates others’ privacy, including sensitive or confidential information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, private phone numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, or other non-public information.

  • Posting intimate or explicit images taken or posted without the subject’s express consent.

  • Posting copies of private communications between private individuals without the explicit consent of all parties to the communication.

• Spam - we prohibit and will immediately remove spam and associated characteristics of spam from the website including:

  • Posting duplicate content, whether from a single account or across multiple accounts.

  • Use or re-use content templates with slight modifications across multiple posts and accounts.

  • Performing a disproportionately large number of interactions, particularly by automated means including indiscriminate and bulk interactions, such as following of other accounts (follow spam) clapping, highlighting, or leaving comments.

  • Articles where the content is clipped with the sole purpose of linking to the rest of the article on a different website.

  • Posting content primarily to drive traffic to, or increase the search rankings of, an external site, product, or service.

  • Scraping and reposting content from other sources for the primary purpose of generating revenue or other personal gains.

  • Repeatedly using responses or other interactions as a method of promotion

  • Participating in bounty campaigns or brigades to artificially inflate rankings for posts, accounts, businesses, or products.

• Deceptive Conduct - we do not permit deceptive conduct including:

  • Use an anonymous email address which is not linked to your personal, organisation and/or project domain.

  • Using the Website for phishing or fraud.

  • Using tags, links, titles, or other metadata in a misleading way.

  • Linking to or embed malicious or harmful code or software in your posts.

  • Posting content or impersonating a person or organization in a way likely to deceive people.

  • Using deception to generate revenue or traffic. You are required to disclose any affiliate links, compensation, free goods/services or anything of value in exchange for writing an article or post and in connection with the topic of your posts and articles.

  • Including shortened URLs in your posts.

  • Advertise or participate in bounty campaigns, pump and dumps, reviewing for reward, or other forms of brigading or inauthentic activity.

• Non-genuine interactions - we do not permit the following:

  • Driving traffic to an external website, business, or product. All content must be relevant, substantial and informative.

  • Capturing user information or soliciting money through links or embeds, requests for donations, ask for likes and other calls to action.

  • Third-party advertising, promotions and sponsorships including products, services, or brands through articles and posts, images that indicate brand sponsorship or as part of a publication name or logo in an article or post, images functioning as third-party ads, and inline images or embeds that link out and function as banner ads for third-party brands.

  • Duplicating content, whether from a single account or across multiple accounts, either publicly or as an unlisted article.

  • Buying, selling, or trading in accounts or account interactions including likes, claps, highlights, responses or other traffic.

  • Using services, apps, or arrangements that offer more follows, likes or other interactions on your Website account or content.

  • Registering accounts, posting content, or interacting with users or content automatically, systematically, or programmatically.

• Harassment – we have zero tolerance for: 

  • Using any and all of the Website features in a way intended to annoy or harass someone

  • Reviewing businesses, products and/or services in a gratuitously harmful or abusive manner

  • Bullying, threatening, or shaming someone, or posting content likely to encourage others to do so

  • Aggregation of publicly available information to target, shame, blackmail, harass, intimidate, threaten, or endanger others

• Violence, incitement and hate -we prohibit accounts, content and/or actions that: 

  • Use hateful text, images, symbols or other content in usernames, profiles and/or bios

  • Threaten, encourage, or incite violence against anyone, directly or indirectly.

  • Promotes violence or hatred against people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity

  • Glorify, celebrate, downplay, or trivialise violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths of individuals or groups, including the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims to pathologise, dehumanise, or disempower others.

  • Call for intolerance, exclusion, or segregation based on protected characteristics, and glorify groups which do any of the above.

• Graphic content - we prohibit the following:

  • Pornographic images or videos.

  • Erotic writing and non-graphic erotic images.

  • Gratuitously graphic or disturbing media, even if it’s not pornographic.

  • Promote the sexual or violent exploitation of minors, including the sexualisation of fictional minors.

  • Encourage, promote and glorify self-harm such as cutting, eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia, and suicide. 

• Copyright and trademark infringement - we response to notices of alleged infringement as described in our Terms of Service. Do not use the copyrights and trademarks of others unless you are authorised to do so either expressly or by legal exceptions and limitations like fair use.

• Embedded content - we restrict the behaviour of certain embedded content in compliance with the European GDPR including embeds that directly collect data through form fields, and embeds that facilitate the submission of email addresses and other personally identifying information through forms and the submission of credit card information. You are required to link out from your post in the Website to your form hosted elsewhere and disclaim the independence of the Website to your form if you want to collect information from your readers.

• Cryptocurrency - we do not endorse or verify any coin, token, or similar announcement, articles and posts.

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Fraud Prevention

• It is your responsibility to prevent fraud and abuse of your account. You should use an active email account and address from your personal, organisation or project domain as your verified Website account email, and include a link to your active domain in your account bio.  You may also link a page with up-to-date contact information about you and/or a consistently-branded social media account to your account.

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Addressing Violations

• In deciding a violation, we will take into account the context, newsworthiness, nature of the content, and applicable privacy laws. If you believe your content or account has been restricted or disabled in error, or believe there is relevant context we were not aware of in reaching our determination, you can use the Contact Us Form to appeal.

• We will notify you when investigating or disabling your content or account, except when we believe your account is automated or operating in bad faith, or that notifying you is likely to cause, maintain or exacerbate harm to someone.

• We reserve the right to suspend your account and remove content, without notice, for any reason, particularly to protect our Services and/or community. We will suspend any new accounts and content you create.

• You may use the Contact Us Form to report any conduct, contributor content and/or account on the Website that you believe violates these Rules.

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Government Takedown Requests

• We will notify you if we receive a request from a government organisation to restrict access to content associated with your account, unless we are prohibited by law or believe doing so may endanger others. 

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Enforcement & Changes

• We may enforce, or not enforce, these Rules at our sole discretion. These Rules do not create a duty or contractual obligation for us to act. We reserve the right change these Rules at any time.