Threats of violence, calls for violence, and praise for violence done to somebody are not permitted here. This is a service where people write to the ones they love and set those words to arrive later, sometimes after they have died, and a threat sent that way lands on a person who cannot answer it.
We do not screen anything before it is posted, and we do not use automated systems to look for it. This policy runs on reports. Anyone with an account can report a post, a comment or an account, a person reads every report, and we review reports within 24 hours of receiving them. That is why the rules below turn on what a post says rather than on why it was posted: we can act on what a report puts in front of us, and a rule that turned on what somebody meant is one we could not apply evenly to two people who wrote the same thing.
Violent Threats: You are prohibited from issuing threats of physical harm to others. This includes threatening to kill, torture, sexually assault or otherwise harm a person. It also covers threats to damage homes, shelters, or the infrastructure people depend on for daily, civic or business life.
Glorification of Violence: Praising or celebrating an act of violence in which somebody was harmed is not permitted, and neither is praising the person who carried it out or the organization behind it. Glorifying cruelty to animals is not permitted either. Your own account of violence done to you is a different thing, and it is allowed. What that covers is set out below.
Incitement of Violence: You may not tell other people to harm somebody, or encourage them to. This includes encouraging another person towards self-harm, and calling for crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide. Saying it in coded or indirect words does not change what it is. What decides it is whether the post calls for harm to a person, which is something a person reading a report can see.
Wishing Harm: Wishing physical harm, illness or disaster on a person is not permitted here. This rule is about a person now, and it is not aimed at your own account of what was done to you, or at what you felt about the person who did it. That is set out below, and where a sentence could be read either way, that section is the one that decides it.
Your own account of what was done to you is allowed here. If somebody hurt you, you may write down what they did, at whatever length you need, and you may say what you felt about it and what you still feel: that you hated them, that you wanted them to suffer the way you suffered, that you were glad when you heard they had died. People write here at the end of their lives, and for some of them the person who did them the most harm is part of what they have left to say. What you wrote will not be removed for carrying anger of that kind, and you do not have to sand your own story down to be allowed to tell it here.
What is forbidden is turning it on somebody now. A threat made to a person, or a post telling other people to go and harm one, is the thing this policy is about. What decides it is the post itself, who it is addressed to and what it asks anyone to do, not what was going on behind it. That is something a person reading a report can see for themselves.
Writing about your own thoughts of suicide or self-harm is not incitement either. The rule above is about urging another person towards it. What you have lived through and what you are living through now are yours to write down, and our Suicide and Self-Harm policy says so in full. Leave out the methods, because somebody else will read it.
Ordinary heated speech is not a violation of this policy. Hyperbole between friends, cursing, a figure of speech, and talk about a game or a match are not threats, and they are not treated as threats.
Any user with a Goodbye App account has the ability to report potential violations of this policy.
In-app and Desktop
You can report content for review in-app and desktop as follows:
Content we find in breach is removed, and we act on the account that posted it. What that means depends on what was posted and on what the account has done before. We may lock the account so that it cannot post, and a threat made against a person can close an account the first time. Breaches that carry on after a warning close the account.
There is no middle setting. Nothing here ranks posts or decides what anybody is shown, so there is no reach to turn down: a post is either left up or taken down, and a person makes that decision by reading the report.