Child safety standards

Our position

Child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and any content or conduct that sexualises a child, is forbidden on Vewn without exception. There is no context in which it is permitted, and no appeal that restores an account removed for it.

This is not only a rule in our terms. It is the standard we moderate to, and the one we act on when somebody reports it to us.

Who can use Vewn

You must be 18 or over to have a Vewn account. That is higher than the law requires: consenting to an online service on your own account is 14 in Austria and between 13 and 16 elsewhere in the EU. We set it at 18 because everything here is written by the people using it and none of it is read by us before it appears.

An account we believe belongs to someone under 18 is removed. If you believe a child is using Vewn, tell us using the contact address below.

A minimum age is not a child safety measure and we do not present it as one. It is a statement of who Vewn is for, enforced by closing accounts we find; it is not age verification, and nobody should assume that everyone reading a public post is an adult. Everything below applies in full regardless, and would apply if the minimum were lower or higher.

What is prohibited

• Child sexual abuse material, in any form, including drawn, animated or computer-generated depictions.
• Sexualising a child in text, images or any other content, including describing a real or fictional child in sexual terms.
• Grooming: contacting or attempting to contact a child for sexual purposes, or encouraging anyone else to.
• Sextortion, or threatening to publish sexual content of any person.
• Trading, requesting, advertising or linking to any of the above, on Vewn or anywhere else.
• Using Vewn to identify, locate or recruit a child for any of the above.

How the product limits the risk

Some of this is design rather than policy, and it is worth stating plainly because it changes what is possible on Vewn rather than only what is allowed.

• Who may open a private conversation with you is your own setting, and the default is people you follow. A stranger cannot start one with an account that has not chosen to allow it. The other three choices are nobody, only people you have approved, and anyone.
• A conversation nobody answers closes itself. Somebody writing to a person who has not replied gets three messages and no more, and one account may open at most ten conversations a day. Persisting at someone who has not answered is not something the product permits, and neither is opening conversations at scale.
• Either side can close a conversation permanently, which stops both sides writing, and closing it does not depend on the other person agreeing.
• An anonymous letter cannot be aimed at anyone. The recipient is chosen by our servers at random, never named by the sender, and a person may send at most one letter a day.
• Everything written on Vewn, whether a post, a comment, a private message, an anonymous letter or a profile, is screened before it is stored against a list of terms that have no acceptable use here, including the ones used to offer or ask for sexual material involving children. Content that matches is refused rather than posted and then found. The screening runs on our database rather than in the app, so it applies to every way of reaching us, and it is a floor under the reporting rather than a replacement for it: it catches what is written plainly, and a person reviews what is reported.
• A post cannot contain an uploaded image. Images in posts come only from our GIF provider, which hosts and moderates them; the ability to upload a file into a post does not exist in the product.
• The only images a person can upload are their own profile picture and profile banner, which appear on their own profile.
• Anyone can block another account, in both directions at once. A blocked account cannot see or reach them, and cannot open a conversation with them either.
• Private and unlisted posts are enforced in the database rather than hidden in the interface, so writing you have not published is not reachable by other people.

How to report a child safety concern

Every profile, post, comment and private message on Vewn carries a report control, on the web and in both apps. Choose the content or the account, open the ⋯ menu, and choose Report. You can add a description, which we read.

You do not need an account to use it. On the web the ⋯ menu is there whether or not you are signed in, and without an account Report opens our safety form with a link to what you are reporting already filled in. It reaches the same people, and what you send is treated the same way.

Reporting a message is the one case where we see part of a private conversation. Reporting copies that message and the two immediately before it out of the conversation and freezes them, so that what happened can be judged. Nothing else from the conversation is copied, and the app tells you so before you report rather than after.

Reporting does not require you to be the person affected, and you do not need to know who the account belongs to.

If you cannot reach a report control at all, the form at vewn.app/support takes a message from anybody, with or without an account, and vewn.app@gmail.com reaches the same person by email. Please put “child safety” in the subject line so it goes to the right place quickly.

If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. In Austria, that is 133 for police or 112 for the European emergency number.

What happens after a report

Reports about child safety are treated as the highest priority and are reviewed ahead of everything else in the queue. Every report is reviewed within 24 hours of being filed, and these are reviewed first.

Where a report is upheld, we remove the content, and we suspend or permanently terminate the account responsible. For child sexual abuse or exploitation the outcome is termination; the escalating scale of temporary suspensions we use for other violations does not apply.

We preserve the account record and the reported material where doing so is necessary for a law enforcement investigation, rather than deleting it immediately. Content removed from public view is not necessarily destroyed, for exactly this reason.

Every moderation decision is recorded with the person who made it, so a decision can be reviewed afterwards.

Reporting to the authorities

We report apparent child sexual abuse material and credible child safety threats to the competent authorities, and we comply with lawful requests for information from them.

For Vewn, operated from Austria, that means the Austrian law enforcement authorities, and Stopline, the Austrian reporting hotline for child sexual abuse material. Where the law of another country applies to a report, we report to the competent body there as well.

We do not require a court order before acting on content that appears to be child sexual abuse material. It is removed first.

Who to contact

The point of contact for these standards, and for any question about how Vewn prevents the availability of child sexual abuse material, is vewn.app@gmail.com.

This address is monitored by Sebastian Deisinger, who operates Vewn, and is able to discuss our methods and our compliance with this policy. Postal contact details are in the Impressum.

Keeping these standards current

These standards are reviewed when the product changes in a way that affects them, and at least once a year. The date at the top of this page is when they were last changed.

This page sits alongside our Terms of service, which prohibit the same conduct as a condition of using Vewn, and our Privacy policy, which describes what we hold and for how long.