Community Guidelines

Hedgehog is a platform to promote good faith conversation and sharing of the news, so that we can all keep up with current events, learn and grow together. We hope in Hedgehog you’ll find a place where different opinions can be embraced, community can be built, and common issues plaguing online discourse today can be avoided. It’s important to us that everyone enjoys their time on Hedgehog, and that means we need to moderate some content with the help of the community to keep our platform at its best.

Below you will find our Community Guidelines - your guidebook for being a Hedgehog member and policies that apply to what you post and comment. We believe in transparency in how your content is moderated, and have provided details on how content is reviewed. We also believe that all members should have a hand in setting norms and boundaries here, and we have a few ways you can directly impact how the community is governed.

Want to learn more? Read on!

To ensure we keep the most harmful and dangerous content off our platform, we use a combination of automated controls and human review to detect and moderate content which violates our Community Rules. This process scans all content before it goes out to the world on the platform. Depending on what’s being reviewed, some content may be proactively approved or removed by our automated systems, while other content may require further review by a human. When automated systems are unable to decide, or when community members report content as containing a violation, we rely on a skilled team of trained moderators to carefully consider a moderation decision. They consider a number of factors like context and account history before making a determination.

Each organization can tune how sensitive this automated review is for its own community, and can add rules describing what its community should be more or less tolerant of. Those settings only adjust sensitivity within limits we set — an organization cannot switch off protections for the most harmful categories, and sexual content involving minors is always removed at full sensitivity.

While we don’t expect anyone to be perfect, we do expect our members to respect the Community Rules and avoid repeatedly violating them. Violations of the Community Rules can impact your overall standing in the community, as well as the standing of those who promoted your account to member status. Please keep in mind that Hedgehog staff and senior community members have the ability to demote your membership status due to sustained violations, and repeated violations can result in permanent account suspension.

In a perfect world, we’d have Hedgehog be a completely self-regulating platform, where members enforce guidelines set wholly by the community. While that may not be possible quite yet, we still embrace self-regulation where we can, and there are a few ways that members of the community can help shape content on Hedgehog:

1. Invite-Only: Hedgehog is an invite-only platform, and we rely on our members to take this responsibility seriously. When you invite someone to become a member, we trust your opinion that they will be a productive member of the community. Keep in mind that bad behavior from a person you invited has the potential to impact your standing in the Hedgehog community.
2. Community Moderators: All account holders who are Members or Contributors have the ability to shape the conversation happening on Hedgehog through Community Moderation. Account holders with this ability can raise posts that may be against Community Standards or otherwise objectionable, allowing other community members to either agree or disagree with their assessment. Community moderation is an essential feature of our platform, and we rely on Hedgehog members to use it respectfully. Abusing moderation privileges or a low community standing could result in loss of such privileges. Learn more about community moderation here.
3. Community Reports: Content review systems are never perfect, and from time to time there may be things that our controls miss. We invite our members to use our reporting feature to alert us of content that may violate our Community Rules, so that we can send it for further review. This process also helps us improve our automated systems and human moderation - a win win!

Please keep these ground rules in mind while using Hedgehog, and for more information, visit our Terms of Use.

1. No Illegal Activity

Hedgehog should not be used to promote illegal activity or goods, or coordinate crime.

Prohibited Criminal Behavior

• Facilitating, organizing, promoting, or admitting to certain criminal or harmful activities targeted at people, businesses, property, or animals.
• Offering, purchasing, selling, raffling, gifting, transferring, or trading illegal goods and services
• Promoting the use, purchase, sale, or trade of items considered illegal in the United States.
• Deceiving, misrepresenting or otherwise defrauding or exploiting others for money or property.

Prohibited Intellectual Property Violations

• Violating other people’s intellectual property rights, trademarks, and other legal rights to content

2. Be Civil

only respectful discourse is allowed on our platform. Comments made in bad faith or intending to harass or demean other people or groups will not be tolerated.

Prohibited Harassing Content

• Repeatedly contacting, responding to or messaging people who do not want to be contacted by you.
• Personal attacks on another member of the community or Hedgehog staff, such as making comments about personal appearance
• Posting content that mocks or trivializes someone’s tragedy or personal injury
• Posting private and/or manipulated imagery:
  • obtained through illegal means
  • If the person has a legal right to expect privacy in this setting

Prohibited Obscene Content

• Slurs, or stereotyping language
• Profanity used to harass or attack another user, or used in excess to derail a conversation
• The use of derogatory terms based on protected characteristics like race, sexual orientation, religion, gender, disability
• Hate speech or promoting hate groups
• Content that substantively supports Nazism, white supremacy and other similar organizations and ideologies.

3. No Violence

Don’t use Hedgehog to threaten the physical safety of others, endanger minors or promote violent acts or organizations. We work directly with law enforcement when we believe there is a genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.

Prohibited Violence Incitement

• Online communication that seeks to organize or elicit offline violence.
• Threatening or advocating for violence against another person, a group, public figure, or location.

Prohibited Violence Glorification

• Celebrating or glorifying human suffering, including mass violent events or natural disasters
• Sharing video or imagery of human or animal gore, including bodies that are diseased, dead, dying, excessively bloody, badly burned, etc.
• Glorifying or honoring perpetrators of violent events, including serial killers

Prohibited Promotion of Dangerous Organizations and Individuals

• Promoting organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence.
• Promoting domestic or international terrorist organizations or individuals as defined by the United States government (FTOs, SDGTs, SDNTKs)
• Promoting groups that engage or intend to engage, or whose online actions might lead them to engage in imminent real-world violence.

Prohibited Self-Harm Content

• Celebrating or promoting suicide or self-injury
• Promoting eating disorders or self-mutilation
• Expressing thoughts of suicide or self-harm, or encouraging others to engage in self-harm

Prohibited Human Exploitation and Abuse Content

• Graphics depicting or advocating for child exploitation or child abuse
• Content that sexualizes children, including depicting child nudity
• Denouncing or mockings victims of child abuse
• Promoting or orchestrating sales of children, illegal adoption, orphanage trafficking or orphanage tourism
• Promoting or orchestrating forced marriages
• Promoting or orchestrating sex trafficking
• Promoting or orchestrating labor exploitation (including bonded labor) or domestic servitude.
• Promoting or orchestrating organ trafficking
• Promoting or orchestrating forced criminal activity
• Promoting or orchestrating recruitment of child soldiers

4. No Sexual Activity

Hedgehog is not the place to engage in sexual behavior or share sexually suggestive or sexually explicit content. We recognize that some expressions of nudity may have artistic value, and we allow non-pornographic nudity in art and sculptures.

Prohibited Sexual Content

• Nudity or pornography, including describing nudity or pornography via text. Realistic genitalia in illustrations, cartoons, etc is also prohibited.
• Posting imagery of bare breasts for purposes other than displaying breastfeeding or for medical/educational reasons
• Promoting sexual violence, sexual assault, or sexual exploitation, whether on platform or linking to it off-platform
• Attempting to lure or meet up with people offsite for dating or sexual purposes

5. Respect Privacy

Privacy is a right, and you shouldn’t attempt to infringe upon or breach the privacy of another person.

Prohibited Privacy Infringement

• Sharing, offering, or soliciting personally identifiable information (PII) - whether your own or someone else’s
• Sharing, offering, or soliciting any information - whether PII or other sensitive data, like financial or medical information - that could lead to physical or financial harm
• Revealing or threatening to reveal someone’s PII with malicious intent or for the purpose of tracking or harassing them (doxxing)

6. Be Authentic

Be yourself, use only one account, and make sure the content you post isn’t intentionally false or misleading. We welcome good faith discussion and want to protect the opinions of the minority who can be subject to the tyranny of the majority, but this should not lead you to share information that is widely accepted as false to the community.

Prohibited Inauthentic Behavior

• Using multiple accounts to coordinate discussion or reactions (Smurfing or Sock puppeting)
• Posting content on behalf of a third party in an attempt to make a message or opinion seem organically and widely held among the community (Astroturfing)
• Leveraging the community reporting system for personal or political gain
• Leveraging code to automate engagement
• Creating multiple accounts, either manually or automatically

Prohibited Misleading Behavior

• Spreading unverifiable rumors that may cause real world violence or that make people or places targets of violence
• Spreading information that is demonstrably false
• Purposefully spreading misleading information, even if the intention of the deception originated from another author
• Spreading manipulated media unless it is clearly satire or for the purposes of raising awareness
• Purposefully spreading health advice which is contrary to the advice of official government sources

7. No Platform Interference

Don’t use Hedgehog in a manner not as intended, or try to alter, manipulate or exploit the platform.

Prohibited Spamming

• Posting or sharing identical, nonsensical or off-topic content at very high frequencies
• Selling, buying, or exchanging site privileges or engagement.
• Clickbait scams
• Attempting to circumvent URL vetting systems intended to protect the community from malicious websites and/or posting external links that have not been pre-approved

Prohibited Security Infringement

• Accessing or attempting to access other people’s accounts in an unauthorized manner
• Using the platform to gain access to sensitive information
• Using the platform to disclose cyber security vulnerabilities not already in news circulation
• Sharing malicious or dangerous computer viruses and code

Prohibited Advertising

• Advertising or promoting products in the comment section on the platform unless solicited for advice
• Phishing, for example, content which directs people to sign up to services (work from home programs)

In most cases, following these guidelines will ensure your content won’t encounter issues on our platform. However, we reserve the right to remove any content or account from the platform for any reason.