Community Guidelines

Hello World is built for families and for the people you actually know. These are the rules that keep it that way.

They apply everywhere in the app: messages, voice notes, calls, posts, statuses, comments, profiles, group names, store listings and anything else you can put in front of another person.

What is not allowed

Anything involving a child

Sexual content involving a minor, in any form — photographs, drawings, generated images, text, or attempts to obtain such material. There is no warning and no second chance for this: the account is closed, the content is preserved for the authorities, and we report it. This is the one rule on this page with no judgment call attached to it. See child safety.

Also forbidden: sexual or romantic approaches to a minor by an adult, and asking a minor for images of themselves.

Harassment and abuse

Targeting a person with insults, threats, or repeated unwanted contact. Encouraging other people to do it. Publishing someone’s private information — their address, their phone number, where they work — without their agreement.

Violence and threats

Threatening to hurt someone. Celebrating or encouraging violence against a person or a group. Content from terrorist or violent extremist organizations, or support for them.

Hate

Attacking people for their race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, caste, disability, illness, age, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Sexual content

Pornography and sexually explicit material do not belong in Moments, in statuses, in profiles or in store listings. Non-consensual intimate images, and threatening to share them, are forbidden everywhere including private messages.

Self-harm

Encouraging anyone to hurt themselves or take their own life, or instructing them in how. Talking about your own struggles is not this, and we would rather you did.

Deception

Pretending to be someone else. Scams, fraud, fake shops, chain messages, and offers that are not what they claim. Selling things that cannot lawfully be sold — drugs, weapons, stolen goods, people.

Spam

Bulk or repeated unwanted messages. Automated accounts. Harvesting numbers or contact details. Using the store or Moments to advertise at people who did not ask.

Other people’s work

Posting or selling material you have no right to. See copyright and intellectual property.

Breaking the app

Trying to get into accounts that are not yours, disrupting the service, reverse-engineering it to work around limits, or automating it in a way that spoils it for other people.

What we do expect

• That the people you write to want to hear from you. Hello World is built for people who know each other.
• That you are who you say you are.
• That you are old enough. Nobody under 13 may have an account, and from 13 until 16 an account needs a parent or guardian — see child safety.
• That translation is not a license. An insult is an insult in any language, and the machine will translate it faithfully.

What happens when a rule is broken

What we do depends on what happened, whether it was deliberate, and whether it has happened before. In rough order:

• The content is removed, and the person is told why.
• A warning, which goes on the account’s record.
• Limits — losing the ability to post, or to message people who are not already contacts.
• The account is closed. For the most serious things, this happens first rather than last.
• We tell the authorities, where a law has been broken or someone is in danger.

We act on reports from people using the app, and we review them promptly. Hello World AI Tools help us read through them, over the data of people who allowed that and no one else; a person decides what happens to an account. You can report a post, a Moment, a comment, a message, a chat or group, a flash, a person, an offering or a shop. No person at Hello World reads private messages, and there is no automated scanning of private messages or flashes for rule-breaking — so if something is wrong there, reporting it is what brings it to our attention. How to do that is on the safety page.

What people publish is filtered before it appears: names, usernames, bios, captions, comments, group names and shop descriptions that contain slurs, sexual content involving children or incitement to self-harm are refused, in the languages Hello World speaks. The filter is deliberately narrow and will miss things; reports are how the rest reaches us.

If you think we got it wrong

Write to support@helloworldmessenger.com and say what was removed or restricted and why you think that was a mistake. A person will look at it again. We would rather reverse a wrong decision than defend it.

Changes

These guidelines will change as the product does. The rules that protect children will not become less strict.