Hedgehog Community Guidelines
Welcome to the Hedgehog community!
How Moderation Works
How You Can Impact Moderation
Our Community Rules
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Violating other people’s intellectual property rights, trademarks, and other legal rights to 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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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)
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
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
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
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.