What To Remember When Reporting to Us

Report Harmful Content is here to help escalate reports that have been made to online platforms to no avail. If the platform has responded to your report stating that no rules (commonly called community guidelines or community standards) have been broken (often referred to as violations), then we will ask that you show us their response, and from here, Report Harmful Content practitioners will review the content and/or screenshots where it is appropriate and legal to do so.

We are often asked, why do I need to show you platforms’ responses to my report? We understand that this can, at times, feel frustrating and want to explain the main reasons for this request:

1. There are lots of different reporting routes on online platforms based on the type of violations that are being experienced. Viewing the response from an industry platform can help practitioners to identify whether the correct reporting routes have been used and signpost accordingly.  
2. This is a requirement of our partnership work with online platforms to help us keep doing what we were set up to do.
3. We are able to provide this information in the context of specific cases to online platforms which provides them with valuable feedback, helping them to improve and streamline the reporting process.
4. It reduces the risk of over-reporting cases which can have a detrimental effect.

It is important to remember that our role as a service is only to mediate once the correct methods of reporting have been attempted. That said, if you have made a report and waited over a week for a response, it may be that we can look into this further for you. Unfortunately, when platforms have not removed content, this doesn’t mean that we are able to have it automatically reviewed and removed. Practitioners review content against online platforms’ own community guidelines and, in some cases, we may reach the same conclusion (i.e. that no violations have been found). However, in this scenario, we will always try and offer you a further explanation about why the platform may have come to this decision. Also, where possible, we will offer further support, advice and signposting to more relevant services.

In other cases, after reviewing the content reported, we may disagree with an online platform’s initial decision. If this is the case, then Report Harmful Content will escalate your case further to our contacts at the relevant platform. To do this effectively, we will often ask (if not provided already) that you provide us with further details about what has happened. It is often difficult to judge what is happening with just one URL and as well as the URL's, we do need to know the context behind the situation. Sometimes additional screenshots or links to relevant comments or images that are being reported may also be needed.

Though we are able to escalate content  with our contacts at online platforms and make a case for action to be taken, we are unable to action content ourselves. There is sometimes a delay between the time we escalate content and a platform’s response which is to do with the platform’s own moderation processes and outside our control.  We really do appreciate that this may cause some anxiety and frustration, but please rest assured we will continue to chase escalations and update our clients along the way to resolution.