Child safety standards

Viral has zero tolerance for child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE). This page sets out the standards we hold ourselves to, what we prohibit, how anyone can report a concern, and who to contact.

Viral is an 18+ service

Viral is not directed to children. Accounts are for people aged 18 and over, the age requirement is stated at sign-up, and an account we find to belong to a minor is removed.

What is prohibited

The Rules of the Arena, which every member accepts before their first post, require that content be lawful. Under that rule we prohibit, without exception:

• Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in any form — image, video, audio, drawing, or generated media.
• Sexualisation of a minor, including text, captions, and commentary.
• Grooming, solicitation, or sextortion of a minor, and any attempt to arrange contact with one.
• Trafficking a minor, or advertising, trading, or soliciting any of the above.

This applies to every surface of the product: posts, replies, debates, profiles, live rooms, events, marketplace listings, and messages.

Reporting a concern in the app

Every post, profile, and live room carries a report control, and the report picker has a Child safety category. Choosing it routes the report straight to human review rather than to an automated queue. To file one:

1. Open the … menu on the post, profile, message, or room.
2. Choose Report.
3. Choose Child safety and confirm.

You do not need an account to reach us: anyone can report CSAE to support@getviral.social. You can also block any account from the same menu.

What we do with a report

• Child safety reports are prioritised and reviewed by a person, not resolved automatically.
• Content we confirm as CSAE is removed and the account is permanently banned. This is outside the ordinary sanctions ladder — there is no warning step.
• We preserve the reported material and the associated account records as evidence for the authorities rather than deleting them outright. This survives the reporter, the sender, or anybody else deleting the conversation — see below.
• We report confirmed CSAM to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and cooperate with law enforcement requests in the jurisdictions we operate in.

Deletion, and why evidence survives it

Viral deletes hard. Erasing a conversation removes the messages, the photos and files themselves, the previews held in notifications, and the search vectors built from the text, and destroys the conversation’s encryption keys as well as its rows. Our Privacy Policy sets that out in full. Reported child-safety material is the first of exactly four things that deliberately survive it, and that is not a gap in the deletion — it is a decision, and this is its scope:

• Only what was reported under the child-safety category. Not the surrounding conversation, and not reports filed under any other category — a spam report about the same chat is erased with it.
• The report to NCMEC, and the evidence record that substantiates it. That record holds a cryptographic digest of the material and a pointer to the preserved copy; it is not itself a second copy of the content, and it is access-controlled.
• Nobody can erase it by deleting. Not the account that sent the material, not the person who reported it, not the account owner, and not by closing an account. If a sender could destroy the evidence of what they sent, reporting would be worthless — and in the United States, 18 U.S.C. §2258A makes preserving it a legal duty, not a choice.
• It is bounded in time. Preserved material is held for at least 90 days and is deleted when the matter closes.

Everything else in that conversation is erased normally. Preservation is the narrow exception, scoped to the reported material and written down where you can read it, rather than a quiet exemption that swallows the deletion promise.

Compliance

We comply with applicable child safety laws in the markets where Viral is distributed, and with Google Play's Child Safety Standards policy and Apple's App Review Guidelines on child endangerment. We review these standards at least annually and when the law changes.

Point of contact

Questions about these standards, or about a report you have filed, go to support@getviral.social.

If you believe a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. In the United States you can also report to the NCMEC CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org.

See also our Rules of the Arena, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Service.