Content Policy

This Policy distinguishes four things, and the distinction determines what happens:

Prohibited Content

Content that may never appear on Boznaw. It is removed on detection or report. Section 3.

Prohibited Conduct

Ways of using the Services that are not permitted, whatever the Content itself contains. Section 4.

Restricted Content

Content that is permitted, but only in defined places, or with a label, an interstitial, or reduced distribution. Section 5.

Legally mandated action

Content we must act on because a court or an authorised government agency has directed it, regardless of whether it breaches this Policy. Section 6.

A Community may impose stricter rules within itself. No Community may permit what this Policy prohibits.

• Context matters. The same words can be an attack, a quotation of an attack, a news report about an attack, or an academic analysis of one. We assess what Content does, not only what it contains.
• Documentation and criticism are protected. Reporting on prohibited conduct, condemning it, or analysing it is not itself prohibited. Presenting it approvingly, or in a way that promotes or facilitates it, is.
• Enforcement is proportionate, except for the categories in Section 3.1, where the response is immediate and maximal regardless of history or intent.
• Rules are not applied retrospectively. Content that complied when posted is not penalised because a rule later changed, though it may still be removed if it becomes unlawful.
• A person decides. Every enforcement action against an account is taken by a human reviewer. Boznaw operates no automated content-classification or machine-learning moderation system.

You must not host, display, upload, publish, transmit, store, update or share any of the following on Boznaw.

3.1 Categories with zero tolerance

• Child sexual abuse material, and any Content that sexualises a minor, in any form — real, drawn, written, or artificially generated. Prohibited under Section 67B of the IT Act, 2000 and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012.
• Non-consensual intimate imagery, including intimate images or video shared without the consent of the person depicted, images captured without their knowledge, and images altered or generated to depict them intimately.
• Sexual extortion, including threatening to publish intimate material to obtain money, further material, or anything else.
• Content that solicits, arranges or advertises the sexual exploitation or trafficking of any person.
• Credible threats of serious violence against an identifiable person or group.

3.2 Unlawful content

• Content that is unlawful under any law in force in India, or that encourages, assists or instructs another person to break such a law.
• Content that threatens the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order.
• Content that incites a cognisable offence, or that prevents the investigation of one.
• Content that promotes, glorifies, or provides support, funding, recruitment or instruction for a terrorist act or a violent extremist organisation.
• Content that promotes enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community, or that is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony.
• Content that is obscene within the meaning of Section 67 of the IT Act, 2000, or that depicts a sexually explicit act contrary to Section 67A.
• Content that is defamatory, or that is otherwise actionable in law.
• Content that relates to or encourages money laundering or gambling, or that is otherwise inconsistent with or contrary to the laws in force.

3.3 Content that harms people

• Harassment: a pattern of unwanted contact, insults, mockery, or sexual comment directed at a person; following a person across threads to continue an argument; repeated unwanted direct messages.
• Bullying, including organising or joining a coordinated pile-on against a person.
• Hateful conduct: attacking, demeaning or dehumanising a person or group on the basis of religion, caste, race, ethnicity, place of origin, language, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability or age, including through slurs or calls for exclusion.
• Encouragement of self-harm or suicide, and instructions for either. Discussion of one's own experience, and requests for help, are expressly permitted.
• Content that identifies a victim of a sexual offence, contrary to law.
• Glorification of violence already done to an identifiable person.

3.4 Privacy violations

• Publishing another person's private information without consent: home address, personal phone number, personal email address, government identifiers, financial account details, medical information, precise location or movements, or identity documents.
• Doxxing: compiling scattered information, including information that is individually public, into a profile that makes a person easy to locate, identify or target.
• Publishing photographs or recordings of a person in a private setting without their consent, contrary to Section 66E of the IT Act, 2000.
• Encouraging others to locate, contact or confront a person.

3.5 Deception and fraud

• Impersonation of another person, business, government body, news outlet or public official. Clearly labelled parody, commentary and fan accounts are permitted.
• Fraud and scams: fake sales, fake employment offers, advance-fee requests, fake charity appeals, investment and trading schemes, and any other attempt to obtain money or data by deception.
• Phishing: links, forms or messages that collect passwords, one-time codes or payment details under false pretences.
• Malware: files or links that install unwanted software, or that exploit a device or a browser.

3.6 Intellectual property

• Content that infringes a patent, trade mark, copyright or other proprietary right. Copyright complaints are handled under the Copyright Policy.
• Links to, or instructions for obtaining, pirated works.
• Use of another party's trade mark in a way likely to cause confusion about the source of an account or its Content.

3.7 Dangerous and regulated goods and activity

• Instructions for manufacturing weapons, explosives or other devices designed to cause injury.
• Sale or solicitation of firearms, ammunition, explosives, controlled substances, or other goods whose sale is regulated or prohibited.
• Content promoting challenges or activities likely to cause serious physical harm.

3.8 Misleading synthetic media

Synthetically generated Content that is unlawful, or that is used to deceive, defraud, impersonate or harass, is prohibited. Synthetic Content that is lawful is permitted, subject to the labelling requirement in Section 5.2.

The following are prohibited whatever the Content involved contains.

4.1 Platform manipulation

• Spam: repetitive posting, cross-posting the same link across Communities, referral and affiliate spam, and engagement bait.
• Vote manipulation: voting with additional accounts, soliciting votes on specific Content, and organising or participating in vote-trading.
• Fake engagement: buying, selling, trading or soliciting votes, followers, accounts or Communities.
• Coordinated inauthentic behaviour: acting with others to make a view appear more widely held than it is, to flood a Community, or to drive a person off the Services.

4.2 Evasion and abuse of the system

• Ban evasion: creating or using another account to circumvent a suspension, termination, feature restriction or block.
• Abuse of the reporting system: filing reports in bad faith, reporting Content solely because you disagree with it, and organising mass reporting of a person or Community.
• Circumventing enforcement by other means, including reposting removed Content, or editing Content after review to reintroduce what was removed.
• Editing to mislead: substantially altering a post or comment after it has been replied to, in order to misrepresent what was said or make replies appear absurd.

4.3 Technical abuse

• Automated access, scraping, crawling or harvesting of Content or User data, other than as robots.txt permits.
• Interfering with the Services, overloading them, or circumventing a rate limit, access control or security measure.
• Probing, scanning or testing the vulnerability of the Services without written permission, and accessing any account or area you are not authorised to access.

4.4 Moderator conduct

A Moderator must not use moderation tools to harass a member, to suppress Content solely because they disagree with it while a dispute involves them personally, or to conceal Content that this Policy requires to be removed. A Community whose report queue is abandoned may be reassigned or closed.

Restricted Content is permitted, but not everywhere and not unlabelled. The measures available to us are listed in Section 7.

5.1 Mature and sensitive Content

• Adult Content is permitted only in a Community marked as mature at creation, and must itself be marked mature so that other Users' content settings can act on it.
• Graphic violence, injury and death — including newsworthy material — is placed behind an interstitial rather than shown inline, and must be marked sensitive.
• Content depicting a real person's death or serious injury is removed at the request of an immediate family member, unless there is a compelling public-interest reason to retain it.

5.2 Synthetically generated information

The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026, in force from 20 February 2026, define synthetically generated information as audio-visual information that is artificially created, generated, modified or altered using a computer resource in a manner that appears real or authentic, and that depicts a person or event in a way likely to be perceived as indistinguishable from a real person or real event.

• You must declare, when you post, whether audio-visual Content is synthetically generated.
• Lawful synthetic Content is labelled prominently, so that a person viewing or listening to it can tell what it is.
• The label must not be removed, suppressed or altered, and Content edited to strip a label will be removed.
• Failing to declare synthetic Content, or misdeclaring it, is a breach of this Policy and may be treated as deception under Section 3.5.

5.3 Content that may be limited rather than removed

Where Content is harmful but not clearly prohibited, or where its status is genuinely arguable, we may reduce its distribution instead of removing it. This applies in particular to unverified claims during an unfolding public-safety event, borderline engagement bait, and Content subject to an unresolved dispute between Users.

Separately from this Policy, we act where the law requires it.

We assess every request against the authority it cites and refuse one that is not lawfully made. Where the law permits us to tell the affected User about a request, we do. Content removed under a legal direction is recorded as such, so that it is not mistaken for a rule enforcement against the account.

How these are chosen, and how to challenge one, is set out in the Content Moderation Policy and the Grievance Redressal Policy.

Use the Report control in the menu of any post, comment or profile. For anything urgent — an immediate risk to someone's safety, intimate imagery published without consent, or Content involving a minor — also write to the Grievance Officer so that it is handled on the urgent track described in Grievance Redressal.

We update this Policy as the Services change and as the law changes. Each version carries a version number and dates, and the change history is published below. Where an amendment expands what is prohibited, it applies from its effective date and is not applied retrospectively to Content already posted, unless that Content is unlawful.

As Rule 3(1) of the IT Rules, 2021 requires, we remind Users of these rules and of the consequences of breaching them at least once every three months.