Transparency Report
See Transparency Report effective before 2022-03-23.
Effective Date: 2022-03-23
Introduction
ASKfm is a territory for people, where you can find communication and attention, new friends, and express your thoughts.
We are determined to maintain a safe space where everyone feels protected by our Terms of Use, regardless of the country where they live, the religion they profess, gender, or beliefs that they share on the site.
We are committed to regularly updating our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use to avoid misunderstandings with the audience when some content remains visible or is removed from the platform.
In this report we share ASKfm results of offending content removal and law enforcement requests processed in 2021. We will continue sharing such reports to make our community more transparent and open to our audience.
Average monthly active recipients
In keeping with Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market for Digital Services and amending Directive 2000/31/EC (the “DSA”) this is information on the average monthly active recipients of ASKfm in the Union, calculated as an average over the period of the past six months as at 17.02.2023: 169,227.
New Safety Accomplishments
Our main concept is delivering attention to our audience within safe and mutually respectful communication. We defined our Community Guidelines and Terms of Use and updated them in October 2021 to keep our concept. With the advent of new content units, such as Answer Chats and Private Chats, we added security features with focus on privacy of our customers.
In 2021 we expanded our cooperation with 3rd parties, especially counter-terrorism organizations. Based on this collaboration and new resources, we have updated our training materials for the moderation team, which has impacted the amount of cleared posts and banned profiles due to display of extremism. The ASKfm team is dedicated to making user experience as positive as possible.
Our Safety tools page describes all possible options for user safety. Moreover, this section is helping out parents concerned with protection of their children on social networks.
Besides the foregoing updates in 2021, we have expanded the potential of the team, rechecked additional 13 million old photos, added a new group of black-list web links to ban pirate websites. And at the end of 2021, we started rechecking old text questions created by our audience. Soon there will be a launch of new functionality, where this previously rechecked content will be displayed. Stay tuned!
Content Moderation
In 2021 our moderation team showed great results in multitasking performance. This became possible after implementing several technical improvements in the moderation process. We made the moderation interface more user-friendly for our team. This enabled us to check queues of new content simultaneously with clearance of old historical content.
- Moderation checked 78.52% more profile reports compared to 2020.
- In 2021 we received and moderated 661,237 profile reports. Profile reports usually take more time to moderate than other types of content, because the moderator checks the date of the profile registration, age posted on the user’s profile, number and types of previous violations made by the user. Since new types of chats were developed on the platform, we reviewed more text content and violations in user-generated content. Usually, we send a warning if a user disregards the Community rules. But sometimes, the user continues posting malicious photos or text despite having received several warnings. In such cases, we ban the whole profile.
- Every user can contact our support team via the contact form or email directly for explanations why their profile was banned. In 2021 our support team received about 500 requests from banned users, and about 200 asked to unban their profiles.
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This diagram shows the percentage of users banned by the main types of reasons we define on ASKfm in 2021* and the percentage of the banned users by country to our daily active users’ number:
*The "Other" reason includes all cases that cannot be attributed to other types.
- This is top banned reasons by country diagram 2021:
- In 2021, 6,027,923 text reports were processed. This amount includes Photopoll reports (11,011 items), new reports coming from new chats (600,696 chats reports in 2021). Text reports more than doubled because our customers now are not limited only by Q&A, now they are free to chat and send as many chat strings as they want.
- We cleared 595,672 text items, which is 11% less than in 2020. This is a positive tendency we’ve noted from past years. Sometimes, a user sends a report, moderation checks the chat, and if everything is within our ToU, the user continues chatting.
- Our pre-moderation tools hit 387,507 times in text content in 2021, helping us define malicious content without human mistakes. Our pattern system includes words and word expressions in different languages, blacklisted websites.
- In 2021 we enriched our pattern list with 17,177 patterns. Most of the new patterns are added when we detect deleterious website links on the platform, like online casinos, dating websites, webpages with adult content, which are not allowed by our policy. Clickbait and massive dispatch of the same questions or answers are also under tight scrutiny by moderators.
- This is a diagram of patterns created during 2021:
- In 2021 we added a group of new patterns to ban well-known pirate content web sources since protecting the rights of copyright holders is essential for us.
- Also, in case we face any global crisis like social or political conflict, we analyse risks for our audience and add potentially risky hashtags or word expressions in the pattern list to monitor our audience’s mood and tendencies. It helps us prevent the spread of dangerous, racist, intolerant content.
- We use hash lists to define suspicious media content. Hash lists hit 368,611 times in 2021, this is 61.94% more than in 2020. See diagram on this statement:
- 43,799,425 media files were checked in 2021, and 409,200 pictures/videos were discarded in 2021.
External Cooperation
In 2021 we received 17 requests to take measures regarding malicious content or at the request of the copyright holder. All requests were processed, and actions were taken according to our platform policy. And vice versa, we reported 58 cases with the top priority threats to Law Enforcement:
Type of threat | Number of cases reported |
---|---|
CSAM | 35 |
Extremism | 3 |
Self-harm | 11 |
Grooming | 2 |
Violence | 5 |
Other | 2 |
We consciously understand that the world is changing, various crisis events are taking place, and new risks appear for people, especially minors. Therefore, we stay sharp, always ready to apply a new approach in order to become the best for our audience under modern trends.
ASKfm is open for cooperation with official organisations against threats to others or self, threats of violence, illegal activity, and content harmful to minors on the Web.
Our email for content issues is abuse@ask.fm.