See Transparency Report effective before 2023-03-23.

Effective Date: 2023-03-23

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 2022. 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 2022 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 2022 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.

Content Moderation

In 2022 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 allowed us to check queues of new content much faster.

• Moderation checked 32.18% more profile reports compared to 2021.
• In 2022 we received and moderated 874,060 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 2022 our support team received about 545 requests from banned users, and about 235 asked to unban their profiles.
• This diagram shows the percentage of users banned by the main types of reasons we define on ASKfm in 2022* 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 2022:
• In 2022, 8,273,540 text reports were processed. This amount includes Photopoll reports (22,723 items), new reports coming from new chats (691,315 chats reports in 2022).
• We cleared 753,307 text items. 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 420,000 times in text content in 2022, helping us define malicious content without human mistakes. Our pattern system includes words and word expressions in different languages, blacklisted websites.
• In 2022 we enriched our pattern list with 23,000 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 2022:
• In 2022 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 264,000 times in 2022. See diagram on this statement:
• 14,071,553 media files were checked in 2022, and 252,240 pictures/videos were discarded in 2022.

External Cooperation

In 2022 we received 91 requests to take actions against malicious content on the platform from official organisations or representatives. All requests were processed, and actions were taken according to our platform policy. We are committed to escalating issues that threaten the safety of our users that may require Law Enforcement intervention. From our side, we reported 35 cases with the top priority threats to Law Enforcement:

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.