Content policy.

WeSearch's comment layer is anonymous and threaded. The vast majority of comments need no moderation. A small fraction cross lines that warrant hiding. This page is the rules — what gets hidden, what's allowed, and how to appeal.

The operating principle

Protect targets, don't police taste. We hide content that would harm specific people (threats, doxxing of non-public figures, sexual content involving minors) and content that would harm the platform (commercial spam at scale, repeated incitement). We don't hide content for being unpopular, wrong, partisan, sarcastic, or rude in ordinary disagreement.

Comments that get hidden

1. Threats of violence or harm against specific individuals, groups, or institutions.
2. Doxxing of non-public figures. Posting the home address, phone number, workplace, or family information of someone who is not a public figure for the express purpose of facilitating contact, harassment, or harm. Public figures' publicly-known information (e.g. a senator's office address) is allowed because it's already public and contextually relevant.
3. Sexual content involving minors. Zero tolerance, immediate ban.
4. Commercial spam at scale. Repeated affiliate-link drops, copy-pasted promotional text, link farms.
5. Incitement to imminent lawless action. Content that would meet the legal incitement standard (specific, immediate, likely).
6. Content that violates intellectual-property law in ways that expose WeSearch by association. E.g., copy-pasting full copyrighted articles into comments.
7. Impersonation of real public figures in a way that's not clearly satire and could mislead readers into thinking the comment is from the named person.
8. Coordinated inauthentic behavior. Detected pattern of multiple keys posting the same talking points to manipulate visible discourse.

Comments that are allowed (even if you don't like them)

• Strong opinions, including ones outside the editorial mainstream.
• Sarcasm, mockery, dunking on a public figure's published statements.
• Disagreement with WeSearch's editorial choices.
• Disagreement with the publisher of the story being discussed.
• Expletive-laden frustration, within reason.
• GIFs, including ones we wouldn't choose ourselves.
• Conspiracy-adjacent skepticism of mainstream coverage (we don't have a "settled science" gate on the comment layer for non-health/climate issues).
• Wrong takes. Being wrong isn't a moderation issue; replies are how that gets handled.

Health and climate exception

For health and climate stories specifically, we apply a narrower rule. Anti-vaccine misinformation in health threads and climate-denial talking points in climate threads can be hidden under our editorial standards as factually unsupported public-health and public-science content. This is editorial; we acknowledge it's contested. Read the reasoning.

What happens when a comment is hidden

1. The comment is removed from the rendered thread.
2. The original poster gets a notice in their inbox explaining the rule and a link to appeal.
3. The hidden comment remains in the database for 30 days for appeal purposes, then is deleted.
4. If the same key receives multiple hides for similar reasons, the key is rate-limited or banned.

Appeals

If your comment was hidden and you think the call was wrong, email /support with the comment id from your inbox notice. We reread the comment in context and respond within a working day. If we got it wrong, the comment is restored and the strike removed. Appeals are not punitive; using them in good faith doesn't count against you.

Rate limits

Each key can post a finite number of comments per hour and per day. Limits are generous for normal use and tighten if a key starts behaving like a flood actor.

Bans

• Soft ban (24h–7d): rate limit reduced to near-zero. Comment-posting blocked; reading still works.
• Hard ban (permanent): the key can no longer post anywhere on the platform. Existing comments remain visible.
• IP-tier ban (rare): the IP is throttled at the firewall layer for 24h. Used for active flood/spam attacks, not for individual comment moderation.

Banned users can email /support for an appeal. Bans for severe violations (CSAM, threats) are not appealable.

Why our content policy is short

Long content policies tend to produce two failure modes: enforcement that's inconsistent (because no human can hold all the rules in their head), and enforcement that's overly broad (because every gray-area decision can be justified under some clause). A short policy with clear principles produces fewer failures of both kinds. We accept some loss of edge-case clarity in exchange for the gain.

The principle "protect targets, don't police taste" is the operating heuristic. When in doubt about a borderline call, that line decides: would hiding the comment protect a specific person from harm, or is it just hiding speech we'd prefer not to see? Only the first warrants moderation.

Comparison with major platforms

Bottom line: who this protects and from what

• Protects readers from threats, doxxing, CSAM, spam, and impersonation.
• Protects WeSearch from legal liability where speech crosses incitement or copyright lines.
• Does not protect anyone from disagreement, criticism, mockery, or being told they're wrong.
• Does not protect public figures from criticism of their public actions.
• Does not moderate based on viewpoint, ideology, or what the platform "prefers."

Frequently asked

Reporting a comment

Use the flag icon on the comment row. We review flags within one working day. If you flag in bad faith repeatedly, the flag privilege is revoked for that key.