Community Guidelines

1. Where these rules apply

These guidelines apply to everything you do on Mistify: in Spaces (their group chats, social feeds and Popularity Boards), Individual Posts on the map and in the feeds, captions, comments, likes and dislikes, direct messages, your username, name, bio and profile photo, and reports you make. The same rules apply in the same way to Space group chats, Space posts, Individual Posts, comments and direct messages.

They are part of our Terms of Service. By using Mistify you agree to follow them. They apply wherever you are, and wherever you pin an Individual Post.

2. Mistify is for adults only

You must be 18 or over to use Mistify, and you must give your real date of birth. Lying about your age, or helping someone under 18 get onto Mistify, breaks these rules and gets the account removed.

If you think someone on Mistify is under 18, report their profile. If you think a child is in danger, call 999.

3. Spaces

Spaces are Mistify community spaces for real places, like university campuses. They are not run, endorsed or sponsored by the institution or place they are named after. Everything in them is posted by Mistify users.

• You join a space once, from within its join radius (3 miles for campuses), and you are asked to agree to these guidelines each time you join.
• Spaces are public. Anyone signed in to Mistify can read a space’s chat and see its Space posts, its members and its Popularity Board. A private account doesn’t hide anything you post or say in a Space.
• Popularity Board. Posting in a Space’s feed puts you on its Popularity Board. Don’t game it: no fake or bought engagement, coordinated liking, or extra accounts to boost rankings. We may remove rankings, content or accounts that do. If you don’t want to be ranked, don’t post in that Space’s feed, or delete your posts there.
• Don’t claim to speak for the institution, and don’t use its name, crest or logo to mislead people.
• There are no space moderators. The same rules apply in every space, and our team makes every decision.

4. Illegal content — zero tolerance

Never post, send, share or ask for anything illegal. We remove it as soon as we know about it, we act against the accounts involved, up to a permanent ban, and where the law requires it or someone is at risk we pass information to the police or the National Crime Agency. This includes:

• Child sexual abuse and exploitation of any kind: sexual images of anyone under 18 (including drawn, AI-generated or “fake” images), grooming, sexual messages to or about children, or arranging to meet a child. We report child sexual abuse material to the National Crime Agency, as UK law requires.
• Terrorism: supporting, promoting or recruiting for a proscribed organisation, sharing terrorist material, or encouraging terrorist acts.
• Threats: threats to kill, threats of serious harm, and messages meant to make someone fear violence.
• Blackmail: demanding money, images or anything else from someone by threatening to share something about them or to harm them.
• Harassment and stalking, including using Mistify to track, follow, watch or turn up on someone, and controlling or coercive behaviour towards a partner or family member.
• Hate crime: stirring up hatred on grounds of race, religion or sexual orientation, and abuse aggravated by race or religion.
• Intimate image abuse: sharing, or threatening to share, intimate or sexual images of someone without their consent; creating or asking for sexual “deepfakes” of a real person; and cyberflashing (sending sexual images to someone who has not agreed to receive them).
• Encouraging or helping suicide or serious self-harm.
• Selling or supplying drugs, psychoactive substances, firearms, knives or other weapons.
• Fraud and scams, including fake offers, investment or crypto scams, unauthorised financial promotions, and money laundering.
• Human trafficking, sexual exploitation, or controlling or inciting prostitution for gain.
• Helping anyone to enter or stay in the UK illegally.
• Extreme pornography.
• Sending a message you know is false to cause someone serious harm; deliberately sending flashing images to someone with epilepsy.
• Foreign interference and animal cruelty.
• Anything else that is a criminal offence where you or the person affected is, including infringing someone else’s copyright or trade mark.

5. Not allowed on Mistify, even where it is legal

Some content is legal but still has no place on Mistify. We remove it and may restrict or ban the account.

• Nudity and sexual content. Mistify has no explicit content. No sexual images or videos, no sexual services, no soliciting sex, including in posts labelled “Looking for a date”.
• Content promoting suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, including instructions, “challenges”, or content presenting them as positive. Talking about your own experience or asking for help is allowed. If that is you, please contact Samaritans on 116 123.
• Graphic violence and gore, and content that glorifies violence or cruelty.
• Bullying, harassment and abuse: insulting, humiliating, threatening or piling on someone; unwanted contact after being asked to stop.
• Hateful content that attacks or dehumanises people because of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity.
• Racism of any kind, including racist slurs, insults, jokes and stereotypes.
• Other people’s private information: someone’s home address, phone number or live whereabouts without their consent (“doxxing”), and photos or videos of people in private situations without their consent.
• Impersonation and fake accounts: pretending to be another person, an organisation, an institution or Mistify; running more than one account to get around a block or a ban.
• Spam and manipulation: repetitive or automated posting, fake engagement, misleading links, and unsolicited advertising.
• Restricted goods: selling or promoting tobacco, vapes, alcohol, prescription medicines, gambling, or anything else whose sale is restricted.
• Dangerous acts and harmful misinformation that could lead to real-world injury.

6. Location: share your world, not other people’s

Every Individual Post is pinned to a place, and other people can see where you pinned it. That makes a few rules especially important:

• Think before you pin. Your Individual Post appears at the exact point you choose and, unless it is a disappearing post, stays on your profile’s footprint map until you delete it. Don’t pin Individual Posts at your home, or anywhere you don’t want strangers to associate with you.
• Never reveal where someone else is, lives, works or studies without their permission, and never post a pin that shows where someone can be found against their wishes.
• Never use Mistify to find, track or turn up on someone who has not clearly agreed to meet you.
• Pin honestly. Don’t use pins to mislead people about where something is happening.

7. Meeting people in real life

Mistify helps people nearby connect, and some of those connections turn into plans: a coffee, an event, a party, a date. We don’t check who anyone is, beyond their self-declared age. When you meet someone from Mistify:

• meet in a busy public place, and tell a friend where you’re going;
• arrange your own travel, and don’t share your home address early;
• never send money to someone you’ve only met online;
• leave if you feel unsafe, and call 999 in an emergency.

If you organise an event or party through Mistify, you are responsible for it being lawful and safe, and for anything you promise the people who come.

8. Direct messages

If your “Who can message you” setting is Everyone (the default), anyone on Mistify can start a conversation with you. With Followers only, only people who follow you can start one. With No one, nobody can message you, including in conversations you already have, and you can’t message anyone either. You can change it at any time in Settings.

• Don’t send sexual content, threats, abuse or spam, and don’t keep messaging someone who has asked you to stop or hasn’t replied.
• Don’t pressure anyone for money, personal details, photos or a meeting.
• If someone makes you uncomfortable, block them. Blocking stops them messaging you. Report them too if they broke these rules.

9. How to report

Reporting is anonymous. The person you report is not told who reported them.

If someone is in immediate danger, call 999 first. You can also report child sexual exploitation to CEOP (ceop.police.uk), and child sexual abuse images to the Internet Watch Foundation (iwf.org.uk).

Report honestly. Reports are how we keep Mistify safe, so reporting something just because you disagree with it, or to get someone into trouble, counts against you (see below).

10. What happens when the rules are broken

Steps that happen automatically

A few steps happen automatically when several different people report the same thing. Each one is temporary and only holds things until our team reviews them:

• 5 reports on a space chat message or Space post: the message or post is hidden while we review it, and its author is paused from chatting and posting in that space (only that space) until we decide.
• 8 reports on any post: the post is blurred as sensitive, and people have to choose to see it.

Decisions our team makes

A person on our team reviews reports and decides. We can act on a single report. Depending on what happened, we may:

• leave the content up, if it doesn’t break the rules;
• record a false-report violation against people who reported it in bad faith;
• remove it, and record a violation against its author, with a warning;
• ban the author from a space, which is permanent for that space;
• suspend or permanently ban the account from Mistify;
• for serious illegal content, remove it and ban the account at once, and report it to the police or the National Crime Agency.

If something reported to us turns out to be fine, we leave it up. An honest report we disagree with costs nothing. But if we find a report was false, for example made to harass someone or to get content removed that clearly breaks no rule, each person who made it gets a false-report violation. We warn you about these on every fifth one, and a pattern of false reports can lead to a ban.

We’ll normally tell you when we take action on your content or account, unless the law or someone’s safety stops us. No number of violations bans an account automatically. A person on our team makes that decision, looking at the whole record.

Our moderation decisions, including bans, are final within Mistify. There is no appeals process. If you believe we made a mistake, you can email support@mistify.app and we’ll look at it when we can.

Creating a new account to get around a ban is not allowed, and we will remove it.