Content Policy

Where this applies

Everything you put on the platform: the stream itself, your screen and everything on it, your camera, your audio, recordings, clips, thumbnails, your channel name, description and links, and what you type in chat.

It applies to you as the channel owner whether you said it or a guest, a caller or somebody in your chat said it. The room is yours to run.

Never allowed

These end a stream and, depending on what happened, the channel. There is no adults-only marking that makes any of them acceptable.

• Sexual content involving children, in any form, real or generated. This is reported to the authorities and the account is closed permanently and immediately.
• Nudity and sexual content. No nudity on stream, no sexual acts, no sexually explicit material on your screen or your camera, and no channel built around sexual content.
• Hate. Attacking, demeaning or excluding people because of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age or serious illness. This includes hate symbols, slurs used as slurs, and the jokes that exist to carry them.
• Harassment. Targeting a person with abuse, following them across the platform to keep at it, sexual harassment, or organising others to pile onto someone.
• Threats and violence. Threatening a person, encouraging violence, or glorifying a violent attack or the person who carried one out.
• Publishing private information about somebody without their consent: their address, workplace, phone number, private accounts, or anything else that puts a real person at a real door.
• Content encouraging suicide, self harm or disordered eating.
• Real world violence and graphic gore as the point of the stream: footage of people being hurt or killed, animal cruelty, or the aftermath of either.
• Illegal activity: streaming a crime in progress, selling stolen data or credentials, unauthorised intrusion into systems you do not own or have written permission to test, or trafficking in anything the law forbids.
• Harm to viewers: malware, credential harvesting, cryptocurrency and giveaway scams, phishing pages, or a payload dressed up as a demo.
• Impersonating a person or a company, including making a channel look like somebody else's.
• Faking engagement: bought viewers, bot chat, bot follows, or anything that inflates what is really happening.
• Other people's work without their permission, including their code, their video, their music and their designs. The copyright process is set out in the DMCA policy.

Allowed

The other direction matters as much, because a policy that leaves it unsaid ends up moderated by whoever is in the worst mood that day.

• Swearing. Programming involves a lot of it. Profanity is not a breach of anything here, in your audio, on your screen or in your chat.
• Frustration, strong opinions and arguing about tools, languages, frameworks and models. Being scathing about a piece of software is not harassment of the people who wrote it, and criticising a company is not hate.
• Failing in public: broken builds, production incidents, code that will not compile at two in the morning, and the reaction to all of it.
• Games, and violence within a game the way its own rating carries it.
• Security and hacking as a subject: writing exploits, capture the flag, reverse engineering, penetration testing you are authorised to do, and teaching any of it. What is not allowed is attacking systems you have no permission to touch, live, on stream.
• Difficult and political subjects, discussed as subjects. The line is who you are talking about and how, not what.
• Alcohol on stream, if you are of legal drinking age where you are. Being visibly incapable on stream is not it.

What has to be marked for adults

Channel settings asks one question: is this channel suitable for under 18s? Answer no and the channel is limited to viewers 18 and over. Every stream and recording on it inherits the answer.

Mark the channel when any of these is a regular part of it:

• Sustained strong language, beyond the swearing that comes with the work.
• Games rated 18, PEGI 18 or ESRB Mature, and games with intense violence.
• Adult themes discussed frankly: drugs, sex as a subject, self harm as a subject, serious crime.
• Anything else you would not want a thirteen year old to walk into.

Marking a channel for adults raises the age of who can watch. It does not widen what you may stream. Everything in the list above stays banned at every setting, and if what you want to do needs a rating we do not have, this is not the platform for it.

Getting this wrong deliberately, so that a channel for adults reaches viewers who are not, is treated as seriously as the content itself.

How we know anyone's age

We ask for a date of birth when you create an account. You have to be at least 16 to hold one. A channel marked for adults reads that date, and opens for accounts showing 18 or over. It is stored on the account and cannot be changed afterwards, so the question is answered once rather than asked at every player.

Be clear about what that proves: it is a date somebody typed, not a date anybody verified. It keeps an adults-only channel away from viewers who told us honestly they are under 18. It does not stop somebody who lies, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

A signed-out visitor is asked to confirm before an adults-only player loads. That is a confirmation and nothing more: there is no account to check it against and we cannot tell who answered.

Verified age assurance, where a third party checks a document or a face, is what the law requires for pornography and other content it treats as most harmful to children. We do not carry that content and never will, which is why we do not put every viewer through an identity check to watch somebody write code. If the platform ever carries content that needs it, we will put verification in first and say so here.

If you believe somebody under 16 is using FATCOMMA, or that a child is appearing on a stream in a way that is not right, report it and we will act on it as a priority.

Your chat is yours to run

Chat on your channel is part of your channel. You are expected to moderate it: remove what breaks this policy, and remove the person if they keep going.

A channel that leaves hate or harassment standing in its chat is running that content, whoever typed it.

How we enforce it

Reports and our own monitoring both reach the same place. A person makes the decision, and what happened is recorded against the channel.

What we can do, roughly in order:

• Remove a recording, a clip or a chat message.
• End a live stream.
• Mark a channel for adults ourselves, when it plainly should be.
• Make a channel private, so only its owner can open it.
• Suspend the account for a set period.
• Close the account permanently.

Context matters and we take it into account: what was said, whether it was aimed at somebody, whether it keeps happening, and what the channel did about it. What does not earn context is anything in the never allowed list, which is acted on the first time.

When we act, we tell you what happened and why, in words rather than a policy code.

Reporting a channel

There is a Report control on every channel page, under the stream. Pick the closest reason, add anything that helps us find it, and send it. You need an account, and it is one report per channel per day so that reporting cannot itself be used as harassment.

If a stream shows somebody in immediate danger, call the emergency services in that country first. Then report it here.

Reports are not public and the channel is not told who reported it.

If we get it wrong

Every suspension can be appealed, from the page you land on when you next sign in. A person reads it, not the person who made the original decision where we can avoid it.

If we made a mistake we undo it and say so. A restored channel keeps its followers, its recordings and its balance.

Changes

This policy will change as the platform does. Anything that narrows what you are allowed to do is announced before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page is always the date of the current version.

Contact

Use the contact form at fatcomma.tv/contact and we will reply to the address you give. Anything that has to be served formally goes to Web Hero Limited, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom.