What happens when you report someone

Where you report

Report and block sits on the other person's profile and inside the conversation. We did not make it loud, but it is always somewhere you can find.

You choose a reason and you can write down what happened. A report goes through even if you write nothing.

Block is on by default when you report. If something was bad enough to report, you probably don't want that person on your screen any more. You can switch it off.

We hold ourselves to a clock

• A first response within 4 hours
• The review closed within 24 hours

Anything we miss shows up as overdue on our own operations screen. We built it that way so we can't quietly bury it.

Some reports don't wait for a reviewer

Three reasons stop an account before a person looks at it.

• Appears to be underage
• Explicitly tied money to sexual acts
• Asked for a payment or transfer outside the service

The account is suspended at once and the session is cut. The review happens afterwards. Where a minor may be involved, there is no exception.

Not just anyone can set this off

An immediate suspension is a heavy action, so someone with no connection to you can't point at you and trigger it. It fires only where the two of you actually exchanged messages or had a meeting, or where several different people reported the same person.

Reports that don't meet that bar are not thrown away. They go into the review queue and a person reads them.

And every immediate suspension is read by a person afterwards. An action that started automatically does not end automatically. If the call was wrong, the suspension is lifted.

We read the conversation before deciding

This part has to be said plainly.

When a report comes in, a reviewer reads the messages between the two of you. They look at the reported photo. Choosing between suspend and leave alone without reading is guessing, not deciding.

The reading is limited to the reported conversation. Who opened what and when is logged, and that log cannot be erased. Reviewers are watched too.

We don't tell you the outcome

We tell you the report was received and we tell you the deadline. We don't tell you what was decided.

We know that reads as unhelpful. Here is why.

If you learn the outcome, you learn which reason gets someone suspended. Once that is known, reporting stops being reporting and becomes a tool — a way to remove someone you were fighting with. The person hurt by that is the one who genuinely needed reporting to work.

So the outcome stays closed. We published the deadlines instead.

Reporting can't be used as a weapon

There is a cap on how many reports one person can file in a day. It exists to stop reporting from becoming a weapon, and it is not tight enough to block someone who is actually in trouble.

Blocking is invisible to the other person

Block someone and you disappear from each other, and any meeting you had scheduled is cancelled. The other person is not told. A screen that says you have been blocked is itself an invitation to retaliate.

You can undo a block at any time. My account has a blocked list showing names and dates only — we did not build a screen that lines up the faces of people you blocked.

Messages are not deleted

If you block someone, or they close their account, the messages themselves stay.

Without knowing what a block was about, an automated call that turned out wrong cannot be reversed. And if a reported person could erase the record by closing their account and then come back, the action would mean nothing.

Anything urgent comes before us

If you are in danger, call 112 first. All we can do is preserve what happened inside the service and act on it. A person's safety is outside what we can handle.