We don't censor you. We don't watch you. Here's exactly what that means.

What we promise

• We can't browse your groups.We support free speech, and we also respect your privacy, so Frendivo is built so our staff can't look through what's posted in a group. When someone reports a post or image to us, we see that one item and nothing else. No software scans your posts for keywords, opinions, or “sentiment,” either.
• We don't remove posts for their viewpoint.Religious, political, and personal views stay up, however unpopular, offensive, or out of step they are.
• We don't punish you quietly, either.No shadow bans, no demoted posts, no warning labels, no “fact-checks,” no limits on reach. Your group sees every post, newest first.
• We don't give in to complaint campaigns.People outside a group who dislike what it believes can't get it removed by complaining to us.
• We tell you when we act.If we ever remove something, the person who posted it and the group's organizers are told which post it was and which item on the list below applied, unless the law forbids it.
• That includes criticism of us.Especially criticism of us.

No vague “community guidelines”

Big platforms ban people for “violating community guidelines” and often never say which guideline, or even which post. Rules written that loosely can be stretched to cover whatever is unpopular that week, and a person who's never told what they did can't defend themselves. We don't have guidelines like that. Our entire policy is the short list further down this page, in plain words. Been banned somewhere else? Read this.

Even when it's about us

Want to start a group called “We Hate Frendivo and Hope It Dies a Horrible Death”? Go ahead. Invite everyone you know. Post every complaint you have about us, every day. It stays up, it gets the same features as every other group, and we won't touch it.

A free-speech policy that protects only the speech its owners like isn't a free-speech policy. This is how you can tell ours is real.

Who moderates, then?

The people who run each group. Every group has an owner, who can add co-owners and moderators. Together they can:

• write the group's own rules, which new members accept when they join;
• remove posts, and pin or lock threads;
• approve new members, and remove or ban anyone.

A church can keep its group on topic. A family can ban politics at the dinner table. That's their choice, not ours. And if you don't like how a group is run, start your own. It takes a minute, and nobody can stop you.

The short list: what we will remove

Free speech has legal limits, and so do we. Exactly those, and no more:

1. Child sexual abuse material. Removed immediately, the uploader's account closed, and the material reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, as federal law requires. This is the one place we use automatic checking; see below.
2. True threats. Serious statements of intent to commit violence against a specific person. Hoping something terrible happens to us isn't a threat; saying you're going to do it is.
3. Content a court orders removed. Valid court orders and other lawful legal process.
4. Copyright infringement, after a valid DMCA notice. The person who posted it can file a counter-notice.
5. Fraud and illegal sales. Scams aimed at members, and the sale of illegal goods or services.
6. Spam and malware. Mass-posted ads, junk and bots, and links to malware. Spam isn't an opinion; it's noise that drowns out your group's real conversation.

That's the whole list. Nothing is removed for being rude, offensive, controversial, “misinformation,” or “hateful” in someone's opinion. If it's legal speech and not spam, it stays.

The one automatic check

We have zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material, so every image uploaded to Frendivo is checked the moment it arrives. The check works on a fingerprint: a short code calculated from the image, compared against databases of fingerprints of already-identified abuse images maintained by child-protection organizations.

A fingerprint match can only answer one question: is this a known abuse image? It can't see what's in your photo, describe it, or judge it. Nobody looks at your pictures, and no AI decides whether a photo is acceptable, so ordinary family photos are never flagged for what they show. Your posts' text is never checked at all.

When an image matches, it is blocked before anyone can see it, the uploader's account is closed, and a report goes to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

The honest part

Like any website, the people who run Frendivo's servers technically could look at what's stored on them. We won't pretend otherwise, and we don't advertise end-to-end encryption we don't have. What we've done is build our own tools so they can't be used to browse: Frendivo's admin console has no way to open a group's posts or photos. The only content it can show us is the single post or image someone has reported. The only other way we would ever look at content is if a court orders it, through a search warrant (see our law-enforcement guidelines). The image fingerprint check above is the only automatic check we run.

Why we can promise this

• U.S. law allows it. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects websites from liability for what their users post, whether or not the site moderates. Choosing not to police opinions is legal, and it's our right.
• We're a U.S. service. Some countries require platforms to remove legal speech. Frendivo serves the United States, under U.S. law.
• We don't have advertisers. Groups pay for Frendivo, so there is no advertiser for us to keep comfortable.