Safety standards
& content policy

01What can actually be misused on Dit

Being precise here matters, because it determines what we can and cannot moderate. Dit transmits no text, no images, no voice and no video between users. A dit carries only the fact that it was sent; a dah only the fact that it was acknowledged. There is no message content for anyone to write, and therefore none for us to read or remove.

That leaves exactly two surfaces where harm can happen, and both are covered by this policy:

• Your profile — username, display name, bio and profile picture. These are the only free-form fields in Dit, and the only place where words or images exist at all.
• The act of signalling itself — who you send dits to, how often, and whether you keep sending them after someone has made clear they don’t want them. A signal with no content can still be a way of saying “I know where you are and I won’t stop”.

We treat abuse through the signal system exactly as seriously as abuse through words. The mechanism doesn’t change the harm.

02Zero tolerance

The following are prohibited on Dit without exception:

• Harassment and bullying — repeated unwanted signals, intimidation, stalking, or any pattern of behaviour meant to distress, humiliate or wear someone down.
• Hate speech — anything in your profile that promotes violence, discrimination or hostility on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, or any other protected characteristic.
• Threats and violence — direct or implied threats of physical harm against anyone, and content that encourages self-harm or suicide.
• Impersonation — presenting yourself as another real person, organisation or entity in a way intended to deceive or to cause harm.
• Abuse of the signal system — mass or automated signalling, flooding, or using dits to circumvent a block or to pressure someone who has stopped responding.
• Sexually explicit profile content — explicit usernames, bios or profile pictures. Dit has no age-gated space; there is nowhere for this content to belong.

03Child safety

Our commitments

• Prohibition of CSAM — any profile content, or any use of Dit, that involves, depicts, promotes or facilitates child sexual abuse material is forbidden.
• Prohibition of CSAE — grooming, solicitation, sextortion, trafficking and any other predatory conduct toward a minor is forbidden, whether or not any image is involved. Dit’s signal system must never be used to establish or maintain contact with a child for these purposes.
• Immediate termination — an account credibly implicated in CSAE is suspended the moment we become aware of it, before any further review, and then permanently deleted.
• Referral to authorities — we report credible CSAE to the competent authorities and cooperate fully with their investigations.
• Evidence preservation — when we identify or receive a credible CSAE report, we preserve the relevant account data and report record for law enforcement, and we hold it outside the normal deletion schedule for as long as the law requires. This is the one case where deleting your account does not erase the record.

Where to report child abuse directly

You do not need to go through us, and in an emergency you should not.

• If a child is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number — 112 across the European Union, 911 in the United States.
• In Italy — the Polizia Postale, through commissariatodips.it, which operates the national centre for combating online child abuse (CNCPO).
• In the United States — the NCMEC CyberTipline.
• Elsewhere in Europe — your national INHOPE hotline, listed at inhope.org.

Minimum age

You must be at least 16 to use Dit in the European Union and the United Kingdom, unless the Member State where you live has set a lower age of digital consent — it is 14 in Italy, and Member States may set it anywhere between 13 and 16 under Article 8 GDPR. Everywhere else the minimum age is 13.

Dit does not ask for a date of birth, so we cannot verify age proactively. If we learn that an account belongs to someone below the applicable age, we terminate it and delete the associated data. Report suspected underage accounts to the address at the bottom of this page.

04Prohibited behaviour at a glance

05Report someone

Reporting is built into the app. You never have to leave it, and you never have to contact us first.

1. 1Open the person’s profileFrom Contacts, tap the person. Or from a dit you received, open the sender.
2. 2Tap “report user”On a contact’s profile it sits alongside “block user”. From a dit, it’s in the actions menu for that person.
3. 3Choose a reasonOffensive content · Spam · Harassment or bullying · Minor exploitation or inappropriate content.
4. 4Add details and submitAn optional free-text field takes up to 500 characters — use it, context makes a report far easier to act on. Then tap submit report.

What a report contains, and who sees it

A report records the account you reported, the reason you chose, your optional note, the time, and the fact that the report came from you. Your identity is stored so that we can come back to you and so that we can detect abuse of the reporting system itself.

Reporting without the app

If you cannot use the in-app flow — you don’t have an account, you’ve been locked out, or you are reporting on behalf of someone else — email [email protected]. Include the username of the account, what happened, and when. Reports about child safety are read first, always.

06Block someone

Reporting asks us to act. Blocking lets you act immediately, yourself, without waiting for anyone. The two are independent, and for anything that makes you uncomfortable we suggest doing both.

Open the person’s profile and tap block user. The moment you confirm:

• Every dit between the two of you is deleted, in both directions, permanently.
• Your contact records for each other are deleted, in both directions.
• They can no longer find you in search, send you a dit, or see your profile.
• They are never notified. To them it is indistinguishable from you having left Dit.

You can unblock later, but the deleted signals do not come back. Blocking someone does not report them — if their behaviour breaks this policy, please report it too, so it doesn’t simply move on to the next person.

07Review & enforcement

How reports are handled

Reports are reviewed by Dit’s operator through an internal moderation console. We review incoming reports at least once every 24 hours. Reports flagged as minor exploitation or inappropriate content, and any report indicating an imminent threat to someone’s safety, are treated as immediate priority and acted on ahead of everything else.

What we can do

How we decide

• Proportionality — the response matches the severity. A clumsy bio is not a ban. A pattern of targeting one person is.
• Consistency — the same rules apply to everyone, regardless of how long the account has existed or how much it is used.
• Context — a single unwanted dit is not harassment. Twenty after a block is evaded is, and so is one sent to a child.
• Safety first — where a judgement call involves a minor or a credible threat, we act on the side of protection and investigate afterwards.

08If we act against your account

If we remove your content, suspend or ban you, we will tell you which rule was broken and what we did — a statement of reasons, as required by Article 17 of the EU Digital Services Act. We are not obliged to reveal how we detected it or who reported it, and we won’t.

You can contest the decision by writing to [email protected] within 30 days. Say what you think we got wrong. A contested decision is reviewed by a person, not re-run through the same automatic check, and we answer within 14 days. If we were wrong, we restore the account.

09Legal framework

These standards are how Dit meets its obligations under, among others:

• EU Digital Services Act (Regulation 2022/2065) — notice-and-action mechanism (Art. 16), statement of reasons (Art. 17) and a published point of contact (Arts. 11–12). Dit is run by a private individual as a free, non-commercial project, so parts of the DSA may not apply to it at all; where they do, the obligations in Articles 20 to 28 do not, by virtue of Article 19. We provide the appeal route above regardless.
• Google Play Child Safety Standards Policy — published CSAE standards, an in-app reporting mechanism, and a designated child safety point of contact.
• Apple App Store Review Guideline 1.2 — for apps with user-generated content: a method to report objectionable content, the ability to block abusive users, and published contact information. All three are in the app.
• GDPR Article 8 — minimum age and children’s data.
• Italian and EU criminal law on child abuse material, and cooperation with the competent authorities.

How we handle the personal data involved in a report is set out in the Privacy Policy.

10Safety contact

This is Dit’s designated child safety point of contact, as required by Google Play’s Child Safety Standards Policy. It also handles legal enquiries, law enforcement requests and questions about this page.

[email protected]

Child safety matters are answered within 24 hours. Everything else within 5 business days. If a child is in immediate danger, contact emergency services first.