Improving Community Safety on Wattpad
At Wattpad, nothing is more important than the safety of our users and community. Every person who works at Wattpad is a part of our global community. We are Wattpad readers, writers, and stewards of the incredible community we’ve created alongside users around the world. Misuse of our platform and behaviour that compromises the safety of the Wattpad community are unacceptable to us, which is why we’re announcing a number of important changes to ensure Wattpad is a safe place for all users.
We know that there is no finish line for user safety, but that doesn’t change our commitment and determination to maintain the safety and integrity of the community we’ve all created together. As a user-generated content (UGC) platform, we take on the enormous task of keeping our community safe, building important community safety and education initiatives, supporting users in distress, and reviewing and removing anything we find that violates our rules.
We use a combination of technology and a world-class Trust & Safety team, along with our global Ambassador network and Ambassador support team, to help find and remove content violations. We are also a member of the Tech Coalition, where our teams can work alongside industry peers to stay on top of the most important issues and advances in online community safety. We’ve long prioritized user safety and content moderation with a simple guiding philosophy: we don’t debate content violations, we remove them. No user, story, or business target will ever compromise our commitment to keeping users safe. Currently, we invest millions each year in community safety, but we can and must do more. We strive to always improve our processes as the Wattpad community grows.
Our commitment to keeping users safe
Today, we are committing to significant improvements and additional investments in our processes, technology, and educational resources to prevent the misuse of our platform and keep our community safe. We’re doing so by:
Implementing new tools and processes to identify problematic and unwanted messages
Connection is an important component of the Wattpad community, but connection online can come with risks, especially for our users who are under 17. To better protect users, we will be implementing new text classifier and AI moderation tools for stronger, automatic detection of messages that suggest sexual content and potential grooming behaviour.
We are also updating our Community Standards to make it clear that sexual messaging and language suggesting grooming behaviour are unacceptable on Wattpad.
Going forward, we are also exploring new tools and safeguards to limit any unsolicited contact in Direct Messages.
Taking a harder stance on content that violates our guidelines
As a UGC platform, Wattpad remains focused on addressing the Internet-wide challenge of content moderation. Our teams are in the process of blocking a wider range of tags and the ability to search for offensive terms on Wattpad, ensuring that content which may violate our guidelines does not circulate. We have also implemented new processes and stronger standards to remove violative stories related to grooming, sexual roleplay, and stories that breach our terms by functioning as sexual chatrooms. In light of these changes, our teams have recently removed hundreds of stories and are removing thousands more.
Implementing a new age verification system and new tools to better classify Mature content
Wattpad is only for people who are 13 years of age or older. That said, like any bookstore, library, or streaming service, we host a variety of content, some of which is not appropriate for younger users. Currently, Mature content on the platform should only be accessed by those who are 17 and up, and our systems limit access to this content for people under 17 who have correctly registered their age.
To ensure Mature content is not reaching an unintended audience and to address the Internet-wide challenge of age verification, we are investing in new ways to verify the age of users on our platform and are looking into new tools to better classify Mature content. These new processes will be rolled out early 2023.
Enhancing the educational resources on our Safety Portal
Education is critical when it comes to staying safe online. Everyone using the internet and connecting with people online need to understand the signs and red flags that could lead to dangers. In 2019, we launched the Wattpad Safety Portal, a dedicated educational resource for younger users and parents with information about staying safe online. Wattpad’s Safety Portal includes articles on subjects like cyberbullying and harassment, making safe connections, and sharing personal information online. We will be building out this resource to provide more information and support to help users understand risks, identify red flags, and stay safe online.
As always, we encourage users to report concerning content or messages and to review our content guidelines and safety resources. Users should know that we report any illegal activity related to youth, including grooming, luring, and sextortion to the appropriate authorities.
As we continue to implement these updates, our users may experience some changes to their user experience. We ask for everyone’s patience as these critical updates are made, and throughout our ongoing efforts to further improve the experience and safety of our users, employees, and all those in our community.
No person or technology can ever solve the problem of content violations or bad actors online. But we can and must commit to doing better, improving protections for users and making sure that Wattpad is the safe space we know it can be.
Wattpad Team