Our rules, and the one hard line

OpenBook is 100% open source and fully transparent. That is a promise about how the platform runs, not a license for anything to happen on it.

Almost everything here is decided in the open. The ranking is published, every moderation action is logged in a public ledger, big changes go to a community vote, and you can hold a view the whole crowd disagrees with and still be seen. We mean those promises, and you can check every one of them in our code on GitHub.

But being open and transparent is about how we run OpenBook. It is not a loophole that makes anything goes.

We protect unpopular opinions. We do not protect crime. Those are not the same thing, and keeping them apart is exactly what lets us defend the first one.

What this covers

Anything that is genuinely illegal under the law that applies to us, including but not limited to:

• Child sexual abuse material, and any sexual content involving minors.
• Credible threats of violence, incitement to violence, and terrorism.
• Human trafficking and exploitation.
• Sharing someone's intimate images without their consent.
• Fraud, scams, and the sale of clearly illegal goods.
• Malware, and doxxing that puts a real person in danger.

Where the line is

The line is drawn at illegal acts and illegal material, never at ideas. You can criticise a government, a company, a faith, or any of us, and argue for views most people reject, and that stays protected. What is not protected is using OpenBook to break the law or to harm real people.

This is still transparent, and still fair

Refusing to host illegal content does not turn us into a black box. When content is reported as illegal it is hidden right away and reviewed only by platform admins, never by a public jury. If it is confirmed, it is removed and recorded in the public moderation log, but written generically with no details, because republishing or describing the material would re-expose the people it harms. Anyone who believes their lawful content was removed in error can appeal.

The line holds us to account too. We comply with valid legal obligations, such as removing unlawful content and reporting what the law requires us to report, while refusing to censor lawful speech just because someone powerful dislikes it.

Why we hold this line

This rule protects you. It protects the real people that illegal content harms, and it protects the platform itself: a service that knowingly hosted illegal content would be cut off by its providers and shut down, and every voice on it, including the dissenting ones we exist to protect, would go silent with it. Staying within the law is not the opposite of staying free. It is what keeps OpenBook alive to be free at all.