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# What gets blocked, and why

Concrete beats abstract. These are the categories our moderation scores before delivery, with the kind of message each one is meant to catch. A flagged text message is delivered with a safety notice to its sender, and one the check scores high enough to block is withheld.

Updated September 29, 2026

## Personal information harvesting

"What's your number?" "Add me on snap." "Let's move this to Insta." The push to collect your personal details, or to move you off somewhere else, is one of the most common patterns we watch for — and it is on the list for a specific reason. Off-platform is where accountability ends. The moment a conversation leaves a moderated space, not one of the protections here follows it.

So a push for a phone number, an email or a social handle is scored against the personal-data category before delivery. Not because contact information is inherently sinister, but because the pressure to hand it to a stranger inside the first few minutes almost never is the innocent thing it presents itself as. In our evals a phone number or home address shared in a chat is flagged; a flagged text is delivered with a safety notice to its sender, and one the check scores high enough to block is withheld. A plain request to move the chat to another app is one the check does not reliably catch, so treat it as a warning sign yourself.

## Harassment

Targeted abuse — insults aimed squarely at you, slurs, threats, the message whose only purpose is to make you feel small — is scored against the hate, violence and harassment categories before it lands. In our evals a targeted insult aimed at the chat partner is flagged; a flagged text is delivered with a safety notice to its sender, and one the check scores high enough to block is withheld.

This is the clearest case there is for moderating before delivery instead of after. An after-the-fact system means the harassment already worked; you have already read it. A message the check withholds never reaches you at all, so that attempt just fails, quietly.

## Sexual content and pressure

Unsolicited sexual content and pressure for photos are scored against the sexual category before delivery; a flagged text is delivered with a safety notice to its sender, and one the check scores high enough to block is withheld. The plainest request for photos, such as "send nudes" or "send me naked pics", is blocked instantly as the message is sent. It is worth being precise about the line, because the precision is the whole point: consenting conversation between adults is not the target. Pressure is. Non-consent is. The unsolicited part is.

The difference is not prudishness, it is consent. A message that ignores a no, that escalates after obvious disinterest, or that arrives sexual and uninvited is what the check looks for. Two adults who both want the conversation they are having are not. The system is built to tell those two situations apart.

## Scams

The commercial junk of stranger chat has a recognizable shape: crypto "opportunities," links dropped into the very first message, "come watch my stream." A pitch is judged by what it says, like any other message. It is scored against the scam category; a flagged text is delivered with a safety notice to its sender, and one the check scores high enough to block is withheld. A link or a promo on its own is not a category, so what decides is what the message says. There is no copy-paste or volume detection today, so the hundredth copy of a pitch is judged the same way as the first.

This category is less about protecting your feelings and more about protecting your wallet. A stranger who opens with a link is not there to talk.

## Self-harm: blocked vs supported

This is the category with the most carefully drawn line, and it runs right through the middle of the subject. Encouraging someone to hurt themselves — "kys" and everything uglier than it — is on the wrong side of that line. There is no ambiguity there and we do not want any. The plainest forms, "kys" and "kill yourself", are blocked instantly as the message is sent, and the sender sees a safety notice. That instant block records no warning against the sender. The AI check scores other encouragement, and in our evals it is flagged: a flagged text is delivered with a safety notice to its sender, and one the check scores high enough to block is withheld.

But a person disclosing their own struggle is never punished for it. Someone saying they are in a dark place has not committed a violation; they are a person having a hard moment. When the check reads a message as someone disclosing their own struggle, they are shown crisis resources — the 988 line, findahelpline.com — and no warning is recorded against them, because showing support and not punishing someone are, in this one case especially, the same decision. The message is still delivered unless it scores at the block bar, where it is withheld like any other message; that hold is not a penalty. Getting this right matters far more than getting it fast.

## When we get it wrong

Over-blocking happens. A joke reads as a threat; an edgy aside reads as abuse; a message you meant harmlessly gets held. We are not going to pretend that never occurs, because it does, and pretending otherwise would undercut everything else on this page.

So appeals exist in the app, and false positives are treated as top-severity — a legitimate message wrongly blocked is not a rounding error we shrug off, it is something we consider broken until it is fixed. If you want the mechanics of how the check itself runs, [how AI moderation works](https://safemeet.now/guides/how-ai-moderation-works) lays out the pipeline step by step, and the [safety](https://safemeet.now/safety) page covers the rest.

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Source: https://safemeet.now/guides/what-gets-blocked