Trust & Transparency

What CTFO is

A small independent platform for people to share their actual thoughts. The point is honest free expression, opinions, takes, arguments, with one anti misinformation mechanic on top. That's it. It's not a surveillance product, it's not a marketing pipeline and it's not a front for anything.

What we won't do

• Sell user data. No ad networks, no broker pipelines, no "anonymised" data deals. Your account, your content, your IP logs, not for sale.
• Quietly cooperate with corporate pressure. Companies, PR firms or interest groups asking us to take down legal speech because it's inconvenient for them get told no.
• Run preemptive surveillance. We don't scan DMs, profile political views or flag users for "future risk". DMs sit encrypted at rest, see the section below for the full story.
• Shadow ban or silently throttle. If your post is removed or your account actioned, you'll be told and given a reason.
• Hand over data without legal process. No informal requests, no favours.

What we will do

• Cooperate with valid UK legal requests. Court orders, valid warrants, statutory requests under UK law, we comply, and we push back on overbroad fishing requests.
• Report CSAM and credible threats immediately. Child sexual abuse material is reported to UK authorities on detection, credible imminent threats to life follow the same path.
• Remove illegal content. Anything illegal under UK law is removed and the account banned, we don't host it and we don't relitigate the law.
• Keep audit logs. Actions on the platform are logged so we can detect coordinated abuse, spam networks or attempts to use CTFO to hide organised illegal activity, logs are internal and only released under valid legal process.
• Publish a transparency report. Once there's enough activity, we'll publish counts of takedown requests received, complied with and refused.

Direct messages

DMs are private, 1:1, text only. They are stored encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM, with a per-conversation key wrapped by a server-held master key. This is not end-to-end encryption, and we don't claim it is, the server can technically decrypt. The point is that nobody on our team can decrypt your DMs casually, and nobody outside our team can without breaking into the server and stealing the master key.

There are exactly three situations in which a moderator will decrypt a message you sent or received:

1. You or the other participant reports a message. The report carries the plaintext of the reported message from the reporter's device. To see the messages immediately before or after for context, the moderator must type a written justification, and that decryption is logged.
2. We receive a valid UK legal request naming the account (court order, warrant, or equivalent statutory request). We push back on overbroad requests.
3. A credible imminent threat to life requires us to act and contact authorities.

Every admin decryption is recorded with the moderator's name, the conversation id, the reason, and how many messages were unsealed. Aggregate counts will appear in our transparency report once there's enough activity to publish meaningful numbers.

What we don't do: scan DMs for content, read them for ad targeting (we don't do ads), train models on them, or share them with anyone outside the situations above. Image DMs are off by default, we'll only enable them once CSAM-hash scanning is in place.

You control who can DM you in Settings, default is people you follow only. Blocking someone hard-blocks DMs both ways. Either side leaving a conversation tombstones the messages for both.

The line between free speech and a shield for crime

Free speech protects expression, opinions, beliefs, criticism, art, jokes, uncomfortable truths, things people disagree with. CTFO defends all of that aggressively.

Free speech does not protect organising illegal activity, coordinating harassment or distributing illegal material. If small groups try to use CTFO as cover for that, the audit log, the moderator and UK law enforcement when appropriate are the answer.

The platform is for honest speech, not laundering crime, those aren't the same thing and we won't pretend they are.

If something feels off

Spotted coordinated abuse, a brigade or content you think is illegal, flag it, the moderator sees everything. If you think CTFO itself has acted wrongly, send a message via the contact form and you'll get a real reply.

Accountable person

Under the UK Online Safety Act, we name an individual accountable for compliance with the illegal content duties and the reporting/complaints duties: Natchland. Reachable via the contact form with the Legal category. Detailed safety information lives on the Safety page.