Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing, browsing, submitting content to, voting on, or otherwise using the Platform, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, you must not use the Platform.

The Unredacted Project is a public-interest platform for reporting alleged violations of law and constitution by U.S. public officials and public employees acting in their official capacity. It is not a venue for allegations against private citizens, private-sector entities, or the private conduct of government actors.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years of age to create an account, submit a claim, file a dispute, or cast a vote in a debunked-vote session. Read-only browsing of the public site is available without an account and without age restriction.

You represent that you are legally permitted to use the Platform in your jurisdiction and that your use will comply with all applicable federal, state, and local laws.

Accounts may not be shared, sold, transferred, or used on behalf of another person. Voting eligibility is further scoped by jurisdiction as described in the platform’s public verification-tier documentation.

3. Content Licensing (CC BY-SA)

When you submit a claim, evidence description, dispute, dispute reply, comment, or any other user-generated text content to the Platform (collectively, “User Submissions”), you grant both the public and The Unredacted Project a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to use that content under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0) .

This means anyone — including researchers, journalists, other platforms, and the general public — may copy, redistribute, and build upon your User Submissions, including commercially, provided they give appropriate credit and license any derivative works under the same terms.

Uploaded evidence files (documents, images, recordings, and similar artifacts) are not automatically relicensed under CC BY-SA. You grant The Unredacted Project only the rights necessary to store, display, index, and make such files available on the Platform in connection with the claim to which they are attached. You represent that you have the legal right to upload each evidence file and that doing so does not infringe any third party’s rights.

You retain ownership of your underlying copyright in all User Submissions.

4. Attestation Obligations

By submitting a claim or dispute, you attest under penalty of perjury (where applicable) that, to the best of your knowledge and belief:

• The factual allegations in your submission are true and not knowingly false.
• The evidence you have attached is authentic and has not been fabricated or materially altered.
• You have obtained any evidence you submit through lawful means.
• The submission concerns a U.S. public official or public employee acting in their official capacity, consistent with the Platform’s scope.
• You are not subject to any court order, settlement, or other legal obligation that prohibits you from publishing the content of the submission.

Knowingly submitting false information, fabricated evidence, or content intended to harass a specific individual under the pretext of a good-faith claim is a material breach of these Terms and may result in immediate account suspension, removal of the content, and referral to appropriate authorities.

5. Dispute Rules

Any user may file a dispute against a published claim. Filing a dispute moves the claim to the Disputed verification tier and triggers AI re-evaluation. Disputes must be submitted in good faith and, where possible, accompanied by counter-evidence.

• Bare denials. Disputes filed without supporting evidence are marked as “bare denials.” They are visible on the record but carry reduced weight and are subject to automatic expiration as described in the public platform documentation.
• Frivolous disputes. Disputes that the Platform’s AI screening or human moderators determine to be frivolous, duplicative, or filed to harass may be rejected without further action. Repeated frivolous filings may result in account restrictions.
• Entity representatives. Authorized agency spokespersons may file a Verified Response dispute on behalf of the agency, subject to the verification process described in the platform documentation.
• Debunked votes. Moving a Disputed claim to Debunked requires a community vote with jurisdiction-scoped eligibility, contextual quorum, and a supermajority threshold, all as defined on the Platform.

All dispute activity is recorded in the public audit trail of the underlying claim.

6. Account Deletion & Claim Preservation

You may delete your account at any time via your account settings. Upon deletion:

• Personally identifying account fields (email address, display name, and any profile metadata) are removed or irreversibly anonymized in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
• Submitted claims, evidence, disputes, and votes remain on the Platform. Because User Submissions are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and form part of a durable public record of alleged government misconduct, deleting your account does not withdraw or retract those submissions.
• Authorship attribution is converted to an anonymous marker where your chosen attribution type permits. Submissions made under real_name or pseudonym attribution may retain their attribution label for the integrity of the record; contact us if you have a specific concern.
• Evidence files you uploaded remain available unless they are independently removed under our content-moderation or DMCA processes.

If you submitted a claim as an anonymous user using an edit token, deleting your account (if any) does not affect your edit token; conversely, losing the edit token does not create a right to have the claim removed.

7. Prohibited Content & Conduct

You agree not to submit content or engage in conduct that:

• Targets private citizens, private-sector entities, or the private conduct of government actors (outside the Platform’s scope).
• Is defamatory, knowingly false, or intended primarily to harass a specific person.
• Contains unlawfully obtained material, including material obtained in violation of computer-fraud, wiretap, or similar statutes.
• Contains personally identifying information of private individuals (doxxing), including home addresses, personal phone numbers, or unlisted family details of public officials that are not relevant to the alleged official misconduct.
• Contains sexually explicit material, graphic violence for shock value, or content depicting minors in any sexualized or exploitative context.
• Contains malware, credential stuffing, scraping tooling, or material intended to compromise the Platform or its users.
• Constitutes spam, commercial solicitation, or coordinated inauthentic activity intended to manipulate tier transitions or votes.
• Violates any applicable law.

We may remove any content and suspend any account that violates these restrictions, with or without prior notice, at our sole discretion.

8. Administrator & Insider Conduct

If you are an administrator, moderator, operator, or other insider of the Platform, the following obligations apply to your use of the Platform in addition to all other Terms:

• When you participate in the Platform as an ordinary participant — submitting a claim, filing a dispute, casting a vote, or otherwise acting as a member of the public — you must use a regular user account. You may not submit, dispute, vote on, or otherwise post such content using an administrator or other privileged account.
• You may not take administrative or moderation actions on your own submissions, or on any submission in which you are personally involved, regardless of which account was used to create that submission. This obligation applies whether the submission was made under a regular user account or any other account.

9. Platform Liability Limitations

The Platform is a venue for third-party speech about the conduct of government. Under 47 U.S.C. § 230 and analogous protections, The Unredacted Project is not the publisher or speaker of User Submissions and is not liable for the content of those submissions.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE PLATFORM IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, OR ACCURACY OF ANY USER SUBMISSION, AI-GENERATED SUMMARY, TIER LABEL, OR OTHER PLATFORM OUTPUT.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE UNREDACTED PROJECT AND ITS OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUES, DATA, OR GOODWILL, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR USE OF THE PLATFORM.

AI-generated summaries, risk scores, tier recommendations, and category suggestions are heuristic outputs produced by machine-learning systems. They are editorial context, not findings of fact. You are responsible for your own evaluation of any claim before relying on it.

10. DMCA Safe Harbor & Designated Agent

The Unredacted Project complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), 17 U.S.C. § 512. If you believe content on the Platform infringes your copyright, please send a written notice to our designated DMCA agent that includes all of the following:

1. A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on their behalf.
2. Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed.
3. Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing and reasonably sufficient information to permit us to locate it (for example, the URL of the claim page or evidence file).
4. Your contact information, including address, telephone number, and email.
5. A statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
6. A statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.

We may terminate the accounts of users who are determined, in appropriate circumstances, to be repeat infringers.

Counter-notifications may be sent to the same agent and must comply with 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3). Filing a knowingly false DMCA notice or counter-notice may subject you to liability for damages under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

11. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and, for material changes, provide additional notice (for example, by email to registered users or by a prominent banner on the Platform). Your continued use of the Platform after the effective date of the updated Terms constitutes your acceptance of the changes.

If you do not agree to a change, you must stop using the Platform and may request account deletion as described above. Prior User Submissions remain licensed under the version of these Terms in effect at the time you made them, consistent with the irrevocable nature of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.