The rules.

You are saying that:

• the words are yours to publish;
• the photo is yours to use, or you have permission to use it, and anyone recognisable in it agreed to be shown;
• you are not pretending to be somebody else while you write it.

And you should know what publishing means here: your report gets its own page at its own link, that link works for anyone who has it with no app and no login, and it is meant to keep working indefinitely. Sharing is the point of the product. Think of a filed report as public and permanent, because that is how it behaves.

The list is short and there are no exceptions on it. A report comes down when it involves:

• Nudity or sexual content. No nudity, no sexual acts, no sexualised images of anyone. Anything involving a minor is removed and reported to the authorities, not merely taken down.
• Harassment of a real person. Threats, abuse, insults aimed at someone identifiable, or a pile-on dressed up as a news story.
• Impersonation. Writing as a real person, company, publication or official body, or putting words in their mouth as though they said them.
• Defamation. Stating as fact something damaging about a real, identifiable person or business that is not true. A satirical headline about a public figure is one thing; an invented crime with a real name attached is another, and it is the second one this rule is about.
• Private individuals as the subject. Someone who is not a public figure did not sign up to be written about. Their name, their address, their phone number, their workplace, their photo, their business — leave them out of it.
• Anything illegal, anything that invents a public-safety emergency or a death, and anything that is an advert wearing a headline.

A story being made up is not by itself against the rules — this is a site where readers write their own reports and every one of them is labelled as unverified. A story that hurts a real, identifiable person is a different thing, and that is the line every rule above is drawing.

Every photo is checked before the report it belongs to goes public. Uploads are screened automatically for adult and violent imagery, and a person looks at each one before it publishes. That review is why there is a wait between filing a report and seeing it on the site.

Screening catches what is visible in the picture. It cannot tell that an image was taken from somewhere else or that the person in it did not agree to be there — for those, we depend on you telling us. If a photo is yours and it was used without permission, or a picture of you is up and you want it down, say so and we will pull it. We do not need a legal filing to act.

From the app is fastest. Open the story in Breaking News Maker and use the report button on it. That files straight into the moderation queue with the story attached.

From here works too. The contact page has the address; email the link to the story and one sentence on what is wrong with it. Specifics — impersonation, harassment, a stolen photo, an invented emergency — get acted on faster than "this is bad".

Every flag is read by a person. You do not need an account, you do not need to be the person in the story, and you will not be identified to the person who filed it.

We remove reports and stop devices from filing, at our discretion, without warning and without owing an explanation. That is not a threat, it is the honest description: there is one person reading the queue, and the decision on a borderline story is a judgement call rather than a process.

Removal is total. A pulled report stops resolving everywhere at once — the section pages, the feed, the app, and every link to it that has already been shared. Nothing is quietly hidden while staying reachable.

Think a call was wrong? Tell us. There is no formal appeal, but there is a person on the other end of that address who will look again.

Stories here are not verified facts. Do not act on one the way you would act on a report from a news organisation, and do not use anything on this site to make a decision about your safety, your health, your money or a legal matter.

The site and the app are provided as they are. We do not promise that a report is accurate, that the site is available, or that any of it is fit for a particular purpose. Reader reports are the accounts and opinions of the readers who filed them, not ours.

Breaking News Maker, the app and this website are operated by Tech Efficient LLC. Using either means these rules apply to you. They can change — the current version is always the one on this page.

Anything else: the contact page, or support@breakingnewsapp.net.