Child safety standards

Huddle is a social network for students at Nigerian universities, built and run by Voyager Technologies. It is for people aged 16 and over, which means some of the students on it are 16 or 17 and are children in law. We do not allow child sexual abuse or exploitation in any form. This page sets out what that covers, how to report it, what we do when it is reported, and who to write to.

Throughout this page a child means anyone under 18, regardless of the age of consent where they live.

What is not allowed

Anywhere on Huddle: posts, comments, direct messages, pulses, marketplace listings, resources, profile photos, usernames, bios and uploaded files.

• Child sexual abuse material. Any image, video, audio, drawing, text or link that shows or describes the sexual abuse of a child, or that sexualises anyone under 18. Animated and computer-generated material counts, and so does material a model produced.
• Sexual images of anyone under 18. Sharing them, asking for them, offering them or trading them. This includes images of a student who is 16 or 17, and images a person took of themselves.
• Grooming. Building contact with someone under 18 in order to abuse or exploit them: asking for images, asking to meet in private, offering money, gifts, grades or accommodation, or moving the conversation somewhere less visible.
• Sextortion. Threatening to share intimate images of someone under 18 unless they send more, pay, or do something else.
• Trafficking and sexual services. Advertising, arranging or asking for sex with anyone under 18, and anything that helps someone traffic a child.
• Normalising it. Content that glorifies, jokes about, defends or promotes the sexual abuse of children, or that promotes an attraction to them.

Posting anonymously changes none of this. An anonymous post still carries the account that made it, and that is what we act on.

Accounts belonging to anyone under 16 are removed when we find them, as our terms and privacy policy say.

How to report it

• In the app. Every post, comment and profile has Report in its menu. Choose Sexual content, or Something else and say it involves a child. For something sent in a message, report the sender's profile.
• By email. Write to support@huddle.ng with "Child safety" as the subject. Send links or usernames, not the images themselves.
• If a child is in danger now, call the police on 112 first, then tell us.

Reports are confidential. The person you reported is never told who reported them. You will not be in trouble for reporting something that turns out to be nothing, and we would far rather read ten reports that come to nothing than miss the one that does not.

What we do

• Child safety reports are the first thing the Huddle team reviews, ahead of every other report.
• We remove the material and close the account that posted it, permanently. Closed accounts do not come back, and there is no appeal on this one.
• We report child sexual abuse material and exploitation to the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), to the Nigeria Police Force, and to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children through its CyberTipline.
• We preserve what we removed, and what we know about the account, for as long as the authorities need it, and hand it over when they ask through proper legal process.
• We cooperate with law enforcement investigating the abuse or exploitation of a child, in Nigeria and elsewhere.
• Where we can tell that someone else on Huddle was targeted, we act to protect them too.

How we try to prevent it

• Huddle is closed. There is no public feed and nothing is indexed by search engines; you have to be a signed-in student at the university to see anything.
• Accounts need a confirmed email address. We ask for a matric number and check its format, and student verification asks for a document a person on our team looks at.
• The minimum age is 16, stated in the terms and enforced by removing accounts we find below it.
• Report, block and mute are on every post, comment and profile, and blocking stops someone reaching you at all.
• Our community guidelines tell every student, in plain words, that this is the one rule with nothing behind it.
• Staff who handle reports know what to do with this category before they see one, and it does not wait in the ordinary queue.

Compliance

We comply with Nigerian law on the abuse and exploitation of children, including the Child's Rights Act, the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act and the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition) Enforcement and Administration Act, and with the child safety laws of the other countries where Huddle is available. These standards are reviewed at least once a year, and whenever the product changes in a way that touches them.

Point of contact

Our designated child safety contact is the Huddle team lead at Voyager Technologies, reachable at support@huddle.ng with "Child safety" in the subject line. That address is monitored for this purpose and is the right one for students, parents, universities, child protection organisations, regulators and law enforcement alike.

Law enforcement should say which agency they are writing from and what legal process they are acting under, and we will respond directly.