Yubo in 2025: Designing a Trusted Adult Space Built on Strong Safety Foundations

In 2025, Yubo became an 18+ platform. This was a natural evolution, considering over 90% of our users were already over 18. Today, Yubo is a space for adults to meet, connect, and engage in real time, built on the same safety foundations originally designed to protect younger users.

As we enter this new chapter, our approach remains proactive: strengthening what safety means in an adult environment and continuing to raise the bar across the industry.

Design for Age Appropriate Experiences

We design age-appropriate experiences and take a zero-tolerance approach to child sexual exploitation, including CSAM and grooming. That starts with who can access the platform. Since 2022, every Yubo user, new and existing, has been required to verify their age. Today, 100% of users go through age estimation, supported by Yoti’s facial age estimation technology. This approach is supported by ID verification where needed and ongoing behavioral monitoring to detect age mismatch. In 2025 alone, that system processed over 290 million age checks.

Although Yubo is now an adult-only platform, child safety remains a core priority. We continue to invest in child abuse detection, preventing circumvention attempts, and collaborate with industry partners to ensure minors cannot access the platform. 

Safety by Design: Our Approach to an 18+ Environment

Safety at Yubo is built into how the platform works. Our approach is grounded in four core pillars that guide how we design, enforce, and communicate safety: 

• Authenticity: Ensuring users represent themselves honestly, reducing impersonation, scams, and enabling informed interactions.
• Consent: Encouraging that every interaction is based on clear, mutual agreement and can be reversed at any time.
• Accountability: Ensuring decisions and enforcement actions are consistent, transparent, and proportionate.
• Autonomy: Giving users control over their experience, including what they see, share, and engage with.

These principles are applied through a safety-by-design approach, meaning:

• Risks are anticipated early and addressed at the product level.
• Clear reporting, blocking, and control tools are built into the user experience.
• Enforcement decisions are contextual, consistent, and explainable.
• Users are given clear information to make informed choices about their interactions.

The Numbers Behind Our 2025 Transparency Report

Each year, we publish a global Transparency Report, a commitment we made voluntarily in 2022, ahead of regulatory requirements, as part of our approach to building trust through transparency.

• Today, 87% of the alerts and reports processed by our safety team are the result of a proactive detection strategy.
• Automated moderation plays a key role in early intervention, reducing exposure to harmful content.

Compliance is not just a requirement for us, it is a lever to continuously raise safety standards and reinforce user trust. We actively work with regulators and partners globally to stay ahead of emerging risks and expectations.

What We Added in 2025

Beyond the transition, 2025 brought meaningful improvements to how we protect our community:

• We partnered with the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA) to strengthen protections against financial and identity fraud, including scams where users are manipulated into sending money or sharing sensitive information.
• We enhanced our enforcement systems to better account for overall user behavior, ensuring decisions are contextual, consistent, and proportionate.
• We introduced parallel transparency reporting, including a DSA-aligned report to meet evolving European regulatory standards.

Safety as a Collective Effort 

Our Trust & Safety team uses a three-tier model, from routine moderation to complex escalations across markets, managed by specialists including a dedicated Law Enforcement & Escalation Coordinator.

They are supported by Safety Policy, Safety Engineering, Product Safety, and Quality Assurance teams that continuously review moderation accuracy.

We also work closely with external experts and organizations to strengthen our approach. Our     Safety Board includes experts from NCMEC, Thorn, The Diana Award, Net Family News, adolescent psychiatry and law enforcement backgrounds.

Looking Ahead

As Yubo has evolved into an adult platform, our approach to safety has evolved with it, adapting to how risks emerge in adult interactions while staying grounded in the same core priorities.

Our focus remains clear: ensuring minors do not access the platform and interactions are free from exploitation and harm, while enabling meaningful and mutual connections.

We will continue to publish our data with transparency, collaborate with regulators and partners, and build a platform where trust, accountability, and user choice are at the core of the experience.

Years of building and refining our systems have made one thing clear: safety isn’t static. It requires constant iteration, testing, and innovation as online spaces continue to evolve. 

Read the full 2025 Transparency Report here.