Safety Hub

At Yubo, safety isn’t just a set of rules — it’s an active, evolving discipline designed to protect people without making their journey feel stymied, compromised or watched.

Our approach is guided by the idea of safe passage: our belief that the best safety systems work quietly in the background to enable a free-flowing experience for users — until circumstances require us to go from quiet monitoring to overtly acting.

A key part of this strategy is education. Specifically, we believe that healthy online behavior is built through awareness, not just enforcement. That’s why Yubo uses real-time, in-the-moment prompts — developed with behavioral experts — to alert users when they’ve crossed a line while also giving them the chance to adjust their behavior before we take further action.

Behind the scenes, our safety framework combines advanced technology with human judgment. We use AI-powered tools to help us detect instances of misconduct, industry-leading age-estimation tech to verify all users on the platform, and first-of-its-kind real-time video moderation for Live sessions. These systems work hand-in-hand with the specialists on our Trust and Safety team, who monitor activity 24/7 and respond quickly to reports.

Of course, you shouldn’t feel any of this going on if you’re going about your Yubo experience in good faith. We only take action when our Community Guidelines are violated, and we continually evolve our tools and policies to address emerging risks while remaining unobtrusive to the vast majority of our users.

Ultimately, our safety strategy has a simple goal: to create a space where people feel safe enough to be themselves, curious enough to connect, and supported enough to keep coming back.

At Yubo, we believe everyone deserves the freedom to be themselves, meet new people, and share who they are without feeling watched, judged, or pressured. 

We align with the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights by treating safety, privacy, and dignity as core design considerations across the platform. These principles help shape the experiences we create and the safeguards we put in place.

Human rights are reflected throughout our Community Guidelines and our approach to content moderation. When we write rules, review content or develop detection systems, we are careful to consider community protection alongside our belief in everyone’s freedom to express themselves. To support that balance, we draw on academic research, industry best practices, and guidance from our independent Safety Board.

As a European company, Yubo is committed to complying with digital and privacy regulations, including the Digital Services Act and the General Data Protection Regulation. We implement privacy-by-design and safety-by-design practices, provide transparent information and user controls to support data protection rights, apply robust safety and content-moderation measures, maintain clear reporting channels, and continuously review our processes to meet evolving regulatory expectations across the EU and worldwide.

Protecting human rights isn’t a one-time promise. It’s ongoing work that means continually reviewing and strengthening our policies, tools and partnerships so Yubo remains a place where people can connect with confidence, curiosity and trust.

Yubo has zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA), including child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and enticement or grooming. Protecting children from sexual exploitation and abuse is a core priority for our teams. We apply strict enforcement across the platform and continuously improve the tools, processes and safeguards that support child safety.

To keep our community safe, we combine advanced automated detection tools with trained human safety specialists. That means we actively look for suspicious behavior, remove violating content, take action on accounts, and — where legally required or appropriate — escalate cases to the relevant authorities.

We know automated systems aren’t perfect. Some signals can produce false positives, and certain classifications (including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM) require confirmation by human experts before action is finalized. That’s why our process includes:

• The use of trusted child-safety hash databases, always paired with human review
• Continuous improvements to our detection systems
• Ongoing quality checks on moderation decisions

We also apply strict security and governance safeguards, including encryption in transit, controlled access to sensitive data, logging, data protection impact assessments, and limited data retention.

We don’t do this alone. Where appropriate, we collaborate and share relevant information with widely recognized child-safety organizations and reporting bodies, including the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) and PHAROS in France.

For a detailed overview of our child safety framework, please refer to page 25 of our most recent Transparency Report.

For further statistics and data published in line with the Digital Services Act, please consult our EU DSA (Digital Services Act) Transparency Report.

Our reporting practices are regularly reviewed to ensure consistency with applicable legal requirements.

Our approach to safety is shaped at the highest levels of the company and ingrained in everyone who works for or with Yubo. From the newest hire to our most senior leader, our roles are all built around how to best protect, support and show up for our community.

That strategy is perhaps best embodied by our Trust and Safety team — a global network of specialists working around the clock to keep our in-app experience safe, supportive and fun. They monitor activity 24/7, step in when someone may be at risk, and respond quickly to user reports, especially during Live sessions, when timing matters most.

True to our belief in safe passage, this work is designed to be calm and unobtrusive. Most users will never need to interact with our safety specialists — but if something doesn’t feel right, they’re always there and ready to act.

If you ever have a concern, you can report it directly in the app by tapping the shield icon and selecting “Report,” or you can reach out through the Contact Us section of our website.

We promise that every report is reviewed and any concern you raise is taken extremely seriously.

We are guided by a board of safety experts made up of the following respected thought leaders, who provide invaluable advice and inform our proactive approach to safety:

• Annie Mullins OBE – Independent Safety Advisor, Yubo
• John Shehan – Vice President, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)
• Alex Holmes – Deputy CEO, The Diana Award
• Travis Bright – Product Director, Thorn
• Mick Moran – Garda Liaison Officer Paris, former Deputy Director INTERPOL
• Dr. Richard Graham – Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Clinical Director, Good Thinking
• Anne Collier – Founder of Family Net News & Exec Director of The Net Safety Collaborative (TNSC)

Keeping people safe online isn’t something we do alone.

That’s why we work closely with governments, NGOs, charities, and industry organizations around the world to help advance digital safety, well-being, and responsible platform design. These partnerships inform how we build, how we moderate, and how we support our community — both on and off the app.

Working with experts and advocates

We regularly partner with leading nonprofits and advocacy organizations to run awareness campaigns, shape educational resources, and support users around sensitive topics like mental health, bullying, identity, and online harm. These partners include the Cyberbullying Research Center, The Trevor Project, The Diana Award, Switchboard, Good Thinking, e-Enfance, and many others.

You can explore some of this work in our blog posts on mental well-being and Pride Month.

Collaborating with governments and regulators

We also work directly with governments and regulatory bodies to help strengthen protections for young people online. This includes participation in initiatives such as:

• Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Tier 1 social media scheme
• France’s Protocol for Child Protection against pornography
• The UK’s Five Country Ministerials’ Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

Partnering across the tech ecosystem

Yubo is a board member of the Technology Coalition and a member of the Internet Watch Foundation and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, working alongside other major platforms to address serious online harms at an industry level.

We also collaborate with organizations such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (US), NSPCC (UK), Kids Helpline (Australia), INHOPE and Point de Contact (France), and Thorn (US) to strengthen reporting pathways and improve response to harmful content.

Building safer systems together

Finally, some of our most important partnerships help shape how safety works behind the scenes. In collaboration with Yoti, Yubo became the first major social platform to implement comprehensive age verification across its entire community. You can learn more about that work here.

Across all of these relationships, our goal is the same: to learn, to improve, and to ensure that the systems protecting our users are informed by the best thinking available — not just our own.