Platform Safety Watch examines online safety risks across live video, adult-content ecosystems, creator platforms, dating apps, social media, payment systems, AI tools and digital communities.
Platform Safety Watch is a public-interest initiative by the Digital Safety & Accountability Foundation, a non-profit organization established with a mission of public awareness and public-interest research. We monitor how digital platforms - including live video, adult-content ecosystems, creator sites, dating apps, payment rails, and AI tools - handle their duty of care, and we make that behaviour measurable, comparable, and challengeable.
Our purpose is to identify safety gaps, document emerging risk patterns, refer serious harm to the appropriate authorities, promote prevention, and advocate for stronger safeguards. We avoid unsupported allegations and always distinguish between verified facts, reported concerns, observed patterns, and unresolved questions. We have identified 12 areas of concern that we rigorously monitor.
We continuously review platforms against twelve safety dimensions - from child & teen safety to trafficking indicators, sextortion and synthetic media.
We collect open-source and reported evidence, corroborate every claim against at least two independent sources, and publish patterns - not personalities.
One public rubric, applied the same way to every platform, so safety claims can be measured side by side instead of taken on trust.
Credible child-safety and trafficking indicators go straight to NCMEC, IWF and national anti-trafficking units - fast, with a traceable evidence trail.
We publish live scam alerts and plain, practical guidance so users and creators can recognise and stop harm before money or safety is lost.
Every platform gets a right of reply, published in full, and we track whether the documented harm is actually fixed - not just acknowledged.
Victims can bring a complaint to us across all twelve of our areas of focus, and we can act as an intermediary with the platform on your behalf. Where we cannot resolve it, we connect you to local lawyers and law enforcement in the jurisdiction that can actually help - because online harm crosses borders. Your identity and everything you send stays fully confidential and encrypted.
Raise, structure and escalate your complaint with the platform on your behalf, across all twelve areas of focus.
We work out which authority, regulator or unit actually has reach when the platform, the harm and you are in different countries.
If we cannot resolve it, we introduce you to local lawyers, specialist NGOs and the right law-enforcement channel.
Submit anonymously if you wish. Everything is encrypted, and nothing identifying is shared without your consent.
Serious incidents and confirmed infringements by platforms - once investigated - are reported and published in our public directory, so the findings stay open and platforms cannot quietly bury them. View the public directory.
We collect data from open and reportable sources, verify it against independent evidence, and publish patterns rather than personalities. Every finding is traceable back to a documented source and a named reviewer - so the work can be cited, challenged, or updated.
Public platform pages, app-store listings, court filings, regulator notices, researcher disclosures, victim-reported testimony and on-platform behaviour observed by trained reviewers - never private data, never unlawful access.
Each indicator is corroborated by at least two independent sources before it becomes a finding. We log dates, source URLs, capture hashes and reviewer initials so any claim can be re-walked end-to-end.
We score against the twelve risk dimensions, weight by severity and reach, and map cross-platform behaviour - how the same scam, the same operator or the same exploit moves between ecosystems.
Findings are published with severity, status, supporting evidence and a clear statement of what is verified vs. observed vs. unresolved. Platforms and regulators get a right of response before publication on contested items.
The twelve dimensions we measure across every platform. Each one is published with its own criteria, indicators and remediation steps so that scoring is reproducible.
Protecting under-18s from grooming, sexualised exposure, fake adult profiles, coercive private contact, sextortion and unsafe live-streaming environments. The single most important safety surface on every platform we review.
Whether a platform can actually tell who is on either side of an interaction - and how easily that breaks. Weak age and identity checks are the root cause behind most of the other risks on this site.
Stalking, doxxing, agency pressure, earnings control and unsafe working conditions for the people on camera. The performer side of the platform is too often treated as content rather than as workers.
When the person on camera is not freely participating - debt bondage, third-party control, exploitative recruitment and trafficking indicators that platforms are increasingly responsible for detecting.
How private recordings, identity documents, viewing history and payment details are collected, stored, retained and ultimately leaked or sold by adult platforms.
When sexual interaction becomes leverage. Photos, recordings or fake-relationship trust used to extract money, more intimate content, or both - and recurring scripts that show coordinated operation.
How tipping, tokens, fan-club fees and crypto rails on adult platforms are used for fraud, coercive payment patterns and money-laundering - well beyond the typical entertainment-spending category.
AI-generated profiles, voice clones, deepfake nudes and automated grooming bots running at industrial scale. The fastest-growing category of harm and the one least covered by existing platform policies.
How harm starts on one platform and continues through WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram or crypto wallets - often invisible to any single platform's safety team and rarely investigated end-to-end.
Attention loops, addiction mechanics, parasocial pressure and monetisation patterns that push both creators and viewers into unhealthy or unsafe behaviour - by design, not by accident.
Whether a platform actually responds when a victim reports something - including evidence preserved off-platform - and how transparent the appeals process is when it doesn't.
Patterns that suggest more than one operator behind an account, a studio or a network - coordinated scripts, shared payment channels and reused profile artefacts that single-account moderation will miss.
Encrypted at rest. Reviewed by named reviewers. You can submit anonymously.
