Platform Circumvention Prevention Guide

Platform circumvention occurs when users attempt to bypass your platform’s safety measures by moving conversations to external channels that lack proper moderation and oversight. This behavior puts users at risk since these external channels don’t have the same protections in place.

Users commonly try to move conversations to:

• Messaging apps (WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal)
• Social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook)
• Personal communication methods (email, phone)
• External forums and chat rooms

Some examples of how users attempt this:

• “Let’s continue on WhatsApp”
• “DM me on Instagram, my username is @myusername”
• “Add me on Telegram”
• “My phone number is +1234567890, call me and let’s talk”

Detecting and preventing platform circumvention is crucial for maintaining user safety and ensuring conversations remain within your platform’s moderated environment where proper oversight and protection measures are in place. When users move to external channels, platform rules and protections are bypassed, allowing potentially risky behavior to go undetected.

Prevention Methods

You can implement several measures to prevent platform circumvention:

1. Platform Bypass Detection

   • Configure the “Platform Bypass” filter on AI Text moderation.
   • This automatically detects when users attempt to suggest moving conversations to other platforms
   • Catches subtle hints and variations of platform switching requests

2. Personal Information Protection

   • Enable the “PII” (Personal Identifiable Information) filter on AI Text moderation.
   • Detects sharing of personal contact information like phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses
   • Helps prevent users from exchanging private contact details

3. Domain Blocklist

   • Utilize email/domain type blocklists
   • Block URLs from specific platforms or social media sites
   • Prevents sharing of links to external communication platforms

4. Pre-send Webhook Integration (Chat Only)

   • Implement pre-send webhooks to implement custom logic to scrape and detect personal information.