Volunteer Safety Contributor Guidance

This page describes proposed volunteer safety contributor expectations.

It is guidance only. It does not create active operational authority, investigation authority, case access, evidence access, staff authority, or an application workflow.

APEX should not offer volunteer access to private reports, cases, evidence, safety records, account-correlation records, appeal records, or platform trust and safety tools until formal onboarding, confidentiality terms, training, access controls, and legal review are complete.

Volunteers or contributors, if used, may only perform approved, limited, supervised tasks.

Volunteers are not law enforcement, private investigators, independent moderators, or independent representatives of APEX.

Volunteers may not make final safety decisions.

Volunteers must not conduct vigilante investigations.

Volunteers must not:

• create decoy accounts
• impersonate minors
• contact suspected unsafe users
• bait users
• solicit content
• ask for explicit material
• collect illegal material
• join communities to investigate users on behalf of APEX
• publish allegations
• threaten, shame, harass, dox, or retaliate against users
• present themselves as APEX investigators

Volunteers must not collect, request, upload, store, distribute, or view sexual images of minors, illegal material, exploitative material, or content that could create legal or safety risk.

If such material is encountered, volunteers must stop handling it and escalate through approved official reporting and APEX safety channels.

Volunteers may be required to sign confidentiality terms, training acknowledgments, and role-specific agreements before receiving access to any nonpublic information.

Volunteers must not share reports, account identifiers, safety signals, screenshots, internal notes, case information, or other nonpublic APEX information outside approved APEX workflows.

Volunteer access should require training, role review, and staff supervision.

APEX may limit volunteer access based on age, experience, trust level, conflicts of interest, privacy requirements, legal requirements, or safety requirements.

Lawyer review needed: final age requirements, background checks, confidentiality terms, labor classification, and volunteer program structure.

Until lawyer-reviewed onboarding, confidentiality, training, and access controls are complete, volunteers must not receive access to:

• private reports
• cases
• raw evidence
• safety records
• account-correlation records
• appeal records
• platform trust and safety tools
• legal hold information
• reporter identities
• internal notes

Volunteers must disclose conflicts of interest, including involvement in disputes, personal relationships, server conflicts, prior moderation disputes, or public statements connected to a case or user.

Volunteers with conflicts should not handle related matters.

Volunteers must act professionally, calmly, and privately. They must avoid inflammatory language, speculation, retaliation, public shaming, unauthorized disclosure, and unsafe conduct.

Volunteers must escalate concerns through approved APEX channels. Volunteers must not make independent public determinations or direct enforcement decisions.

APEX may remove volunteer access at any time for misuse, confidentiality violations, unsafe conduct, unauthorized disclosure, harassment, retaliation, or failure to follow APEX policies.

This page does not create an application workflow. Any future volunteer application, onboarding, case access, training portal, or contributor workflow should be lawyer-reviewed before launch.

APEX provides request paths for privacy, deletion, correction, objection, and appeal-review concerns. Use the dashboard where available.

If you cannot access the dashboard, use the contact information on the Contact page. APEX may need to verify account ownership before disclosing, deleting, correcting, or reviewing account-related information.