Moderation
Moderation & takedown policy
Last updated August 20, 2026
CourseTrees has community surfaces (ratings, career rooms, study groups, and org pages), and content posted there is our responsibility to moderate. This page says what is not allowed, how to get content taken down, how fast we act, and how to push back if we get a call wrong. In short: anyone can report content without an account, we acknowledge reports within 24 hours and resolve them within 48 hours, and intimate imagery shared without consent is removed within 48 hours as the law requires.
What is not allowed
- Intimate imagery shared without consent (NCII), in any form, of anyone. Federal law (the TAKE IT DOWN Act) requires removal within 48 hours of a valid report, and we treat that as a hard deadline, not a target.
- Harassment and threats targeting anyone: another student, an instructor, or someone who is not on CourseTrees at all.
- Private personal information posted without consent: home addresses, phone numbers, private emails, schedules, or anything else that exposes a person.
- Impersonation: accounts or posts presenting as a person or an institution they are not.
- Spam and scams: commercial spam, phishing, link schemes, and academic-dishonesty services.
- Content that breaks the law, including copyright infringement and anything involving minors, which we escalate rather than merely remove.
Criticism of a course is welcome; our surfaces exist for it. The line is people: reviews and posts are about the course and the teaching, not about someone's body, identity, or private life.
How to report content
- The report form: coursetrees.com/report-content. No account needed. You do not have to be a CourseTrees user, and you can report on behalf of someone else.
- Email: safety@coursetrees.com or coursetrees@gmail.com. Both reach the same people.
- In the product: every board thread, reply, rating, and chat message has a report button for signed-in students.
How fast we act
- Acknowledgment: within 24 hours of a report, if you left a way to reach you.
- Resolution: within 48 hours. The content comes down, or we tell you why it stays.
- NCII removal: within 48 hours of a valid report, including identical copies we can find. This deadline is set by federal law.
Honesty about scale: CourseTrees is run by a small student team, not a 24/7 trust and safety department. Moderation today is human review of every report against this page. The deadlines above are commitments we size the rest of our work around, and reports of intimate imagery jump every queue.
What removal means
Removed content stops being visible to everyone immediately. We keep an internal record of what was removed and why. That record is what lets us answer appeals and prove we met the deadlines above. For unlawful content we escalate to the appropriate authorities instead of only removing it.
Appeals
If your content was removed and you think we got it wrong, email safety@coursetrees.com with the subject line “Appeal” and a link to or description of the removed content. A person re-reads the decision against this policy and answers within 48 hours. Where our team size allows it, that person is not the one who made the original call. Removals required by law (NCII, content involving minors) are not appealable here.
Related pages
How we handle data lives in our data ethics page and privacy notice; catalog-data corrections and per-source takedowns are covered there. This page is about content people post.