LINE

In order to provide a safe and secure experience on our services, LINE suspends content that violates our terms of service agreements and relevant laws. This report details the results of content moderation over a given period of time.

1. Actions Taken against Violating Posts on LINE Services

LINE employs a two-step process to monitor posts on Timeline (Current LINE VOOM), LINE LIVE, LINE Manga and other LINE services. User-posted content is checked first by (1) an automatic monitoring system and then afterwards as needed by (2) our monitoring team. This two-step process helps ensure that any post that violates our terms of service agreements or relevant laws do not spread on LINE's various community platforms.

First, user-posted content on supported LINE services is checked by the automatic monitoring system to ensure that it does not contain any prohibited language, break any service rules, or violate the terms of service or relevant laws. If objectionable content is found by the monitoring system, it is immediately suspended after being posted.

Next, a monitoring team checks any content the monitoring system cannot classify. The monitoring team compares the content against a set of evaluation criteria and previous examples to make a decision on whether or not the content is safe. If the monitoring team determines the posted content is in violation of the terms of service or relevant laws, it is suspended.

Please refer to the chart below for more information on suspended content by the monitoring team in the last six months.

The breakdown of types of suspended content by manual check is as follows:

Covered services by this report

• • OpenChat
  • LINE Timeline (Current LINE VOOM)
  • Smart Channel
  • LINE Official Account
  • LINE KEEP
  • LINE LIVE
  • LINE Manga
  • LINE Fortune
  • LINE Talk Fortune
  • LINE Pasha
  • LINE BLOG
  • LINE Shopping
  • LINE Place
  • livedoor blog
  • Fanwiki
  • LINE Talk CARE
  • LINE Healthcare
  • LINE Lawyer Consultation
  • LINE Pokeo
  • Brown Stories
  • LINE TODAY
  • LINE SPOT
  • @Commerce

LINE is unable to monitor any message a user sends/receives on a regular LINE chat room unless the user sends unencrypted chat data to LINE by using the reporting tool. How LINE responded to the reported messages is not in the scope of this report.

Other notes

• Promotion of illegal activity: Announcements of attacks or bombings, sale of illegal drugs, selling online data (such as accounts, coins, and avatars) for real money, etc.
• Obscene content: Child pornography, videos of sexual content and genitalia, etc.
• Solicitation: Inappropriate requests for dating or meeting, etc.
• Spam: Using tools to send stickers or messages repetitively in a short period of time, advertising adults-only websites, promoting registration for dating apps, etc.
• Unpermitted commercial use of accounts: Advertisement of counterfeit brand websites, sales of inappropriate products, etc.
• Disturbing and problematic content: Excessively hateful remarks or slander, content that make others uncomfortable such as photos of dead bodies, click fraud, links to phishing sites, etc.
• Other:
  • Case 1: Publishing personal information, such as LINE ID or phone number
  • Case 2: Running a promotion to induce friend requests or transfer of personal information (Example: I'm giving out free stickers! If you want some, just leave your LINE ID in the comments section.)
  • Case 3: Impersonating an official announcement (Example: This is the LINE Operations Team. We've detected several issues with our system today. We are giving out 500 LINE Points to every user to apologize for this inconvenience.)
  • Case 4: Unique situations for specific services (Examples: posting spoilers on LINE Manga, making threats or stalking people on LINE BLOG)

LINE will continue working hard to provide safe and secure services with the most transparent operations possible.