Last updated: December 19, 2020

People come to TravelTube to connect with great local businesses. We know that people won’t always agree, but we expect everyone on the site to treat one another and the platform with honesty and respect. We’ve put together these general guidelines to help set the tone for discourse on the site—just in case. Please also read the additional guidelines below for specific types of content that you might contribute to the site.

• Relevance: Please make sure your contributions are appropriate to the forum. For example, reviews aren’t the place for rants about political ideologies, a business’s employment practices, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience.

• Inappropriate content: Colorful language and imagery are fine, but there’s no place for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, or other displays of bigotry.

• Conflicts of interest: Your contributions to TravelTube should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t write reviews of your own business or employer, your friends’ or relatives’ business, your peers or competitors in your industry, or businesses in your networking group. Businesses should never ask customers for review.

• Privacy: Don’t publicize people’s private information. For instance, please don’t post close-up photos or videos of other patrons without their permission, and don’t post other people’s full names unless you’re referring to someone who is commonly referred to by their full name.

• Promotional Content: Don’t post promotional material unless it’s in connection with a TravelTube advertising product and through a Business Account. Let’s keep the site useful for consumers and not overrun with commercial noise from every user.

• Intellectual property: Don’t swipe content from other sites, users, or businesses. You’re a smart cookie, so write your own copy and share your own photos and videos.

The best reviews are personal, passionate, and reflect your consumer experience. They offer a rich narrative, a wealth of detail, and a helpful tip or two for other consumers. Here are some additional thoughts for conscientious reviewers:

• Personal experience: We want to hear about your first hand experience, not what you heard from your partner or co-worker, or what you saw in the news. Tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations.

• Accuracy: Make sure your review is factually correct. Feel free to air your opinions, but don’t exaggerate or misrepresent your experience. We don’t take sides when it comes to factual disputes, so we expect you to stand behind your review.

• Demanding payment: Writing a review should be informative and meant to help the broader TravelTube community. You should not threaten to post or offer to remove a negative review as a way to extract payment from a business.

• Review updates: Review updates should reflect a new experience or interaction with the business. Don’t keep posting about the same old story you’ve already told. If you’d like to add new insight to an old experience, you can edit your review within 30 days of posting it.

Photos, audio and videos should be broadly relevant to the business and reflect the typical consumer experience (e.g., what the business looks like, what the business offers, etc.). If you’re a business, show us what you offer and what makes your business unique. Here are some additional things to keep in mind:

• Keep it relevant to everyone: We may remove a photo or video that showcases a unique personal experience that isn’t relevant to other people (e.g., a receipt or email exchange with a business) from the photo gallery for the business, but it may appear alongside your review if you write one about the business.

• Keep it clean: We don’t want imagery of violence, drug use, nudity, near nudity, or suggestive acts—even if those images are an accurate representation of the business’s services or products.

• Keep it friendly: Don’t use your photos or videos to attack or disparage others. A picture is worth 1,000 words, so it’s best to pick those words carefully and make your point in a review, direct message, or review response.

• Relevance: Please make sure your contributions are appropriate to the forum. For example, reviews aren’t the place for rants about political ideologies, a business’s employment practices, extraordinary circumstances, or other matters that don’t address the core of the consumer experience.

Inappropriate content: Colorful language and imagery are fine, but there’s no place for threats, harassment, lewdness, hate speech, or other displays of bigotry.

Conflicts of interest: Your contributions to Yelp should be unbiased and objective. For example, you shouldn’t write reviews of your own business or employer, your friends’ or relatives’ business, your peers or competitors in your industry, or businesses in your networking group. Businesses should never ask customers to write reviews.

Privacy: Don’t publicize people’s private information. For instance, please don’t post close-up photos or videos of other patrons without their permission, and don’t post other people’s full names unless you’re referring to someone who is commonly referred to by their full name.

Promotional content: Don’t post promotional material unless it’s in connection with a TravelTube advertising product and through a Business Account. Let’s keep the site useful for consumers and not overrun with commercial noise from every user.

Intellectual property: Don’t swipe content from other sites, users, or businesses. You’re a smart cookie, so write your own copy and share your own photos and videos.

All users of TravelTube Services, as defined in our Terms of Service, must comply with our policy, which places restrictions on how you may use such Services. In these Guidelines, we explain how we interpret those restrictions

We’re committed to enforcing our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy in a way that balances important individual rights like free expression and privacy with our responsibility to keep TravelTube and the broader community safe from harmful materials. Help us do that by following our Guidelines and reporting content that might violate them.

All content - videos, recordings, live streams, text, images -- that you submit to us or create using our Services must comply with our Acceptable Use Policy, the contents of which are explained below.

Before you submit any content, you must ensure that you have all necessary rights to do so. You must either own the content, have obtained appropriate licenses, or have some other clear legal basis to upload it. If your content contains any third-party works (like background music or stock footage), you must also have the right to include those works in your content.

Uploading infringing materials may expose you to legal liability and could result in the termination of your account in accordance with our copyright policy.

Members of TravelTube may only upload videos that they materially developed. Examples of material development include shooting significant footage, editing, serving as director of photography (DP). Be sure to include your role in the credits. Note that this rule is in addition to the requirement that you have the right to upload the video. If you don’t own the video, you should have written permission from the owner to upload it on TravelTube

We have reprinted all of the content restrictions listed in our Acceptable Use Policy here, along with additional guidance. You may not upload content that:

• Infringes any third party’s copyrights or other rights (e.g., trademark, privacy rights, etc.)
• Is sexually explicit (e.g., pornography) or promotes a sexual service. We do not allow pornography or other sexually explicit content. This includes content that (1) depicts sexual acts in an explicit manner; (2) contains sexualized nudity; or (3) is primarily intended to cause sexual stimulation, even if no sexual act or nudity is featured. We may allow videos that depict sexuality that serve a clear creative, artistic, aesthetic, or narrative purpose and non-sexual nudity.
• Is defamatory
• Is harassing or abusive
• Contains hateful or discriminatory speech
• Promotes or supports terror or hate groups
• Provides instructions on how to assemble explosive/incendiary devices or homemade/improvised firearms
• Exploits or endangers minors
• Depicts or encourages self-harm or suicide
• Depicts (1) unlawful real-world acts of extreme violence, or (2) animal cruelty or extreme violence towards animals
• Promotes fraudulent or dubious money-making schemes, proposes an unlawful transaction, or uses deceptive marketing practices
• Conveys false or misleading claims about (1) vaccination safety, or (2) health-related information that has a serious potential to cause public harm
• Spreads false or misleading information about voting
• Contains conspiracy-related content where the underlying conspiracy theory makes claims that (1) suggest that a real-world tragedy did not occur, or (2) violate other content restrictions
• Violates any applicable law

You may not use screen names, profile pictures or avatars that are offensive (e.g., names with explicit language), depict any nudity, display symbols associated with gangs, hate groups, or terror organizations, or violate the content restrictions

In making decisions, we consider the entire context of the content to determine whether there may be a valid reason for including certain types of speech, such as newsworthiness, discussion of a religious text, criticism, or dramatic or narrative purposes (for fictional works). Such purposes may not be used, however, as mere devices to justify problematic speech (i.e., Restricted Content under our policy, as detailed in Section 1.3 above). We may also consider related content (like title, description, and tags) and information outside of TravelTube, such as the user’s activities elsewhere, materials linked from TravelTube, and the intended audience.

In some cases, you might submit content that complies with our terms, but may not be suitable for all audiences.

If you submit content that is also distributed on television, you must provide captioning. Similarly, if you are under any legal obligation to provide captioning, you must do so. Even if you are not required to do so, we strongly encourage you to provide them so that we can provide the best experience possible for people who may have difficulty viewing or listening.

Certain users may not use our services, regardless of their content. These are: gangs, hate groups, terror organizations, members of the foregoing, and persons who are subject to U.S. sanctions. In addition, if you are in a country that is subject to comprehensive U.S. sanctions, you may not purchase software services or hardware from us.

Our Terms of Service, sets rules that bar users from (among other things) harassing other users, interfering with our technical measures, spamming, or engaging in inauthentic behavior. “Spamming” includes mass distribution of the same or similar content, content containing links intended to sell the user some dubious item, and the use of bots, scripts, or other automated tools for any purpose. “Inauthentic behavior” includes creating fake accounts, liking or commenting on your own content using another account, and purchasing likes or comments from third-parties

If you see conduct that violates our terms, you may report it by either flagging it (where provided) or contact us.

If you believe that someone has infringed your copyright, please submit a takedown notice using our copyright policy.

We endeavor to review specific content that is flagged by our users, third parties, and certain software-based systems. We do not endeavor to review every piece of content uploaded to our systems. In addition, when we do review content, it is usually for a particular reason, and so we do not endeavor to review it for all possible terms violations. Nor do we “pre-clear” any content before submission.

Violations may result in suspension or removal of videos, account privileges, or your entire account. Account removal will occur in severe cases, such as where you have wilfully or repeatedly violated our terms or have uploaded extremely inappropriate content. If your account is permanently removed, you may not create a new account.

We endeavor to notify account holders of our enforcement decisions by emailing the registered email addresses on file. For this reason, it is important that you keep the email addresses up to date and regularly check your email.

We may, where appropriate, grant grace periods to comply with our requirements. The failure to address our concerns within the provided timeframe will be considered a violation itself absent good cause.

If you believe that we have made a mistake in moderating your account, you may submit a request to reconsider our decision.

These Guidelines provide our definitive views on our restrictions, but are not meant to be exhaustive and shall not be construed to impose limitations or obligations on TravelTube that do not appear in our Terms of Service. We may, from time to time, update our Guidelines to provide guidance on new situations that may arise