SHAFT screening covers every campaign field, not a sample of them

The requirementstatement

The SHAFT screen — sex, hate, alcohol, firearms, tobacco and profanity — must be applied to every sample message and to the campaign description and message flow, and a single hit anywhere fails the whole campaign.

Severityseverity: BlockingBLOCKINGBreaking this rule gets the submission rejected. There is no partial credit.
When it bitesphase: Gates approvalapprovalGet this wrong and the brand or campaign is refused at registration.
What is checkedobject: campaign.description + campaign.sample[] + campaign.message_flow
Where it liveslayer: Message contentMESSAGE_CONTENT
How Ekas settles itdetectability: AI · formAI_FORM; A semantic question about what you wrote: whether a description matches a use case, whether a name looks like a filed entity. Judged by a model against written criteria.
What the fix involvesfailureClass: Hard stopHARD_STOP; Not remediable. Resubmitting will not help, and anyone offering to fix it is selling you a rejection.
Who requires itauthorities: CTIAT-MobileAT&TTCRTwilioBandwidthAWS
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

Reviewers screen the submission as one document, so four clean samples and a fifth that mentions the bar tab is a rejected campaign, not a mostly-passing one. The innocent version of this is very common: the samples are written carefully and the description is written last, in a hurry, naming the product the samples were careful to avoid. Because the rejection names the campaign rather than the field, operators resubmit with the samples polished again and are refused a second time for text they never re-read.

How to fix itremediation

Find which letter was hit before changing anything, because the letters do not share a fix. Sex and hate have no path at any provider. Firearms has none under the strict reading. Alcohol and tobacco have a narrow one that runs through a 21+ date-of-birth age gate rather than through the message copy. The per-letter rule for the category you hit carries the actual path; this one only tells you the screen covers every field you submitted.

Common mistakespitfalls

Re-reading only the samples is the usual second failure — the description and the message flow are screened on the same pass and are where the product name most often survives.

Provider rejection codescodes

The code you get back when this rule is what failed, and whether that provider lets you resubmit.

Provider	Code	Resubmit
Bandwidth	4100	No
Twiliogen1	30883	No

Notesnotes

Deliberately HARD_STOP rather than RETRY_FIELD even though some letters are fixable: the umbrella verdict does not know which letter fired, and a blind regenerate-and-resubmit loop against a SHAFT rejection burns a campaign at Twilio, where the Gen-2 codes are not eligible for resubmission.

Rules you will hit next

6 other rules read campaign.description + campaign.sample[] + campaign.message_flow. Fixing one field to satisfy a single rule is how a resubmission trades one rejection for another, so read these before you change anything.

MSG-137No unsolicited bulk messagingBlockingBLOCKING MSG-164No underage, non-consensual or illegal sexual themesBlockingBLOCKING MSG-170No content promoting, glorifying or inciting violenceBlockingBLOCKING MSG-182No explosives, fireworks or pyrotechnics contentBlockingBLOCKING MSG-183No weapons that are not legal in all fifty statesBlockingBLOCKING MSG-190No kratom or drug-paraphernalia contentBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-161 is one of 122 message content rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.