Family-friendly styling must not carry adult themes

JSONMarkdown

The requirementstatement

Content presented as suitable for a family audience must not carry adult themes, and must not depict children or characters aimed at children in a sexualised or otherwise unsuitable way.

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[]
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
TelnyxBirdT-Mobile
When it appliesapplicabilityText
Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

The harm is that nothing on the surface warns anyone: the message reads as a cartoon promotion, so it is forwarded, shown to a child, and only then understood. Telnyx and Bird both name this shape specifically because keyword screening is blind to it — every word in the message is clean, and the adult content lives in what the styling is pointing at. The honest version is a mascot or cartoon identity attached to an adult product, adopted because it tested well and without anyone thinking about who else receives the text.

How to fix itremediation

Drop the child-facing styling, the mascot and the cartoon voice, and describe the product to adults in adult terms. If the product itself is adult, note that restyling only settles this rule — the underlying content is still judged by the adult-content prohibition, which has no path on 10DLC.

Provider rejection codescodes

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

ProviderCodeResubmit
Telnyx703No
Bird703No

Rules you will hit next

One other rule reads campaign.description + campaign.sample[]. 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-142The description must match the sample messagesBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-008Opt-in confirmation must be 20–255 charactersBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-009HELP reply must be 20–255 charactersBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-011Opt-out confirmation must be 20–255 charactersBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-018An MMS campaign must attach at least one sample media fileBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-019Each MMS sample file must sit under its per-type size ceilingBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-163 is one of 122 message content rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.

Reading the rules is the easy part.

Ekas runs every rule that gates approval, 823 of these 915, against your registration before it reaches the carrier. It reads your site, your policy pages and your opt-in the way a reviewer would, and hands you the fix, not just the verdict.

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