Content must not invade privacy, defame, or otherwise cause harm

JSONMarkdown

The requirementstatement

Message content must not invade privacy, create a safety risk, or be unlawful, abusive, malicious, misleading, excessively violent, obscene or defamatory.

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.sample[] + campaign.description
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
CTIA
When it appliesapplicabilityText
Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

CTIA's residual harm clause is what catches the damage nobody wrote a category for — a message that names a third party's debt, address or medical appointment to somebody else, or that asserts something ruinous about a named business. The recipient of a privacy leak is not the person harmed by it, which is why no complaint-driven check finds these and why the clause is written as a sweep. Businesses reach it innocently through personalisation: a template that renders the wrong record, or a referral message that tells the recipient why their friend needs the service.

How to fix itremediation

Strip any third-party detail out of the message body and address the recipient about their own relationship with you only. Where personalisation pulls in another person's data — a referrer, a dependent, a co-signer — replace it with a reference the recipient already holds, and remove any assertion about a named business you cannot document.

Common mistakespitfalls

  • A message that is accurate can still fail this: disclosing a true fact about someone who is not the recipient is the violation, not getting it wrong.

Notesnotes

This is CTIA MPBP §5.3.1, which is written as a catch-all covering several harms that have dedicated rules elsewhere. It is kept whole rather than split so the limbs nobody else owns — privacy invasion, safety risk and defamation — are not lost between rules; the criteria route the overlapping limbs so a single defect is reported once.

Rules you will hit next

6 other rules read campaign.sample[] + campaign.description. 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-034Samples must not be framed as test, demo or machine-to-machine trafficBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-045Samples must not impersonate another organisationBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-177Content must not depict or facilitate substance abuseBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-179Alcohol content must not be aimed at people under the drinking ageBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-209A charity programme may not run games of chance or recurring donationsBlockingBLOCKINGMSG-DECEPTIVEContent must not be deceptive, misleading, or impersonatingBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-175 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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