# MSG-177 — Content must not depict or facilitate substance abuse

> Message content must not depict, promote or be designed to facilitate the abuse of alcohol, drugs, tobacco or other controlled substances, including where the abuse is implied rather than stated.

- **Rule ID:** MSG-177
- **Layer:** Message content (`MESSAGE_CONTENT`)
- **Checks:** `campaign.sample[] + campaign.description`
- **Severity:** BLOCKING — Breaking this rule gets the submission rejected outright.
- **When it bites:** Gates approval — get this wrong and registration is refused
- **How it is detected:** AI judgement over the submitted form
- **Fix type:** Hard stop — not remediable, resubmission will not help
- **Required by:** AT&T, CTIA
- **Applies:** Applies to every 10DLC registration.
- **Canonical URL:** https://ekas.io/rules/10dlc/message-content/msg-177/

## Why this rule exists

This is the limb of the alcohol prohibition that an age gate does not reach, and confusing the two costs operators a build cycle: gating the site stops minors seeing the offer, and does nothing about copy that sells drinking to excess as the point. AT&T and the CTIA messaging principles both extend it to non-verbal implication, so an emoji, an image or a wink carries the meaning as well as a sentence does. Bars and event promoters hit this constantly and innocently, because "bottomless", "all you can drink" and "we will not judge how many" are ordinary trade language that reads, to a screen, as encouragement to drink to harm.

## How to fix it

Remove the quantity, the challenge and the intoxication as the selling point, and price or describe the offer instead. Do not reach for the age gate here — it settles who may see an alcohol offer, not what the offer says, so building one leaves this finding exactly where it was. Done when nothing in the copy would read as encouragement if a regulator read it aloud.

## Common mistakes

- An emoji can carry the whole violation on its own: a row of beer glasses beside "Friday" is the implication the rule is written about, and deleting the words does not remove it.

## Notes

Graded BLOCKING on the strict reading. The research records the AT&T alcohol-abuse row at HIGH and the CTIA abuse-reference row at BLOCKING; the registry takes the stricter of the two and records the disagreement here rather than averaging it.