Content must not depict or facilitate substance abuse

The requirementstatement

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.

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
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: AT&TCTIA
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

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 itremediation

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 mistakespitfalls

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.

Notesnotes

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.

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 trafficBlockingBLOCKING MSG-045Samples must not impersonate another organisationBlockingBLOCKING MSG-175Content must not invade privacy, defame, or otherwise cause harmBlockingBLOCKING MSG-179Alcohol content must not be aimed at people under the drinking ageBlockingBLOCKING MSG-209A charity programme may not run games of chance or recurring donationsBlockingBLOCKING MSG-DECEPTIVEContent must not be deceptive, misleading, or impersonatingBlockingBLOCKING

All message content rules

MSG-177 is one of 122 message content rules in the 915-rule 10DLC registry. Free to cite under CC BY 4.0.