No adult or sexually explicit content

The requirementstatement

Campaign content must not promote sexually explicit or adult content.

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: TwilioTCRT-MobileAT&TCTIA
When it appliesapplicabilityText: Applies to every 10DLC registration.

Why this rule existsrationale

The S in SHAFT, and the one letter with no path at all. Carriers treat adult content as unsuitable for a channel with no age verification at the transport layer, and Twilio codes it as not eligible for resubmission. Operators arrive here expecting the alcohol treatment — build an age gate, come back — and that expectation is the expensive part: acting on it burns a campaign that cannot be recovered, on top of the build.

How to fix itremediation

Do not build an age gate for this — it is not the fix, and no amount of verification makes adult content registrable on 10DLC under any use case. The only thing that clears the finding is that the content is not adult: if the campaign is a clinical or sexual-health service being read as adult, say who the recipients are and what the service does in the terms a clinician would use. Otherwise adult programmes need a different channel and a different carrier relationship entirely.

Common mistakespitfalls

Bandwidth's Proxy path and Infobip both publish a conditional age-gate code for sexual content, which reads as a route and is not one under the strict reading — spending a build cycle on it costs you the campaign at Twilio and gains nothing anywhere else.

Provider rejection codescodes

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

Provider	Code	Resubmit
Twiliogen2	30953	No
Bandwidth	703	No
Telnyx	703	No

Notesnotes

Discharges the catalog's remediation constraint (MSG-167) as well as the content prohibition: the rule exists as much to withhold the age-gate path as to detect the category. Divergence recorded — Bandwidth Proxy 7006 and Infobip 7006 are conditional on a robust age gate, while Twilio 30953, Bandwidth DCA2 703, Bird 703, Telnyx 703 and AWS all refuse outright. Canonical resolution is terminal.

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-161SHAFT screening covers every campaign field, not a sample of themBlockingBLOCKING 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

All message content rules

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