Everyone Paints

Content & Safety Policy

Last updated 28 August 2026

Everyone Paints is one picture that a group paints together by writing about it. That makes these rules cover two things at once: what you write, and what you try to make the picture depict. A paint comment that steers the canvas toward something in this policy breaks it exactly as much as writing the thing outright, and is dealt with the same way.

This page sets out the rules by category. The Terms of Use are the agreement; this is what the categories mean and what we do about them. Copyright and trademark have a page of their own, because reporting those has a formal procedure.

How anything gets acted on

There are three layers, and it is worth being plain that they are not equally strong:

• You report it. Every comment has a Report action beneath it, and every picture has one on it — tap the canvas to open its history, then tap the version you mean. Both take a reason and an optional note, and both reach a queue a person works, who is emailed when something arrives. Reporting a comment also puts the account behind it in front of that person, which is what an account gets suspended from. This is the primary mechanism, and the one that catches what a machine will not.
• You block. Blocking an account hides everything it writes, everywhere, immediately, without waiting for us. It is reversible from your profile.
• The image model refuses. Every canvas is generated through a commercial image model that applies its own content filter, and a refused instruction produces no picture. This stops a category of visual output at the source, but it is the model's filter and not ours: it does not read the replies under a paint, it does not act on accounts, and it is not a substitute for the first two.

When a report is upheld we remove the comment — which also stops it shaping any future version of the picture — and, where the version in front of people is itself the problem, repaint or roll back the canvas. Accounts are suspended, and for the most serious categories terminated. We aim to look at every report within 24 hours, and same-day for anything involving a threat, a minor, or someone in danger.

Hate, harassment and threatening content

Not allowed, in a comment or as an instruction to the canvas:

• Attacks on people for who they are — race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, caste, disability, disease, sex, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation — including slurs and dehumanising comparisons.
• The symbols, insignia, slogans and numeric codes of hate movements and designated terrorist organisations, and asking the canvas to paint them.
• Praise, support or representation of a violent extremist group, or of a person who committed a mass-casualty attack.
• Harassment: targeting someone with abuse, following them from canvas to canvas, or organising others to do it.
• Threats of violence, wishing harm on someone, or celebrating harm that has already happened to them.
• Posting someone's private information — address, workplace, phone number, papers — or asking others to find it.

Hate content is removed on sight and the account is suspended; a second instance, or any account that exists mainly for this, is terminated.

Threats are handled differently from everything else on this page. A report tagged as a threat is looked at the day it arrives, ahead of the rest of the queue. Where a threat names a person, a place or a time, or where anything suggests someone is in immediate danger, we act without waiting to decide whether the threat was sincere: the account is suspended immediately, the content is preserved rather than deleted, and we contact law enforcement in the relevant jurisdiction. We will also respond to an emergency request from law enforcement without a subpoena where there is a risk to life — see Legal requests.

Self-harm and suicide

If you are thinking about hurting yourself, please talk to someone now. In the US and Canada call or text 988. In the UK and Ireland call 116 123 (Samaritans). Anywhere else, findahelpline.com lists a free helpline by country.

Not allowed:

• Encouraging anyone to hurt or kill themselves, including as a joke or an insult.
• Instructions, methods, dosages, or comparisons of how effective a method is.
• Content that presents self-harm, suicide or an eating disorder as beautiful, aspirational or a solution — and, specifically, asking the canvas to paint it that way. An aestheticised picture is the form this risk takes in an app that makes pictures, and it is treated as a violation rather than as a grey area.
• Challenges, pacts, or games that involve hurting yourself.

Talking about your own experience, including recovery, is allowed. We would rather people be able to say they are struggling than push it somewhere it cannot be seen.

When a report suggests someone may be at risk, that comes before the rest of the queue. We do not silently delete it and move on: the person is sent the resources above, and the content is left up unless it breaks a rule above or someone reports it again. Where there is reason to believe somebody is in immediate danger, we contact emergency services in their jurisdiction with what we have. An account that repeatedly pushes self-harm at other people is suspended, and terminated if it continues.

Sexual content and the safety of minors

There is no sexual content on Everyone Paints at all. Not in comments, and not as something to steer the picture toward. This is a single shared image that everybody in a group sees, so there is no setting, no opt-in and no adult section — nudity, sexual acts, and content whose evident purpose is arousal are removed wherever they appear.

Anything sexualising a minor — real or generated, drawn or described, including a paint comment that asks for it — results in immediate and permanent termination of the account, without warning and without appeal. We preserve the content and the account records rather than deleting them, and we report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children through the CyberTipline, as United States law requires of us (18 U.S.C. § 2258A). NCMEC forwards reports to the law enforcement agency with jurisdiction, and we cooperate fully with that agency. The same applies to grooming, to soliciting images from a minor, and to sexual content involving anyone who appears to be a minor.

You must be at least 13 to hold an account, and an account we believe belongs to someone younger is removed. If you believe a child is using the app, or that any content on it sexualises a child, report it in the app and write to support@everyonepaints.com — that address is monitored for exactly this.

You do not have to come through us. Anyone can report child sexual exploitation directly to NCMEC at report.cybertip.org, or by calling 1-800-843-5678, and outside the United States to the police or hotline in your own country. If a child is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number first.

Violence and graphic content

Not allowed:

• Gore: mutilation, dismemberment, visible internal injury, or a picture whose point is the injury.
• Real people's deaths or injuries, and footage or depictions of an actual attack, execution or atrocity.
• Cruelty to animals.
• Content that celebrates violence, or that is designed to make a real victim's suffering entertaining.
• Instructions for causing serious harm — weapons, explosives, poisons.

A canvas can be dark, tense, or violent in the way a painting or a film is violent. What separates the two here is severity and intent: implied conflict, stylised action and historical or news subject matter are allowed; anatomical gore and the glorification of real suffering are not. Where a canvas has drifted into the second, the version is repainted or rolled back rather than left up while the comments behind it are argued about.

The image models we generate through apply their own filter to every request, and on most of them we set how hard it bites, per canvas. Not all: a few of the models expose no filter setting at all, and on those we get the provider's own judgement and no say in it. Either way the filter is a floor and not the rule — it refuses a good deal of graphic output before it exists, but it decides nothing about comments, accounts, or the canvases we run.

Real people, likeness and impersonation

Not allowed:

• Asking the canvas to depict a real, identifiable person in a sexual situation, in a way that suggests they committed a crime, or in any other false scenario presented as real.
• Pretending to be someone else — a person, a company, or this app — in a username, a display name, a profile picture or a comment.
• Using someone's likeness to defame, degrade or harass them.
• Anyone's likeness used in an endorsement they did not give.

Public figures may be discussed, criticised and satirised. The line is deception and degradation, not the subject.

Two things about how this app works are worth stating rather than leaving to be discovered. Every image here is machine-generated from written instructions, and is labelled as such in the app and in both store listings — nothing on a canvas is a photograph of anything. And when comments are combined into the single instruction sent to the image model, the app deliberately prefers a visual description over a proper name wherever a name was only being used to point at something already in the picture, which makes the identity of a named person harder to lock onto by accident.

If you are depicted on a canvas and did not agree to it, write to support@everyonepaints.com from an address we can tie to you, or report the picture in the app — open the version you mean and use This depicts a real person. Reporting the picture rather than the whole canvas is worth doing: it tells us which of a canvas's versions you mean, which is the difference between a complaint we can act on and one we have to go looking through a history for. We do not require you to prove your identity before we look; we may ask for enough to be satisfied you are who you say you are before acting on a claim made on someone else's behalf.

Upheld claims mean three things, and the first is the one people ask about: the picture comes down — that version stops being served, keeps its place in the history marked as removed, and the canvas goes back to the last version before it. The comments behind the depiction are removed too, so they stop shaping later versions, and the canvas can be repainted away from it. You do not need to send a copyright notice to get any of that; a likeness claim is not a copyright claim and we do not ask you to dress it up as one.

Copyright, trademarks and celebrity likeness

Do not post other people's work as your own, and do not use the canvas to reproduce a copyrighted work, a brand's logo or trade dress, or a celebrity's likeness for commercial purposes.

Rights holders should use the notice procedure on the Copyright & Trademark Policy page, which also sets out the counter-notice route and what happens to accounts that infringe repeatedly.

Also not allowed

• Spam, scams, phishing, and automated flooding of a canvas.
• Selling or promoting illegal goods, drugs, weapons or sexual services.
• Malware, or links to it.
• Evading a suspension with another account.

What happens, and how to disagree with it

What we do depends on what the rule was, whether it looks deliberate, and what the account has done before. In rough order: the comment is removed and stops shaping the artwork; the canvas is repainted or rolled back; the account is suspended, which leaves everything it wrote in place but stops it writing more; the account is terminated. Sexual content involving a minor and credible threats skip straight to the end of that list.

If you think we got it wrong, write to support@everyonepaints.com from the address on the account. A person who was not the one who made the original decision looks at it, and a suspension we should not have applied is lifted.

Legal requests

We keep enough of a record to answer a lawful request: the account, its content, the moderation actions taken on it, and the ordinary server request logs our hosting provider keeps. Where content is removed for a reason in this policy, the record of the removal survives the removal.

We are a registered electronic service provider with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and file CyberTipline reports under 18 U.S.C. § 2258A; the records behind such a report are preserved for at least one year under § 2258A(h), and we do not notify the account holder of a report made under that section.

Law enforcement requests should go to support@everyonepaints.com with "LAW ENFORCEMENT" in the subject line. We require valid legal process appropriate to what is being asked for, we will preserve records on request while that process is obtained, and we respond to emergency requests where there is a risk of death or serious physical injury without waiting for it. We tell people about requests for their data unless we are legally barred from doing so, or where telling them would put someone at risk.

Reporting anything on this page

In the app: the Report action under any comment, and the one on any version of a picture — tap the canvas to open its history and choose the version. By email, and for anything a reporter should not have to hold an account to raise: support@everyonepaints.com.