Acceptable use

This policy applies to everybody using the service and to everything published through it. It forms part of the terms of service, and where the two could be read differently, the terms govern.

It applies to what you do through us and to the consequences of it, including where the consequence falls on a platform account rather than on this service.

• Anything unlawful where you or your audience are, or anything defamatory, hateful, or inciting violence.
• Anything you do not have the right to publish. That includes images, video, music and text belonging to somebody else, and it includes a person’s likeness where you need their permission and do not have it.
• Sexual content involving minors, content sexualising minors, and any depiction of a real person in a sexual context without their consent. There is no warning and no second chance for this one.
• Material designed to deceive: a fabricated quote attributed to a real person, a doctored image presented as a record of something that happened, a fake review, or a claim about a product you know to be false.
• Anything a platform you are publishing to prohibits. Their rules apply to your account on their service whatever ours say.

This service shows you what a named competitor published and how it performed. That signal is there to inform something of your own. It is not a source of material to republish, and the reason is practical rather than moral.

Instagram and TikTok both penalise accounts that repost content without meaningfully transforming it, by removing them from recommendations. Instagram’s stated bar for transformation is humour, social commentary, a cultural reference or a relatable take, carried by original text, edits or voiceover, and it says plainly that a speed change and a credit screenshot do not clear it. That penalty applies to your account, not ours.

So, specifically, you may not use this service to:

• Republish a competitor’s image, video or caption, whether or not you credit them.
• Publish a lightly reworded version of a competitor’s caption, including one produced by asking an AI feature here to rewrite it.
• Present a competitor’s content, metrics or endorsement as your own or as connected to you.

What you may do is the thing the product is for: read that a format, a hook or a posting time worked for somebody in your market, and make something of your own from it.

• Connect only accounts you are authorised to publish to. Publishing as a brand you do not represent is impersonation, and it is the misuse most likely to cost somebody their platform account permanently.
• Do not share one login between people. Seats exist, invitations exist, and a shared password makes it impossible to tell who published what.
• Do not use the service to work around a restriction a platform has placed on you, such as posting from a second account after the first was limited.

• Do not send unsolicited bulk messages, and do not publish at a volume or in a pattern that breaks the rules of the platform receiving it. Platform rate limits are theirs, and our plan limits do not override them.
• Do not publish the same content to many accounts in a way designed to look like separate voices.
• Do not use the AI features to generate content at a scale you have no intention of reviewing. Everything published through here is published by you.

• Do not probe, scan or load test the service, circumvent a rate limit or a plan limit, or attempt to reach data belonging to another customer.
• Do not use the service to scrape or bulk-collect data from a platform in a way that platform prohibits. Every competitor read this product makes goes through a documented first-party interface, and routing something else through it is not covered by that.
• Do not resell, sublicense or white-label the service without our written agreement, and do not attempt to reverse engineer it.
• Do not upload malware, or use the service to distribute it.

Security research is welcome and is not covered by the first bullet if you tell us first. Write to hello@crestnote.com before you start, and see the security page.

What we do depends on what happened. In most cases the first step is that we tell you, and the matter ends there. Where the risk is real and immediate, including anything in section 2 involving minors, we will suspend an account first and explain afterwards.

We may remove specific content, suspend a connection, suspend a workspace, or end the agreement under the terms. We will tell you which and why, unless the law prevents us.

None of this makes us the arbiter of what the platforms allow. They enforce their own rules on their own service, and a platform can restrict or remove your account there whatever we decide here.

If something published through this service breaks this policy, write to hello@crestnote.com with a link and a sentence on what is wrong. A person reads it.