Submit Reports & Appeals

Reports

Cove's Rules allow you to automate 90% of your Trust & Safety work, but unfortunately, it's impossible to automate 100% of it. There will always be harmful Items that slips through your automated systems. To handle those Items, you should allow your users to flag/report anything on the platform that they think is harmful (and in fact, a flagging/reporting feature is required by App Store guidelines and the EU's Digital Services Act). These reports are typically manually reviewed by a real person to account for the mistakes of automation.

Cove helps you handle this workflow through the Moderator Console. Your moderators can review those reports and make decisions about whether or not to take an Action. All you have to do is send us reported Items through our Report API, and we'll automatically add those Items to a Review Queue for manual review. Then, your moderators can log into Cove, review every report in the Queue, and decide whether to take action on each Item.

Appeals

Cove also supports handling Appeals. When you make a moderation decision that affects a user on your platform, you may want to give them the ability to "appeal" your decision (and the EU's Digital Services Act requires this for many platforms). If a user appeals a moderation decision, you'll send that Appeal to Cove's Appeal API so that a moderator can review the Appeal and decide whether or not to overturn the original decision.

Reports and appeals can be closely related. For example:

• User A can report User B's profile, which you would send to Cove through the Report API.
• If a moderator suspend's User B, then User B may appeal that suspension decision, which you would send to Cove through the Appeal API.
• A different moderator can then accept the Appeal and overturn the suspension, or they can reject the Appeal and sustain the suspension.

Sending Reports & Appeals to Cove

When a user on your platform is requesting that you review an Item, you'll hit one of the following endpoints:

1. Report API: When a user on your platform flags an Item as potentially harmful, and you want your moderators to review it, you should submit that "report" to this API.
2. Appeal API: When a user on your platform requests that you re-review a moderation decision because they disagree with your original decision, you should submit that "appeal" to this API.

Both Reports and Appeals are added to Review Queues, but those Queues are kept separate for clarity and logging purposes.