Community Guidelines
(Last Updated 7/15/2024)
These guidelines do not amend the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy.
Hallow community spaces are designed to help users grow in their prayer lives. These guidelines cover prayer campaigns, group studies, and other in-app experiences in which users interact with one another. In these guidelines, a “user” is any person who interacts with the Hallow app. Our goal is to promote a culture of prayer, peace, and safety in these spaces.
Hallow communities, we are not trying to create a public social media platform, but a group of close knit and supportive spaces that center around the common purpose of sharing Christ with the world in different ways. We take building the right culture of charity, welcoming, and peace very seriously. Therefore, the following rules have been implemented to ensure our community is safe and fruitful.
Community Culture
Our goal at Hallow is to create a place of peace, a place that stands as an example of love and charity, and a place in which anyone of any background is welcome. We encourage treating others with respect, even if you disagree with them. Try to engage with a few different prayer campaigns and posts and please keep your posts reasonably short to give others room to share their thoughts.
We reserve the right to delete comments, posts, user names, campaign names, images, and other public elements of our community spaces at our discretion.
Prohibited Conduct
Violent Speech/Suicidal Intent: No user may threaten harm, incite violence, or express a desire to harm themselves or other persons. Users may not use the platform to create groups, campaigns, or intentions that hope for violence against other groups/individuals
Abuse/Harassment: No user may engage in harassing behavior of other users. Harassment includes any willful course or pattern of ill conduct directed at a specific person. This includes, but is not limited to, intimidation, incessant questions about his/her personal life, and unwanted continued contact. This is aggravated if the content of the messages or behavior are of a sexual nature.
Hateful Conduct: Users may not post or send messages that demean, attack, or in any other way belittle a user based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, religious affiliation, age, disability, disease, or other attributes that make us individuals. Personal or coordinated group attacks, name-calling, trolling and abuse will not be tolerated.
Inappropriate Content: Users may not post pictures or send messages containing material that is obscene, grotesque, or in any way deemed inappropriate by the administrators. We do not allow defamatory, indecent, offensive, profane, discriminatory, misleading, unlawful or threatening comments in our community.
Solicitation, or Requests for Donations: We want the platform to remain focused on prayer and not a marketplace. As a result, we will not be allowing links to crowdfunding platforms, requests for donations, solicitation of other goods/services, or any other form of selling on the platform.
Protection of Privacy
Sharing Contact Information: We strongly discourage anyone from sharing contact information with others you do not know. We want to ensure our community spaces are in accordance with our guidelines. Once a conversation is taken off of the Hallow platform we have no way of enforcing guidelines and regulations. For your own safety, we ask you to be judicious with whom you decide to share information with.
Posting Personal Information: If you share a person’s name, image, or other personally identifiable information on Hallow’s community spaces, you are asserting that you have obtained the appropriate consent from the person(s) (or their guardian, if applicable) featured in the post(s), and/or image(s).
Catholic Doctrine
We want to build a place that is both authentically Catholic and as welcoming as possible to all people from any background. We have folks in the community from all sorts of backgrounds and our interactions should always be charitable and welcoming to people from different faiths or perspectives. Hallow, as an organization, intends to be fully aligned with the official teachings of the Catholic Church and accordingly, users should not post content that disrespects the Church, as such content may be removed. Content that questions or engages in dialogue surrounding Church teaching, if posted with charity, is permitted.
Politics
With regard to politics, we defer to guidance given by the USCCB (link here):
“The Church does not and will not engage in partisan politics. Pastors may wish to publish the following bulletin announcement in the weeks before the election…We strongly urge all parishioners to register, to become informed on key issues, and to vote. The Church does not support or oppose any candidate, but seeks to focus attention on the moral and human dimensions of issues…Church organizations, and their representatives should remember these guidelines: Do not endorse or oppose candidates, political parties, or groups of candidates, or take any action that reasonably could be construed as endorsement or opposition.”
As such, users agree to refrain from engaging in partisan politics except for those issues the Church has an official stance on. We are called to participate in the political process, but the Hallow community spaces are not meant to be spaces of political discourse, but rather to serve as a place of peace away from the arguments and division of our world. Users agree to not post anything or make any user names in support of a specific political party or candidate to any election within the Hallow platform. Posts related to issues that the Church has official teachings on, such as the death penalty, abortion, euthanasia or same sex marriage, are acceptable if posted with an attitude of charity.
Sole Discretion
In addition to the prohibited content outlined above, the administrators (or their designees) may remove anything deemed, in their sole discretion, to be inappropriate for the Hallow platform. Such removals may be subject to the penalties listed below.
Enforcement
In all enforcement activities, the administrators have sole discretion in taking actions they deem appropriate in the situation. However, Hallow will aim to follow the below process:
#1 Warning: Administrators can submit warnings to users for behaviors that fall outside of these guidelines. Warnings should be taken seriously as it is a sign that further escalation may be necessary.
#2 Removal of Post or Content: If a campaign name, reply, message, or other content is found to violate these guidelines, the administrator can remove said content from the platform.
#3 Subsequent Offenses: Subsequent offenses may result in the following penalties, which are decided by administrators on a case-by-case basis and in their sole discretion:
- Account suspended for a period of time
- User name changed
- User permanently removed from community space(s)