TargetBay Review Content Policy

Purpose of this document

This policy establishes the standards TargetBay applies to reviews, ratings, questions and answers, photos, videos, testimonials, and other user-generated content collected, displayed, moderated, or syndicated through TargetBay. It is intended to provide a clear foundation for review authenticity, consumer transparency, moderation, and third-party platform compliance.

This document is a marketing and product working draft and should be reviewed by TargetBay's legal/compliance team before publication or incorporation into contractual terms.

Policy Overview

1. Purpose

TargetBay is committed to maintaining a review ecosystem that is authentic, transparent, fair, useful, and compliant with applicable laws and platform requirements.

This Review Content Policy establishes the standards that apply to reviews, ratings, questions and answers, photos, videos, testimonials, and other user-generated content submitted, collected, displayed, moderated, or syndicated through TargetBay.

Our goal is to ensure that customer feedback represents genuine consumer experiences and that merchants do not use TargetBay to create, manipulate, suppress, or misrepresent customer opinions.

This policy applies to:

• Reviews and ratings
• Written customer feedback
• Questions and answers
• Customer photos and videos
• Testimonials
• Review responses
• Review requests and collection campaigns
• Incentivized reviews
• Imported and syndicated reviews
• AI-assisted or AI-generated review content
• Content submitted through TargetBay widgets, campaigns, APIs, integrations, and other collection methods

2. Core Principles

2.1 Authenticity

Reviews must be based on a genuine experience with the product, service, merchant, or business being reviewed.

TargetBay does not permit:

• Fabricated reviews
• Reviews written by people who did not use or purchase the product
• Reviews purchased from third parties
• Reviews generated solely to create artificial social proof
• Reviews submitted through fake accounts or fake orders
• Reviews submitted by bots or automated systems
• Reviews that materially misrepresent the reviewer's experience

2.2 Independence and Fairness

Merchants must not manipulate customer feedback to create a misleading impression of customer sentiment.

Merchants must not:

A review will not be removed merely because it is negative or unfavorable to a merchant.

• Ask only customers they believe will leave positive reviews to submit public reviews
• Discourage customers from submitting negative reviews
• Prevent legitimate negative reviews from being published solely because they are negative
• Require a particular star rating
• Ask customers to change or remove a negative review in exchange for compensation, refunds, discounts, or other benefits
• Alter the substance of a customer's review without the customer's authorization
• Selectively publish positive reviews while systematically excluding legitimate negative reviews
• Use TargetBay's moderation functionality to artificially improve ratings

3. Prohibited Review Content

3.1 Fake, Fraudulent, or Misleading Reviews

Reviews must not:

• Be fabricated
• Misrepresent the reviewer's experience
• Be submitted by someone who has not actually experienced the product or service
• Be submitted using fake identities
• Be submitted through fake transactions or accounts
• Be created or purchased from review farms or third-party review sellers
• Impersonate another person or organization
• Misrepresent an affiliation with a merchant, brand, employee, competitor, or other entity

3.2 Reviews by Employees, Owners, or Other Interested Parties

Employees, owners, officers, agents, family members, agencies, or other individuals with a material connection to a business must not submit reviews that create a misleading impression of independent consumer opinion.

Where such content is permitted by applicable law and platform rules, the material relationship must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed.

Businesses must not use employees, agencies, friends, family members, or other affiliated individuals to manufacture positive or negative customer sentiment.

4. Incentivized Reviews

TargetBay may support review collection programs involving incentives where permitted by applicable law and the destination platform.

Incentives must never be conditional on sentiment.

A merchant may not offer an incentive in exchange for a specific star rating, a positive review, or a negative review. Merchants must also not communicate an express or implied requirement that a review must be positive or negative to receive the incentive.

Where an incentive is offered, merchants are responsible for ensuring that the incentive is appropriately disclosed where required.

Destination-specific restrictions apply. TargetBay does not guarantee that an incentivized review collected through TargetBay is eligible for syndication to every third-party platform.

5. Personal and Confidential Information

Reviews must not contain sensitive or unnecessary personal information about the reviewer or another person.

Prohibited information includes, without limitation:

Reviews may also be removed where they expose another person's personal information without authorization.

• Credit card numbers
• Bank account information
• Passwords
• Government identification numbers
• Private medical information
• Private financial information
• Personal addresses
• Personal phone numbers
• Personal email addresses
• Authentication credentials
• Other sensitive personal information belonging to another individual

6. Contact Information, Links and Promotional Content

Reviews must not be used primarily as a vehicle for advertising, promotion, spam, or directing customers to unrelated websites.

TargetBay may remove or restrict reviews containing:

• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• External URLs
• Promotional codes
• Affiliate links
• Advertising
• Unrelated commercial offers
• Promotional references to competing products or businesses
• Repeated promotional content

7. Offensive, Abusive, or Harmful Content

TargetBay does not permit content that is:

Content that attacks an individual or protected group based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, disability, gender, age, sexual orientation, or gender identity may be removed.

• Threatening
• Harassing
• Abusive
• Obscene
• Sexually explicit
• Pornographic
• Defamatory
• Libelous
• Hateful
• Violent
• Intended to intimidate or threaten another person
• Encouraging violence or illegal activity

8. Illegal or Regulated Content

TargetBay may restrict or remove content that:

Destination platforms may impose additional restrictions on regulated products.

• Promotes illegal activity
• Facilitates fraud
• Promotes the sale of illegal goods
• Contains instructions for illegal activity
• Promotes unsafe or dangerous activities
• Contains malicious software or phishing links
• Promotes prohibited or highly regulated products where the applicable destination prohibits such content

9. Intellectual Property

Reviewers must only submit content they own or have permission to use.

This applies to text, photographs, videos, graphics, logos, music, and other copyrighted or proprietary material.

TargetBay may remove content where it receives a credible claim that the content infringes another person's intellectual property rights.

10. Off-Topic Content

Reviews should primarily relate to the product, service, merchant, or experience being reviewed.

TargetBay may restrict content that is primarily about:

Legitimate customer experiences should not be automatically removed merely because they are unfavorable.

• Political or social controversies unrelated to the product
• Personal disputes
• Delivery or shipping issues where the review is intended specifically for product feedback
• Customer-service disputes unrelated to the product
• Other unrelated topics

11. Duplicate, Spam, and Low-Quality Content

TargetBay may identify or restrict:

• Duplicate reviews
• Repeated submissions
• Automated spam
• Gibberish
• Meaningless or nonsensical content
• Reviews consisting primarily of promotional material
• Artificially generated review volume
• Reviews submitted multiple times for the same experience

12. Review Eligibility

• Every review must be original and meaningful; we do not publish duplicate or blank submissions for the same product.
• Reviews that repeat an existing submission (for the same product) or contain no content will not be published.
• Reviewers must be at least 14 years old for their reviews to be published.
• To protect younger users, we do not publish reviews submitted by anyone under the age of 14.
• All reviews must be written in English to be published on our platform.
• To keep reviews consistent and readable, we accept English-language reviews only.

13. AI-Generated Content

Reviews must represent the genuine experience and opinion of the reviewer.

TargetBay must not be used to generate fabricated customer experiences or automatically create reviews that appear to have been written by real customers.

AI tools may assist a customer with grammar, spelling, formatting, translation, or structuring feedback, provided that the resulting content continues to accurately represent the customer's genuine experience and is not used to fabricate an experience.

AI-generated review content may be subject to additional destination restrictions. TargetBay will therefore not represent AI-assisted or AI-generated content as eligible for every syndication destination.

14. Review Authenticity and Verification

TargetBay may use multiple signals to identify potentially suspicious review activity.

These may include:

A review may be marked as Verified Purchase where TargetBay or the merchant has sufficient information to establish that the reviewer completed a qualifying purchase.

A verification label does not mean that TargetBay guarantees the accuracy of every statement contained in the review.

• Order information
• Purchase history
• Review-source information
• Account information
• IP address
• Device information
• Submission patterns
• Review frequency
• Duplicate-content detection
• Automated fraud detection
• Merchant-provided transaction information
• Manual review
• Other reasonable technical or behavioral signals

15. Review Moderation

TargetBay may use automated and human moderation to identify content that may violate this policy.

Moderation may occur before publication, after publication, before syndication, after syndication, in response to a customer or merchant report, or as part of periodic quality or fraud monitoring.

TargetBay may:

Automated moderation decisions may be subject to human review or appeal where TargetBay provides an applicable review process.

• Publish the content
• Hold the content for review
• Request additional information
• Remove or restrict the content
• Mark the content as potentially suspicious
• Prevent syndication to a particular destination
• Restrict accounts or collection methods associated with abusive activity

16. Reporting a Review

Customers and merchants may report content they believe violates this policy.

Reports may include concerns relating to fraud, fake reviews, personal information, harassment, hate speech, illegal content, intellectual-property infringement, spam, impersonation, or other policy violations.

TargetBay may request additional information reasonably necessary to investigate a report.

A report does not automatically result in removal. TargetBay will evaluate the reported content against this policy and, where applicable, the requirements of the relevant destination platform.

17. Review Removal

TargetBay may remove or restrict a review where it determines that the review violates this policy, violates applicable law, is fraudulent or demonstrably inauthentic, contains prohibited personal information, contains prohibited malicious or illegal content, infringes third-party rights, is spam or duplicate content, is subject to a valid legal removal request, or cannot be lawfully syndicated to a particular destination.

Negative reviews are not removed solely because they are negative. Similarly, positive reviews are not automatically protected from moderation simply because they benefit a merchant.

The objective of moderation is to enforce content standards, not to improve a merchant's rating.

18. Review Responses

Merchants may respond to customer reviews where TargetBay provides this functionality.

Responses must:

Merchants remain responsible for the content of their responses.

• Be truthful and relevant
• Avoid personal information
• Avoid harassment or threats
• Avoid discriminatory language
• Avoid misleading claims
• Not pressure the reviewer to remove or change their review
• Not offer compensation in exchange for changing the review
• Not disclose confidential customer information

19. Review Collection Practices

Merchants using TargetBay to request reviews must use neutral and non-deceptive collection practices.

Merchants must not:

TargetBay may restrict campaigns or collection methods that appear designed to manipulate customer sentiment.

• Ask only customers they believe will leave positive reviews to submit public reviews
• Route dissatisfied customers into a private channel while routing satisfied customers to a public review
• Ask for a specific star rating
• Ask customers to remove negative reviews
• Offer benefits specifically for positive reviews
• Create fake orders for the purpose of generating reviews
• Reimburse customers in exchange for predetermined review outcomes
• Ask people who have not experienced the product to submit reviews

20. Syndication to Third-Party Platforms

TargetBay may provide functionality to syndicate eligible reviews to third-party platforms, marketplaces, search engines, social commerce platforms, or other destinations.

Examples may include Google, Walmart, TikTok Shop, and other review and commerce platforms.

A review being permitted on TargetBay does not necessarily mean that the review is eligible for every syndication destination.

Each destination may have additional requirements concerning review authenticity, verified purchases, incentives, AI-generated content, ownership, duplicate reviews, product identifiers, review language, personal information, review solicitation, review management, and content categories.

TargetBay may therefore filter, exclude, transform metadata, or prevent syndication of otherwise permissible content when required by the applicable destination.

21. Merchant Responsibilities

Merchants using TargetBay are responsible for ensuring that their review collection and marketing practices comply with applicable laws and regulations, consumer-protection requirements, privacy and data-protection requirements, third-party platform policies, marketplace requirements, and advertising and disclosure requirements.

Merchants must not instruct or request TargetBay to create fake reviews, suppress legitimate negative reviews, alter customer sentiment, manipulate ratings, fabricate purchases, create fake customer identities, circumvent destination-platform policies, misrepresent incentivized or sponsored content, or circumvent review verification requirements.

22. TargetBay's Responsibilities

TargetBay will maintain reasonable technical and operational measures designed to:

TargetBay does not guarantee that automated systems will identify every fraudulent, inaccurate, or policy-violating review.

• Detect prohibited content
• Identify suspicious review activity
• Support moderation
• Support review reporting
• Maintain review metadata where required
• Apply applicable destination-specific syndication rules
• Prevent known prohibited content from being syndicated where reasonably identifiable
• Provide merchants with appropriate tools to manage compliant review content

23. Enforcement

Depending on the nature and severity of the violation, TargetBay may:

Repeated or intentional attempts to manipulate reviews may result in stronger enforcement.

• Reject content
• Remove content
• Restrict publication
• Prevent syndication
• Disable a review collection campaign
• Restrict specific review functionality
• Restrict API access
• Suspend an account
• Terminate an account
• Report unlawful activity to appropriate authorities where required or appropriate

24. Appeals and Review

Where an appeal process is available, merchants or reviewers may request reconsideration of a moderation decision.

TargetBay may request supporting information, including order information, proof of purchase, review ownership information, evidence of authenticity, or information concerning an alleged policy violation.

TargetBay may decline to restore content where doing so would violate applicable law, a third-party platform requirement, or another legitimate policy requirement.

25. Changes to This Policy

TargetBay may update this policy from time to time to reflect changes in applicable law, changes in third-party platform requirements, changes to TargetBay products and services, new fraud or abuse patterns, or changes to industry standards.

The latest version will be published through the TargetBay website or applicable product documentation.

26. Merchant Acknowledgement

By using TargetBay's review collection, moderation, display, or syndication functionality, the merchant acknowledges and agrees that:

I understand that reviews displayed or syndicated through TargetBay must represent genuine customer experiences. I will not use TargetBay to create, purchase, fabricate, manipulate, suppress, or selectively solicit reviews in a manner that violates applicable law or third-party platform requirements. I understand that TargetBay may moderate, restrict, remove, or prevent the syndication of content that does not meet these requirements. I understand that permission to display a review within TargetBay does not guarantee that the review is eligible for publication or syndication on every third-party platform.