GoDaddy 2023 Sustainability Report: Our Operations | Content Safety

Originally published in GoDaddy's 2023 Sustainability Report

Content Safety

We target harmful content while creating space for varying ideas.

At GoDaddy, we believe open communication, freedom of expression, and diversity of thought is paramount to empowering people to express their beliefs. We recognize, however, that this must be balanced with safe and responsible management to respond to harmful content properly.

Registries and registrars like GoDaddy act as real estate agents of the digital world, providing domain registration services to the public. If a domain name is registered at one location but hosted elsewhere, the registrar may lack the authority or capability to remove or edit the content hosted on a website. Therefore, we share responsibility to address and mitigate negative consequences that may arise from the misuse of digital technologies to foster a safe, open, and responsible internet for all.

Our Content Safety Philosophy 

GoDaddy’s Universal Terms of Service (UTOS) sets forth the terms and conditions governing the use of our sites, products, and services globally. It’s a violation of our policy to use our services to promote, encourage, or engage in violence or for any illegal activity, including, but not limited to the exploitation of children, the promotion of terrorism, the sale of prescription medicine without a valid prescription, and fraudulent activity. We address new challenges by stress-testing annually and reviewing our content safety policies.

For more information on our content safety philosophy, please review our Trust Center.

To earn the trust of our stakeholders, we take complaints and feedback seriously while building better products and services. Our dedicated Content Safety team reviews every submitted content complaint for possible violations of our UTOS or other content safety policies. If the team identifies a violation, it determines an appropriate response, which may include account suspension or termination or other actions as needed. Our Content Safety team processed nearly 10,000 complaint cases and responded within 46 hours, on average.¹

Protecting Children in Digital Spaces

Since its inception in 2006, we’ve been a proud member of the Tech Coalition, a collaborative effort among industry leaders to prevent and eradicate online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA). This coalition enables members across the industry to share knowledge and work together to protect children in the digital world. Through our deep involvement with the industry through organizations like the Tech Coalition, we developed industry standards for protecting children online and created and implemented state of the art software systems to combat CSEA on our platforms.

The fight against CSEA is far from over, but we’ll continue to collaborate with security companies, independent experts, law enforcement, and other government agencies to remove CSEA content, advance preventative technologies, and remain a leader in this space.

Ambitions for 2024 

While we remain committed to championing diverse perspectives, we intend to continue our focus on minimizing the harmful impacts of online content within the scope of our UTOS and other content safety policies. We will also continue to closely monitor new challenges in this evolving landscape and seek to continue building trust with stakeholders.

To learn more, read our 2023 Sustainability Report.

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About this Report 

The GoDaddy 2023 Sustainability Report details our progress toward our corporate sustainability goals, strategies, and initiatives in support of our overarching corporate mission and values. Unless otherwise noted, this report reflects our corporate sustainability performance across our global operations covering the fiscal year period from January 1 to December 31, 2023. To demonstrate our commitment to transparent communication regarding our sustainability progress, we routinely share updates through our website and our annual Sustainability Report. We welcome your questions, comments, and feedback on this report by contacting ESG@GoDaddy.com.

This report references the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards and includes select Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) metrics for the Internet Media and Services sector. We also disclose our contributions and progress toward priority UN SDGs. For additional information on how we align with these frameworks and key indicators demonstrating our sustainability performance, please review the Frameworks and Metrics section.

¹The 2023 reported figure excludes spam and duplicates that were included in prior year reporting.