Ethics & Standards

The stated aim is to add as much value to as many people as possible, and to build recurring income on top of that value rather than instead of it. Two consequences follow, and they shape every other rule here: the core method stays free, and nothing is published that would mislead the person reading it.

These categories are refused outright rather than flagged. They are expressed as commercial categories, which is deliberate: the same list can be checked by anyone, against any framework, without needing to accept a particular worldview first. It aligns with mainstream ESG exclusion screening — tobacco, weapons, gambling, adult content and high-cost credit are standard exclusions — and with the values-based and faith-sensitive exclusion lists used in ethical finance, where income must come from a real asset, service or trade rather than from money lent on interest or from speculative gain.

Each entry carries a compliant adjacent market, because a refusal with no alternative is not useful to a creator trying to earn a living.

• Wagering & games of chance

  Revenue is taken from loss rather than created by value. Wagering products produce net harm at population scale and are a standard ESG exclusion.

  Adjacent market: Skill-based learning content — strategy, probability literacy, or game design as a craft.

• Intoxicants

  Impairs judgement and is a recognised public-health harm category.

  Adjacent market: Non-alcoholic beverage, mocktail craft, or hospitality-skills content.

• Tobacco & nicotine

  Nicotine products are a universal ESG exclusion and are prohibited from paid promotion on every major short-form platform.

  Adjacent market: Cessation support, breathwork, or endurance training.

• Adult & sexually explicit content

  Outside the boundary of this project and demonetised or banned on all target platforms.

  Adjacent market: Relationship communication, dating-skill education, or personal confidence content.

• Pork-derived products

  Excluded under the values-based screen applied by this project.

  Adjacent market: Poultry, lamb, seafood, or plant-forward versions of the same dish.

• Interest-bearing returns & lending

  Income generated from interest on money rather than from a real asset, service, or trade is excluded under the values-based screen. It also carries the heaviest advertising regulation of any category — loan and credit promotions require APR disclosure and affordability warnings in most jurisdictions.

  Adjacent market: Fee-free budgeting tools, ethical/asset-backed investing education, expense reduction, or income-skill building.

• Speculative gain detached from an underlying asset or service

  Promoting gain with no underlying productive asset transfers wealth from the audience to the promoter. It combines extreme loss rates with the heaviest claims-enforcement risk.

  Adjacent market: Financial literacy, risk education, or the craft of building a real business.

• Arms & weaponry

  A standard ESG exclusion; also demonetised on every target platform.

  Adjacent market: Outdoor skills, safety education, or archery/marksmanship as sport.

• Recruitment-based compensation

  Compensating recruitment rather than retail sale is a pyramid characteristic and is unlawful or restricted in most jurisdictions.

  Adjacent market: Direct product resale with transparent margins, or a service business.

• Conventional insurance transfer

  Conventional risk-transfer contracts priced on interest-bearing reserves fall outside the values-based screen. Heavily regulated to advertise.

  Adjacent market: Mutual/cooperative risk-sharing education, or emergency-fund building.

• Disease treatment & cure claims

  Therapeutic claims require regulatory authorisation and clinical evidence. Unauthorised disease claims are among the most heavily penalised advertising violations.

  Adjacent market: General wellbeing habits, clearly framed as not medical advice.

A creator publishing to thousands of people is making a commercial representation, whether or not they think of it that way. The following are screened for, with a compliant rewrite offered each time:

• Guaranteed income — An income guarantee is a claim you cannot substantiate for a third party. Individual results vary with audience, niche and execution, so this is treated as deceptive on its face.
• Specific earnings figure without typicality — A concrete earnings figure is read by the audience as a typical result. Where it is your own atypical outcome it must be labelled as such, with the period and the effort stated.
• “Passive” income described as effort-free — Recurring revenue is real; effort-free revenue is not. Every model here has an ongoing build and maintenance cost, and describing it as passive understates the work the viewer must do.
• Rapid-wealth framing — Rapid-wealth framing is the signature of the claims that regulators act on, and it attracts the least sustainable audience.
• Overclaim against a professional service — A tool does not replace a professional. This is an unverifiable comparison claim and it misrepresents what the viewer is buying.
• Unverifiable absolute — Absolute superlatives need evidence you almost certainly do not hold. They also read as low-trust to the audience you want.
• Quantified health outcome — A quantified body-composition promise in a fixed window is a health claim. It fails for most viewers and is regulated advertising in most jurisdictions.
• Clinical authority without a source — “Proven” and “studies show” assert evidence. If you cannot cite the specific study in the caption, the claim is unsubstantiated.
• False scarcity or invented deadline — A deadline that does not exist is a deceptive commercial practice, not a copywriting technique. It is the single most penalised pressure tactic in the EU framework.
• Social proof asserted without a source — An audience number you cannot evidence is a fabricated testimonial. It is also trivially falsifiable by a commenter, which costs you the trust you were buying.
• Fear or shame pressure — Shaming the audience converts poorly and is an aggressive commercial practice where it impairs freedom of choice. It also poisons the community you are trying to build.
• Investment or business risk not stated — “No risk” is never true of a business venture. Omitting downside is a material omission, which is treated the same as a false statement.

Where a creator receives anything of value in exchange for, or in connection with, a mention, the connection must be disclosed. Disclose the material connection where the viewer will see it before they act — not at the end, not only in a link, not only on a profile page.

FTC Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR Part 255 · EU UCPD Art. 7(2) · ASA/CAP 2.1

• Show the total price, including tax and any recurring renewal, before checkout. — Drip pricing — a low headline price with fees added later — is a named unfair practice, and it is the most common refund driver.
• Cancellation must take as few steps as sign-up, in the same medium. — A harder exit than entrance is a negative-option violation and a churn number you cannot trust.
• Only publish deadlines and stock counts that are real and will be honoured. — An invented countdown is deceptive on its face and is explicitly listed as a prohibited practice.
• State the refund window up front and honour it without an argument. — A refund policy nobody can find is not a policy. Generous refunds lower, not raise, net refund rates.
• Only publish results, counts and testimonials you can evidence. — Fabricated social proof is the fastest way to lose an audience permanently, and it is actionable.
• No instalment credit, no interest-bearing add-ons, no buy-now-pay-later stacking as the default. — Excluded under the values-based screen, and consumer-credit advertising is among the most heavily regulated categories.
• Keep the core method free forever, and price the paid tier so a student or a first-time creator can reach it. — The stated purpose of this project is value to as many lives as possible. A paywall on the fundamentals contradicts it and shrinks the audience that pays for the rest.

The value ladder is deliberately free at the bottom. The widest possible audience gets the complete method at no cost; paid tiers sell depth, convenience and access, and never the removal of a paywall from something that was promised free.

• Free — everyone — Never gate, delay, or degrade it. No email wall on the core teaching.
• Free — the give-away — One field maximum to sign up. Immediate delivery, no forced sequence.
• Entry paid — State the contents before purchase. Refund window honoured without friction.
• Recurring — Cancel in one click. No retention maze, no guilt screens, no phone-only cancellation.
• Access — Cap it. Under-delivering to a paying community is the fastest way to destroy the free tier's trust.

GDPR Art. 5(1)(c) data minimisation, Art. 6 lawful basis · ePrivacy Directive · CCPA §1798.100

• No account, no email address, no name — nothing is collected to use the app.
• Every record is written to the visitor's own browser localStorage and never transmitted.
• No analytics, no advertising pixels, no third-party scripts, no cookies set by this app.
• Full data export and full deletion are one click in Settings — erasure needs no request to anyone.

The rules above are derived from published instruments rather than invented for this project. The ones cited in the product are:

• FTC Act §5 and the FTC Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) — deception, substantiation and disclosure of material connections.
• EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC — misleading and aggressive commercial practices, and the Annex I list of practices prohibited in all circumstances.
• UK CAP Code — substantiation and typicality of results claims.
• GDPR Articles 5 and 6, the ePrivacy Directive, and the CCPA — data minimisation, lawful basis and consumer rights.
• WCAG 2.2 Level AA — the accessibility target for the interface itself.
• FTC Negative Option Rule and the EU Consumer Rights Directive — cancellation, refunds and pre-contract information.

References are given so a reader can check the reasoning, not as a claim of certification. This project is not certified against any standard, and nothing here is legal advice.

Three places, so it does not depend on anyone remembering:

• At authoring time — the Integrity Gate screens every blueprint, hook, caption and vault link in the browser.
• At generation time — CTA variants that trip a blocking rule are discarded rather than offered.
• At build time — npm run build fails if any bundled template promotes an excluded sector or a prohibited claim. The shipped corpus is screened by the same engine that screens the user.