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Trust & Safety

We are committed to bringing happiness to our users while creating a culture of trust, safety, and respect.

About Our Trust & Safety Program

Our Trust & Safety team is comprised of lawyers and engineers, as well data science, security, privacy, product, and various other technical experts. We receive and evaluate reports of abuse and violations reported from the client, OnZoom events pages, and the Zoom webpage. We work relentlessly to keep our users and our platform safe.

What Are We Doing to Keep Zoom Safe?

We have implemented various measures to keep Zoom vibrant and free from harm.

Our Acceptable Use Guidelines, which govern conduct and content on the Zoom platform.

We evaluate and respond to government and law enforcement requests.

A tiered review system to ensure each reported case receives the proper care and attention that it requires.

A wide range of features users can enable and customize to help combat meeting disruptions.

Are you hosting a Zoom Event? Click here to learn more about tips and tools that you can employ to help keep your events safe.

Read about Zoom's approach to academic freedom.

Read about Zoom’s commitment to freedom of expression.

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Read about Zoom’s approach to suicide and self harm concerns.

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Zoom and the fight against Child Sexual Abuse Material.

Would you like a secondary review of Zoom’s decision about the suspension of your account? Please use this form to submit an appeal request.

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Do you want to report abusive behavior on Zoom that violates our Acceptable Use Guidelines or Terms of Service? Click here.

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Are you a law enforcement official and want to submit a legal request to Zoom? Click here.

Trust & Safety FAQs

Reporting Offensive, Illegal, or Abusive Content or Behavior

Report Abuse - Meetings: There are several ways users can report abuse:

  1. in-meeting
  2. via the web report form.
  3. from the “Meetings” menu via the Zoom web portal

Report Abuse - OnZoom: Events can be reported by clicking the “Report this event”, which is available at the bottom of each event page. Users can also report events via the web report form.

Please visit our Help Center where you will find numerous resources and Support articles. For additional guidance on how to contact Support, Sales, or Billing, please see here

After You Make a Report

After a report is submitted, Zoom’s dedicated Trust & Safety team reviews the report to determine whether there has been a violation of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Guidelines. There is an escalation and review process for difficult cases. We follow up with the reporting user or the event host if we need more information from them, and we also notify the account owner if we take an adverse action on their account.

Once a meeting is reported to us, we act as soon as we can. If the meeting is happening soon, we have an expedited process. When we need to communicate with the account owner, admin or host, we do so as soon as we are able. Turnaround time is context-dependent—we prioritize reports based on type, how much review time is required, and how critical response time is.

Zoom will only take action if we receive reports about possible violations of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Guidelines. We can be made aware of a potential violation before, during or after an event and will make a determination on what action is appropriate as quickly as we are able. We also use an AI tool to scan public-facing OnZoom events.

When we determine that a meeting is in violation of our policies before the meeting is scheduled to occur, we make every effort to notify the account owner in advance of the meeting. We consider appeals on a case-by-case basis.

How Our Trust and Safety Team Works

Our Trust and Safety Team is comprised of dedicated and experienced analysts and lawyers. They receive and evaluate reports of abuse and violations from in the client, OnZoom events pages, the Zoom webpage and trust@zoom.us, which redirects through a link to the webform.

To comply with the law and continue to bring happiness to our users, we have launched content moderation for the entire Zoom platform. After a report is submitted, the Trust and Safety team reviews the report to determine whether there has been a violation of our Terms of Service or Acceptable Use Guidelines.

We have established a documented escalation and review process for difficult cases. Our four-tiered review system ensures that each report receives the proper care and attention that it requires, helping us provide our users with an experience that is as open and diverse as it is free from harmful or malicious activity. Review begins at Tier I when content is flagged by AI or humans for various categories of offending content, and reports may escalate to higher tiers depending on type, urgency, and complexity, and other such factors.

We understand that the same person will have very different expectations of the content in their personal one-on-one conversations, family celebrations, work meetings, large public events, and academic courses, to name just a few uses of Zoom.

Rather than try to create different standards for each use of Zoom, we publish a single standard. Context is vitally important to all of our Trust and Safety decisions and is a factor whenever we evaluate a report.

We commit to relying on reports and public-facing information to discover violations of the Acceptable Use Guidelines and Terms of Service.

People use Zoom in many ways. We have had to scale quickly and create our first Acceptable Use Guidelines designed to help us keep Zoom safe for all our users. We recognize that there are many ways to write Acceptable Use Guidelines. Some are very detailed and others are more general. We wanted to begin with more general guidance and amend it as we experience new use cases and related challenges. We don’t want to prospectively make decisions on the kinds of issues we might see without the benefit of context. As part of our process, we maintain a record of our decisions with the intent to learn from each one.

We have a tiered review process. It starts with a team of analysts who review different kinds of reports and flags in the first instance, and escalate difficult or ambiguous cases. The highest tier is our Appeals Panel. The members of the Appeals Panel come from a diversity of backgrounds, experience levels, tenures and departments at Zoom and serve for one-year terms.

Zoom’s Acceptable Use Guidelines are updated on an as-needed basis. Our Policy team and Appeals Panel regularly review each standard to ensure that they fit our products, serve our users, and are easy for our analysts to apply. We also take suggestions from third party stakeholders, such as civil society organizations.

Once we determine that an update is needed, we circulate a draft internally and externally with Trust & Safety stakeholders. After review and approval, we post the update.

We keep a log of all changes to our Acceptable Use Guidelines here.

Safety and Security Features to Help You Stay Safe on Zoom

Zoom offers a number of security features you can enable and customize.

Features to help keep unauthorized people out of meetings Features to help combat meeting disruptions
  • Waiting rooms
  • Passcodes
  • Geofencing (setting the geographic areas that attendees can join from)
  • Allowing only signed-in Zoom users to join
  • Adding a co-host
  • “Suspend Participant Activities”
  • Streamlined abuse reporting method
  • Settings to limit or turn off
    • Screen sharing
    • Video
    • Audio
    • Annotation
    • Chat
    • Renaming

Your main toolbox for securing meetings is in the settings section of your account while logged in on a browser. Some settings are also available to hosts during meetings in the Zoom app by clicking on the Security icon at the bottom of the app while in a meeting:

For more information on securing your Zoom meetings, please visit our Security Resources.

OnZoom is part of the Zoom platform, so your options for securing events are identical to those for your meetings and webinars. If you create an event with free tickets, we will automatically enable a couple security features. You can turn them off if you wish, but we don’t recommend it unless you know everyone attending your event.

The At Risk Meeting Notifier is a tool to help identify which meetings may be at risk of being disrupted. The At-Risk Meeting Notifier scans public posts on social media sites and other public online resources for Zoom meeting links. When it finds publicly posted meeting information that indicates a given meeting may be at high risk of being disrupted, we notify account owners and admins by email. For more information, please visit the At Risk Meeting Notified support article.

Law Enforcement Requests

Please refer to Zoom’s Government Request Guide for more information.