What is considered inappropriate content on iNaturalist?

Content that violates the Terms of Use or our Community Guidelines may be hidden by curators or deleted by staff. Milder forms of rudeness are unfortunate, but are not something we'll remove.

Examples of what is likely to be hidden or deleted:

• Insults or threats
• Racist or sexist content
• Hate speech
• Sexually explicit content involving humans
• Spam
• Defamatory content, libelous content, or content which violates a third party's privacy

Examples of what is likely to not be hidden or deleted:

• Silly content
• Photos of non-organisms
• Misidentifications which are not malicious
• Heated debates
• Rudeness and curt comments

Although iNat is primarily for sharing observations of wild organisms, observations of captive animals, garden plants, and other organisms most naturalists may not find interesting are okay (they're alive, after all). Other abiotic phenomena should be marked as "Evidence of organism — No" in the Data Quality Assessment section, which is at the bottom of the observation page. Pictures of pets, humans, abiotic phenomena, or obvious test observations are okay unless someone repeatedly posts such content.

Copyright violations should be flagged, i.e. re-published text or images that were created by other people without any evidence of permission or license by the creator of the work. If copyrighted images are used, flag the photo(s) directly rather than the observation. You can do this by clicking the "i" (white circle) below the photo and clicking "Flag this photo" in the very bottom righthand corner of that page. Then choose "Copyright Infringement" in the pop-up and save.