Community guidelines are a platform's published rules for what may be posted and done: the constitution its penalties enforce. Every platform prohibits fake engagement somewhere in them, each in its own words, and the differences between platforms matter more than people assume.
The recurring bans, across platforms: inauthentic engagement, spam behaviour, coordinated manipulation, automation outside approved APIs.
The per-platform accents matter: YouTube names fake engagement and sub4sub outright, Reddit outlaws vote manipulation, TikTok bans artificial amplification broadly, Instagram polices automation patterns. The per-platform reality for exchanges is documented, rule by quoted rule, across the follow-for-follow pages.
Enforcement is probabilistic: classifiers approximate the text, penalties land on detection confidence, and the practical rulebook is the enforcement PATTERN.
The observed pattern spends its severity on content harms and credential automation: strikes for content, suspensions for automation and farms, purges for the fake accounts themselves. That's a navigation fact, not a licence; the contract's own text is under terms of service.
Linked from every help centre and usually from removal notices. They're written to be readable; the annual skim is genuinely worth the twenty minutes.
Yes: rules apply at enforcement time, and old content gets swept when policies tighten. Periodic cleanups of your own archive are cheap insurance.
Guidelines govern content and behaviour; terms of service are the overall contract (accounts, liability, the works). Penalties cite guidelines; account-level consequences flow from the terms.
Related terms
Every definition lives in the full glossary, and the services behind the vocabulary are on the services page.