Terms of Service

Version 1.4 · Effective 21 September 2026
The short version: don't upload what you don't have the right to share, don't violate anyone's privacy, and understand that verification here is a community judgment — not a legal or journalistic guarantee of truth. Everything below spells that out properly.
Contents
1Acceptance & eligibility

By creating an account you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, don't create an account — you can still read the public source archive, all three graphs, and any already-published Brief as a guest, without agreeing to anything beyond ordinary web use.

Cittadelle is invite-only: you need a personal invite code from an existing member. You must be at least 18 years old. Given that Cittadelle deals with real history and politics, and the real people and institutions behind them, that's not a formality — it's the right minimum for what gets discussed here.

One account per person. You're responsible for what happens under your account, including anyone you knowingly share your credentials with.

2What Cittadelle is

Cittadelle is a closed platform for collectively documenting and verifying claims about history and politics — sources, arguments, and the connections between people, institutions and money — checked by the people using it. There are no professional fact-checkers or editorial staff, and Cittadelle does not take a position on what gets concluded. What you get is a record of what documents say and how the community weighed them, not a verdict. See the Manifesto and The Method for how that actually works.

We do not review or monitor content before it is published, and we have no general obligation to monitor it afterwards. We rely on members to follow these Terms and on the mechanisms described below — contestation for disagreement, Section 7 for anything unlawful — rather than pre-approving what gets posted.

3Your account
  • Invite codes are personal. Inviting someone is a form of vouching for them — don't sell, publish, or hand yours to someone you wouldn't personally stand behind as a member.
  • Keep your password to yourself. If you lose access, use account recovery (the "Forgot password?" link on Sign in, or Settings once you're in) — we will never ask you for your password directly, by email or otherwise.
  • We may ask you to confirm your email if we have reason to think it's not a working address you control.
  • Your username is your signature on everything you contribute — there is no separate display name. You may change it once; after that it is permanent. Changing it updates the name shown on everything you have already published. Your previous username is retired permanently: nobody else can register it, and links pointing to it will still lead to your profile.
4Content you contribute

You keep ownership of what you write and upload — sources, posts, verification notes, Briefs, graph proposals, everything. By publishing it on Cittadelle, you grant us a non-exclusive licence to host it, display it, and keep it accessible according to the platform's own rules (for example, a source you submitted may carry forward a contestation raised against it, whether or not you'd rather it didn't).

If you delete your account, your published contributions stay in the archive — reattributed to a member called [Departed], not deleted — because the record shouldn't lose evidence just because a contributor left. This is explained further in the Manifesto and applies whether you agree with it in the moment or not.

Messages you send another member through Correspondence are not covered by this licence. They carry no public code, cannot be cited, anchored, or surfaced anywhere else on the platform, and remain exactly what they are: a private conversation between the two of you.

Nor is what you keep in Traces: what you follow, the levels and private notes you set, and your map. None of it is published or shown to anyone but you; the only public trace of it is an anonymous count of how many members trace something. See the Privacy Policy.

5Content rules

Everything you upload or cite has to clear two tests. There is no grey area on either one.

(a) Copyright

You may only upload or share material you have the legal right to share for documentation and critique — not merely material you happen to have a copy of. In practice, that typically covers: material you created yourself; material already in the public domain; material you're using under a recognised right to quote, report or critique; and material — official records, declassified documents, leaked or previously published material — that whoever made it available to you had the right to release.

Simply possessing a copy of something is not the same as having the right to redistribute it, and that distinction is the one that matters here. If in doubt, cite it or link to where it was already published, rather than uploading the file yourself.

(b) Privacy of the people Cittadelle documents

This is not about your own privacy as a member — it's about the people who appear in what gets published. Citing what a real, relevant document actually says about someone — including a private individual who happens to appear in it — is exactly what Cittadelle is for, the same way a newspaper or an encyclopedia can report what a document says about someone without that person needing to be famous. That is not the line.

The line is building a profile that goes beyond the document: using someone's incidental appearance in one source as a reason to add unrelated information about them — a home address, family details, an unrelated personal history — or to give them a standing entry (a graph node, an entity page) that accumulates information about them across the platform, when their actual connection to what's being documented is peripheral. Public figures, by contrast, can be documented as an ongoing subject in the exercise of their public role — that continuity is exactly what a public role means.

And some categories are off-limits regardless of who the subject is: health information, sexual orientation, and other sensitive personal data about identifiable living individuals may not be published here, public figure or not — unless it is already lawfully and prominently public knowledge in its own right (for example, something the person has themselves made public).

One case needs extra care: an unproven allegation of criminal or otherwise seriously wrongful conduct, about a private individual with no public profile of their own who has not been convicted of it. What a document alleges can still be cited — that is what Cittadelle is for — but write it as what the document says or claims, not as settled fact in your own voice. An attributed claim and a flat assertion carry very different weight, especially for someone with no platform to answer it.

6Prohibited conduct

Besides the two rules above, you may not:

  • Post anything illegal under applicable law;
  • Harass, threaten, or target an individual member — separate from documenting a public figure's public actions, which is the platform's purpose;
  • Impersonate another person or organisation;
  • Upload malware or attempt to compromise the platform's security;
  • Use automated tools to scrape or mass-download the archive;
  • Create multiple accounts to evade a block, a declined message request, or a contested standing;
  • Publish someone's home address, personal phone number, or other direct contact details as such — regardless of who they are. Citing what a document says is covered by Section 5; exposing how to reach someone in person is not documentation, and is not permitted here.
7Enforcement & removal

Disagreement about whether a source or a connection holds up is handled the way the rest of Cittadelle works: contestation, argued in the open, resolved by the weight of what members bring to it. That's deliberate — nobody on Cittadelle has the authority to declare who's right on a contested claim.

Removing something because it's illegal, because it breaches these Terms, or because we've received a credible legal notice (copyright, defamation, privacy, an order from a court or authority) is a different matter and does not go through that process — it would not be fair to leave something legally urgent sitting in a slow community thread. For that, contact support@cittadelle.com directly. This is a narrow power over unlawful or rule-breaking material — it is not a way to settle an argument about what a document means.

8Reporting illegal content

Anyone can report illegal content to us — you do not need an account. Write to support@cittadelle.com with the address of the page, what exactly you believe is unlawful, and why. Leave us a way to reach you and we will confirm that we received it. The same address is the point of contact for authorities, and everything can be done by email: there is no form to hunt for and no login to get past.

We read every report ourselves, act on it in a timely and non-arbitrary way, and decide on what it says rather than on who sent it. Nothing here is filtered or taken down automatically — no automated moderation runs on this platform, and every decision to remove or restrict something is made by a person.

If we do remove or restrict something, we tell the member who published it: what was removed, the ground we relied on — a law, or a specific rule in Sections 5 and 6 — whether the report came from outside, and how to answer us. If you think we got it wrong, reply and say why: we will look again. Going to a court instead is a right these Terms never take away from you.

Where we have reason to suspect that something published here points to a criminal offence involving a threat to someone’s life or safety, we will inform the competent authorities.

9No warranty on content

A source's status — Verified, Authenticated, In Review, Contested — reflects a process this community ran, not a legal or journalistic finding of fact. A graph connection carries the same caveat: it reflects either what a cited source states directly, or a community-argued inference from it — labeled as one or the other — never an independent finding by Cittadelle. Cittadelle does not check, endorse, or stand behind the truth of any claim, source, or connection published by members, including Briefs and graph proposals. Read everything here the way you'd read any single source: critically, and next to what else is available.

10Limitation of liability

Cittadelle is not responsible for what members publish. Content on this platform is written and uploaded by members, not by us — we don't write it, approve it before it goes up, or endorse it by hosting it, any more than a hosting provider is the author of what it hosts. If something a member publishes is unlawful, the responsibility for it is theirs, not Cittadelle's.

What we do instead is what Section 7 already describes: remove what we're required to remove once we know about it. That is the actual protection this section relies on — it would not hold up if we had reason to know about unlawful content and did nothing. Beyond that, Cittadelle is provided as-is, without warranties of any kind, and to the extent permitted by law we are not liable for damages arising from your use of the platform or from content posted by other members.

11Suspension & termination

You can delete your own account at any time from Settings. We can suspend or terminate an account that clearly breaches these Terms — the illegal-content and legal-notice path in Section 7, not disagreements over verification. If we take something down after a copyright complaint and you believe the complaint was wrong — you hold the rights, or the use was a legitimate quotation for documentation and critique — write to us and say so: we will reconsider, and put it back if you are right. An account responsible for repeated copyright infringement will be terminated. Where reasonably possible, we'll tell you why.

12Changes to these Terms, and to Cittadelle

We may update these Terms as the platform changes. If we do, we'll show you the new version and ask you to accept it again before you can keep using your account. Your acceptance, and which version you accepted, is recorded on your account.

Cittadelle itself will change too: features get added, altered, and occasionally withdrawn. If we ever have to reduce or stop the service, we will say so in advance wherever that is possible — and your own work can be exported from Settings at any time, without asking us, precisely so that it never depends on our still being here.

13Governing law

These Terms, and any dispute arising from your use of Cittadelle as a member, are governed by the law of Italy, and Italian courts have jurisdiction over such disputes. This governs the relationship between you and Cittadelle specifically — it does not, by itself, determine which country's law would apply to a claim brought by someone who is not a Cittadelle member, for example about content that concerns them.

If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, this choice of law does not take away the protections of your own country’s mandatory consumer rules, and you keep the right to bring a case before the courts where you live.

14General
  • If any part of these Terms turns out to be invalid or unenforceable, the rest stands, and the invalid part is read as narrowly as the law allows rather than thrown out whole.
  • Not enforcing a rule once does not mean giving it up.
  • Cittadelle is run today as an independent project. If it is later placed under a legal entity created to run it, these Terms and your account move with it — we will tell you, and the Privacy Policy will name the new controller before that happens.
  • These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole of the agreement between you and Cittadelle about your use of the platform.
15Contact

Cittadelle is provided by a private individual in Italy, pending the constitution of an association that will take it over — see Section 14. Their identity and contact details are given on request to anyone entitled to them, and to any authority that asks. Questions about these Terms, copyright concerns, reports of illegal content, or urgent removal requests: support@cittadelle.com.

Version 1.4 · Effective 21 September 2026 Read the Privacy Policy →
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