Editorial Policy
Swear It Happened publishes first-person accounts of things that are hard to explain. Some of them are true. Some of them are not. This site is built on that tension rather than pretending it away: the author writes, an editor reads, and the readers deliver the verdict. This page sets out exactly what the editor does between those two steps, because our requirements are not a secret and never have been — every author sees them before submitting, and they are the same for everybody.
What we do not claim to do. We are not fact-checkers and we do not investigate anybody's private life. We cannot travel to a hallway in 1998 and confirm that the door was open. We do not ask for proof, we do not demand documents, and we never publish an editorial opinion on whether a story is true. That question is left to the reader jury: the True / Not sure / Fake counters under every entry are the readers' ruling, and we do not adjust them, weight them or hide an inconvenient one. What we do instead is make sure that what reaches the jury is a real submission from a real person, written in good faith, readable, legal and honestly labelled.
A person reads every single story. Every submission — from a first-time account and from an author with fifty published cases alike — is checked against the rules set out below before it can appear in the archive. Long submissions are read in full; we do not skim the middle and approve on the strength of an opening.
How we read: the passes. A submission goes through the same sequence every time, in this order.
1. Rules and safety. First we check the things that end a review immediately, whatever the quality of the writing: anything that sexualises or endangers a minor (zero tolerance, and reported onward where the law requires it); pornographic content; anything encouraging suicide, self-harm or disordered eating; credible threats, harassment, incitement to violence or hatred; terrorism-related material; fraud, scams or the sale of illegal goods; other people's private data — real full names, addresses, phone numbers, workplaces, licence plates, medical details; and spam or advertising dressed up as a story. We also stop here anything that invents events involving real, identifiable people and presents them as fact, or that uses a personal-account frame to harm someone. The archive is for adults, and authors confirm they are at least 18.
2. The title as a promise. A headline here is a contract with the reader. We check that the story actually delivers what its title advertises, that the payoff is not missing, and that the title does not oversell a quiet account into something it is not. A story whose title promises a scream and whose text delivers a shrug goes back for a better title rather than being rejected.
3. The read itself. Then we read it as a reader would, and we ask reader questions. Does the timeline hold together — do the ages, seasons, distances and hours contradict each other from one paragraph to the next? Do people appear and vanish without explanation? Is the middle doing work, or is it three paragraphs of driving? Is the ending an ending — not necessarily an explanation (most real accounts have none, and that is fine), but a real stopping point rather than an abandoned sentence? And is there enough concrete detail — the kind a witness remembers, the wrong-coloured light, the brand of the radio, the exact wrong thing someone said — to let a reader stand in the scene and decide for themselves? Vagueness is what makes a jury shrug, so we flag it.
4. Language and grammar. Readable English is a submission requirement, not a service we perform for you by default. On the submit form you can ask us to polish your grammar: tick that box and we will correct spelling, punctuation, apostrophes, capitalisation, tense slips, run-on sentences, missing paragraph breaks, stray ALL-CAPS shouting, mismatched quotation marks and doubled words for you — with automated proofreading tools, and without touching your voice, your structure or your ending. Fixing commas is not writing: the words stay yours, which is the only thing we ever ask of an author. If you leave that box unticked, your story is expected to arrive already proofread — a text that comes in full of grammar mistakes is returned to you rather than published. Our house standard is American English spelling; British spellings are left alone when the author is clearly writing in British English, because consistency inside one story matters more than a house preference. English is not everyone's first language, and an accent in the prose is never a reason to decline a good account — if you would rather the commas were our job, just tick the box.
What we never touch. Whether or not you asked for the proofreading above, we do not rewrite. We do not restructure your account into a tidier shape, we do not sharpen your ending, we do not add a twist, we do not remove your digressions and we do not smooth your voice into ours. Your rhythm, your word choices and your ending are yours. When a text needs more than light editing — when whole passages are unreadable or the sequence of events cannot be followed — it goes back to you with the reason, so the rewriting is done by the person who was actually there.
5. Originality and authorship. We check that the submission is the author's own work and not something already published elsewhere, a well-travelled internet legend retold as personal experience, or a copy-paste from another archive. We also run an authorship check for text generated by AI. This one is strict and we do not negotiate it: the site's entire premise is a reader deciding whether they believe a person, and a machine-written "personal experience" defrauds every reader who votes on it. A story that fails this check is not published.
6. Media. Pictures and videos submitted with a story are reviewed separately and by the same standards. A story can be approved while its media is not — in that case the text is published and the picture or video is stripped, and you are told why. The upload slot is for a real photograph taken by you: either with no people in the frame, or with the consent of everyone who appears in it. We do not accept AI-generated images made anywhere outside this site, whatever tool produced them. If you have no photograph of your own, ask our team through Author Support to make an illustration for you — it is published with a clear AI-generated label, so no reader is misled.
7. Filing. Finally the editor checks the practical layer: the right category, sensible tags, the correct place in a series if the story belongs to one, and that nothing in the text breaks the page layout.
Published as told. Unverified. The readers judge. We do not ask an author to prove anything, and we never publish an opinion on whether a story is true — that question belongs to the reader jury, and the verdict is always about the events described, never about the author. The vote is a game the readers agreed to play; using it to damage someone is not. What is never allowed is inventing events involving real, identifiable people and presenting them as fact. How published stories are treated in legal terms is set out in our Terms of Use.
The decision. Four outcomes are possible: published; published after light copy-editing; returned to you with a reason, so you can fix it and resubmit; or declined. Decisions are visible in your account, and the reason is stored there rather than sent into a void. Returning a story is not a verdict on you as a writer — most returns are about one fixable thing. If you think we got it wrong, reply through Author Support: a person, not an automated system, looks at it again.
After publication. A published story is not frozen. Authors can correct errors, and can file an "UPDATE from the author" when a case gets a sequel — updates are reviewed exactly like new submissions. Authors keep the copyright in their own texts — we take only the non-exclusive licence needed to publish them here and to adapt them into audio and video distributed by us or our partners — and can export everything they ever wrote here as a ZIP at any time. If you want a published story taken down, ask through Author Support: the request reaches a person, not a form. A podcast episode or video that has already been released cannot be recalled from listeners' devices, but on request we remove it from our own feed and pages and never use the story in a future episode. Every published page also carries a Report button for readers; every report is read by a person, and anything illegal or against our rules is removed as soon as we know about it.
What we never do. We do not pay for stories and we do not charge to publish one. There is no way to buy a place in a chart, a showcase or a verdict. We do not edit a story to make it more believable, or less. We do not delete comments for disagreeing with an author or with us, only for breaking the comment rules. And we do not publish anything under an author's name that the author did not write.
Questions about a decision, or about this policy: webmaster@swearithappened.com. See also the page for authors, Online Safety and content rules, Terms of Use and About this project.