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. Nothing on this site auto-publishes. There is no queue that empties itself overnight, no "trusted author" bypass and no score that lets a text through unread. Every submission — from a first-time account and from an author with fifty published cases alike — is opened and read from the first line to the last by a human editor before its status changes. 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. 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. We proofread every story. Spelling, punctuation, apostrophes, capitalisation, tense consistency (a story that keeps sliding between past and present is exhausting to read), sentence fragments and run-on sentences, missing paragraph breaks in a wall of text, stray ALL-CAPS shouting, mismatched or missing quotation marks in dialogue, doubled words, and the tell-tale artefacts of a machine translation that nobody re-read. Our house standard is American English spelling; British spellings are not corrected 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 a heavy accent in the prose is never a reason to reject a good account — we would rather clean up the commas than lose the story.
What we fix, and what we never touch. Light copy-editing is done for you, quietly: typos, punctuation, obvious slips, paragraph breaks. 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 real photographs. Authors' own AI-generated images are not allowed; if you have no photograph, you can ask our team through Author Support to make an illustration for you, and 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.
Fiction is welcome — say so. This is a true-and-fiction archive, and we have never pretended otherwise. Authors submit accounts of what they witnessed; authors may also, if they prefer, open a story with a line stating that it is fiction. Both are legitimate ways to publish here, and readers vote either way — the verdict is always about the events described, never about the author. What is not allowed is the third option: inventing events involving real, identifiable people and presenting them as fact, or using the "true story" frame to spread something harmful. The vote is a game the readers agreed to play. Using it to damage someone is not. In legal terms every story in this archive is treated as fiction told in the first person unless its author states otherwise, and any resemblance to real events, persons or places is coincidental.
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.