[SO2]Rating Criteria of
Rating Standard SafetyOnline2


(Last update: August 8th, 2002)
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"SafetyOnline2" is a new rating standard based on "SafetyOnline", a rating standard that the Internet Association, Japan has been promoting. The original SafetyOnline defined five categories, namely "Nudity," "Sex,""Violence," "Language," and "Others," and applied five rating values between 0 and 4 for each category. With the new SafetyOnline2 standard, the five categories are consolidated into a single category which apply five levels of harmfulness between 0 and 4.

The rating criteria of SafetyOnline2 are shown in the following table. Larger rating level values indicate Web sites with more harmful content.

The standard description file for SafetyOnline2 is SafetyOnline2.rat.


LevelSafetyOnline2 Rating Criteria Description
Level 4Emphasis on genitals: Pornographic images/videos which emphasize human or humanized objects' genitals.
Sexual acts: Images/videos which explicitly depict sexual acts. Images/videos which show sexual crime such as rape, sadistic or masochistic sexual acts.
Cruelty: Images/videos which shows cruel scenes such as torture, cutting of dead bodies, rape, or images/videos depicting such as a dead body that is cut into pieces.
Defamation: Defamation against a particular individual or a group or an extremely obscene expression.
Antisocial: Content considered antisocial.
Level 3Complete nudity: Images/videos such as photographs, paintings, and illustrations which show human or humanized objects' genitals or pubic hair.
Depiction of obscured or implicated sexual acts: Images/videos which do not clearly depict sexual acts, but depicts obscured or implicated sexual acts.
Killing of human beings: Depiction of violence and killing of human or humanized objects or images/videos which show the results of violence such as blood and gore or a dead body.
Obscene expression: Obscene expression.
Illegitimacy: Content which has illegitimacy but thought to have no antisocial intentions.
Level 2Partial nudity: Images/videos which does not show genitals but show parts of a human body that is normally covered by cloth, such as bare bottoms or breasts.
Sexual touching with clothes on: Images/videos of sexual touching with opposite sex or same sex with their clothes on such as petting.
Killing or deliberate injury: Images/videos of killing or deliberate injury or acts that implicate those things to human beings or humanized objects.
Expletives: Crude words or expletives which have profanity or evil intension.
Offend public order and morals: Content that seem to offend public order and morals but are not against the law.
Level 1Highly revealing clothes: Images/videos of a man or woman with clothes that covers his or her genitals, buttocks and breasts, but, for instance, emphasizes the woman's body line, or shows at least three fourths of her breast.
Sexual kissing: Images/videos which shows kissing with tongues contacting or kissing with mouths open. This does not include kissing to express affection.
Fighting: Images/videos which shows fights between people or animals. This does not include the depiction of deliberate injury or blood and gore.
Mild expletives: Words which are comparatively mild but crude. Includes expressions of sexual functions for scientific purposes.
Caution needed: Content which may require caution when shown to children under the age of 18.
Level 0Does not include content described between level 1 and 4.



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