The February 2026 Character.AI moderation wave, in two user captures

In mid February 2026, users of Character.AI reported that characters in their accounts had been replaced by entries labeled "Moderated". Character.AI did not publish a count. This page records two of the posts users made at the time, transcribes the figures visible in them, and lists what can and cannot be said about the label from public sources.

Summary

• On 18 February 2026 (UTC), an r/CharacterAI post titled "Sad day" showed 18 consecutive entries, all labeled "Moderated", across two images.
• Each entry still displayed a conversation counter. The largest read 3.4m. Five of the 18 read more than 100k: 3.4m, 481.1k, 248.6k, 113.8k and 110.3k.
• The day before, a post titled "Aaaaand everything is moderated again" showed a Chats list in which several conversations appeared under the name "Moderated", next to conversations whose character names were still shown.
• These are two accounts' screens. They are not a measure of the wave's total size, which has not been published.

The two posts

Posting times, image counts and post text come from the public Reddit archives Arctic Shift and PullPush, which recorded both posts 17 seconds after publication. The posters' usernames are not reproduced here, and are blacked out in our screenshots.

Post 1: a Chats list, 17 February 2026

What the image shows:

• Entries in the Chats list remain listed after the label is applied. The character's name and avatar are replaced by "Moderated" and a yellow "M" tile.
• The image does not show what happens when one of those entries is opened.

Post 2: 18 characters with their counters, 18 February 2026

The 18 entries, transcribed

Every entry shows "Moderated" as its title and as its subtitle; no character name is visible. "Counter as shown" is the number next to the speech-bubble icon, copied exactly. "Counter, expanded" turns the app's abbreviation into a whole number (k = thousand, m = million); because the app rounds, the expanded figure is approximate. "Likes as shown" is the number next to the heart icon.

Download the table as CSV: /research/data/character-ai-moderation-wave-feb-2026.csv (18 rows; columns: position, character_name_as_shown, counter_as_shown, counter_numeric, screenshot_file, post_url).

Notes on the table:

• Entry 5 is the only one whose tile is dimmed and overlaid with a crossed-out eye icon, and it shows no heart counter. Entry 9 also shows no heart counter. We found no public explanation of either difference.
• The table records what the screen displayed. It does not tell us whether these are characters the poster created or characters made by others, because the heading of the screen is not visible in either image.
• The speech-bubble figure is the number Character.AI displays on a character's card. We did not find a Character.AI definition of exactly what it counts, so this page calls it a counter rather than a number of users or messages.

What the "Moderated" label does, and what is documented

Each statement below is followed by its source. Where we could not find a source, the statement is listed separately and not asserted.

Documented:

1. The label replaces a character's name, and its avatar, with "Moderated" and a yellow "M" tile, in the Chats list and in a list of characters. Source: our captures of the two posts above (17 and 18 February 2026).
2. Labeled entries keep displaying their counters in the list of characters. Source: the "Sad day" post, both images.
3. Conversations with labeled characters stayed visible in at least one user's Chats list. Source: the "Aaaaand everything is moderated again" post.
4. Users reported that, during this wave, characters were "replaced by a 'Moderated' tag" or disappeared. Source: PiunikaWeb, 18 February 2026, describing r/CharacterAI posts.
5. A moderator of r/CharacterAI was quoted as writing: "We have to follow the law, and that means taking Characters down when IP owners ask us to." Source: PiunikaWeb, 18 February 2026. We did not locate the original comment.
6. A stickied moderator comment under an r/CharacterAI post of 22 February 2026 about an original character labeled "Moderated" reads: "If any of your original Characters were mistakenly affected, please report them here so we can review https://support.character.ai/ . We're actively working to identify and restore any false positives as quickly as possible." Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1rbbph9/why_is_my_oc_moderated/ (captured 8 September 2026).
7. Character.AI's help centre states that "through human or automatic moderation", content can be "tagged as content that should not be shown (e.g. in search)", and gives appeals@character.ai as the contact for content believed to be moderated by mistake. Source: Character.AI help centre, "Why is my post/Character/comment not appearing?", dated 29 April 2023. This article predates the February 2026 wave and does not mention it.
8. Character.AI's help centre describes an appeal process: the creator is emailed when action is taken, can reply to that email to appeal, the company aims to decide within 24 hours, an approved appeal restores the content, and each item can be appealed once. Source: Character.AI help centre, "How Appeals Work", updated 3 September 2026. We do not know whether this process was in place in February 2026.
9. For an earlier group of removals, Character.AI wrote that removed characters would be added to its blocklists and that "users also won't have access to their chat history with the Characters in question." Source: Character.AI blog, "Community Safety Updates", 22 October 2024. This statement concerns the 2024 removals, not the February 2026 label.

Not documented, so not asserted here:

• That a character labeled "Moderated" in February 2026 could no longer be edited by its creator. No source found.
• That conversations with a labeled character could no longer be continued, read or exported during the February 2026 wave. The 2024 blog post above says chat history was lost for the characters removed then; we found no equivalent statement for 2026.
• Whether labeled characters were deleted or hidden. No source found.
• What the dimmed tile and crossed-out eye on entry 5 mean. No source found.

What we are not claiming

• We are not claiming a total. Character.AI did not publish how many characters were removed or relabeled in this wave, and we found no figure in its blog, its help centre or the press coverage cited here.
• We are not claiming the 18 entries are representative. They come from one account, captured by its owner on one day, and the second image suggests the list continued.
• We are not claiming the counters are exact. The app rounds them; the expanded figures inherit that rounding.
• We are not claiming to know why these 18 characters were labeled. No character name is visible, so the entries cannot be matched to any rights holder, franchise or rule.
• We are not claiming the label means deletion, or that it means the same thing in every case.

Method

• 8 September 2026: the three screenshots were captured from the public Reddit pages, at 1265 px wide. The posters' usernames and avatars were blacked out in the image files; nothing else was edited or annotated.
• 8 October 2026, 08:44:01 to 08:44:02 UTC: post metadata (creation time in UTC, flair, post text, number of gallery images) was retrieved from the public Reddit archives Arctic Shift and PullPush. Both list exactly two images in the "Sad day" gallery, so the two images above are the whole post. Reddit itself refused unauthenticated requests from our network at that time (HTTP 403).
• 8 October 2026, between 08:44 and 08:54 UTC: the Internet Archive's CDX index returned no captures of either permalink, on www.reddit.com or old.reddit.com, nor of the reddit.com/gallery/1r7ot9a address.
• 8 October 2026, from 08:39 UTC: the 18 counters and like counts were read from enlarged crops of the two "Sad day" images (the copies served at the URLs above, downloaded at 08:41:59 UTC). Seven of the counters (3.4m, 110.3k, 54.6k, 32.5k, 481.1k, 248.6k, 113.8k) were checked against an earlier independent reading of the same images. The PiunikaWeb article and the Character.AI help centre and blog pages cited below were read the same day.
• All times on this page are UTC unless stated otherwise.

Sources

1. r/CharacterAI, "Aaaaand everything is moderated again", 17 February 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1r7k4j0/aaaaand_everything_is_moderated_again/
2. r/CharacterAI, "Sad day", 18 February 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1r7ot9a/sad_day/
3. r/CharacterAI, "Why is my OC moderated???", 22 February 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1rbbph9/why_is_my_oc_moderated/
4. PiunikaWeb, "Another Character AI moderation wave is taking down bots, and users aren't happy", 18 February 2026: https://piunikaweb.com/2026/02/18/character-ai-moderation-wave-bots-removed-2026/
5. Character.AI help centre, "Why is my post/Character/comment not appearing?", 29 April 2023: https://support.character.ai/hc/en-us/articles/14997503807515-Why-is-my-post-Character-comment-not-appearing
6. Character.AI help centre, "How Appeals Work", updated 3 September 2026: https://support.character.ai/hc/en-us/articles/55327212710683-How-Appeals-Work
7. Character.AI blog, "Community Safety Updates", 22 October 2024: https://blog.character.ai/community-safety-updates/
8. Arctic Shift archive records for posts 1 and 2: https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/api/posts/ids?ids=1r7k4j0,1r7ot9a

Related

• A dated record of platform restrictions at Character.AI and Replika: /blog/character-ai-restrictions-timeline
• The March 2023 Replika rollback: the founder's update, in full: /research/replika-rollback-march-2023

Disclosure: this page is published by sultrai.com, which operates an AI character chat service for adults. The page describes another company's product and contains no promotion of ours.