Comment Policy
We believe in free speech and the right to express one’s opinions about the posts in this blog. However, free speech cannot be an effective right for everyone in a hostile environment. Because of this, we will moderate comments to create an environment in which any person feels that E can share freely and openly Eir opinions. Regardless of the expressed opinion, we will remove any comment that does not contribute to creating such an environment.
The following list of rules is not exhaustive in any way, but it should give an idea of the limits we impose.
- Stay on topic—comments should be related to the post that they are commenting on.
- Don’t advertise. Don’t spam.
- Be civic and respectful with the author and other commenters.
- Harassment of any kind (see definition below) will not be tolerated at all.
- Any comment containing hate speech, sexist, racist or discriminatory expressions will be immediately removed.
As the list above is not complete, satisfying all the rules is a necessary but not sufficient condition for commenting.
Definition of harassment
To guarantee that the meaning of ‘harassment’ is clear, we include the following list (taken from the Geek Feminism Blog) of what we will consider as harassment. Although not all the list elements apply directly in the context of commenting in a blog, we show the list integrally for completeness.
We will consider as harassment any of the following actions:
- Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.
- Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
- Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names.
- Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behavior in spaces where they’re not appropriate.
- Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g., textual descriptions like “*hug*” or “*backrub*”) without consent or after a request to stop.
- Threats of violence.
- Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or engage in self-harm.
- Deliberate intimidation.
- Stalking or following.
- Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
- Sustained disruption of discussion.
- Unwelcome sexual attention.
- Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others.
- Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.
- Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
- Publication of non-harassing private communication.