News24's Comments Policy
2010-11-09 15:21
News24’s new comments system allows you, our loyal users and commenters, the opportunity to help us moderate comments.
What do we mean? Well, we’ve made two fundamental changes to the system which we hope will greatly improve the quality of comments and our ability to weed out the trolls.
First, all commenters will need to log in before commenting. They can do this only with their Facebook account. This means that we can track users and their accounts on our system, and take the necessary steps should they contravene our policies.
Second, users – logged in or not – can flag any comment as abusive just by clicking the link next to each comment. This flags the comment with our editors and should ensure the speedy removal of any comment that we feel does not comply with our terms and conditions. This means the power is now in your hands to report trolls and get their comments off our site.
So what are our comment terms and conditions?
When moderating, we try not to edit or remove too many comments, however we do try to maintain certain standards with each article. We rarely if ever edit individual comments for spelling and grammar - with thousands of comments coming in to News24.com each month, we just don't have the time - but we can and may delete comments based on the following basic criteria:
- The relevance of the comment to the topic
- The extent to which other users will understand what has been said
- The extent of swear words, the degree of insulting language and severity of the tone of the comment towards either a group of people or an individual
- News24 Users who abuse the comments facility by posting under existing aliases or who post simply to incite arguments on the board
- Duplication of comments
Most importantly, racist, sexist, offensive and abusive comments will not be tolerated.
We reserve the right to maintain the quality of the discourse on the comments board as much as we can.
As per our website’s terms and conditions, we require that:
11. Users are encouraged to report untrue, inaccurate, defamatory, illegal, infringing and/or harmful content available from the News24 web site to News24 and News24 undertakes to correct and/or remove such content or any part thereof if the person reporting such content provided reasonable grounds to prove the alleged nature of the content.
12.2 Users undertake not to post content to the News24 web site that may be illegal, defamatory, infringing, harassing, obscene, commercial advertising, personal marketing, profane, untrue, incorrect or harmful and News24 reserves the right to remove such content in terms of clause 11 above.
As part of our new system, we undertake to review any comment reported to us within 12 hours. We do, however, reserve the right not to delete a comment reported as abusive if we feel it has not contravened our terms and conditions.