All comments are moderated and need to be reviewed before being displayed publicly.
If you notice a comment on Global Voices that was already approved that contains hate speech, obscenity, or personal attacks, please contact your newsroom editor, managing editor or translation manager immediately.
Commenting Guidelines
Commenters in the Global Voices community are asked to follow these guidelines, to ensure their comments are not incorrectly identified as spam or deleted for inappropriate content:
- Do not submit your comment more than once or it may be identified as spam;
- Please treat others with respect. Comments containing hate speech, obscenity, and personal attacks will not be approved;
- If you spot a comment mentioning a mistake in the post that needs correcting, speak with your editor or your translation manager. Changes preferably have to be requested using this form, to ensure translations of the post are also amended.
- You can use comments as a way to respond to other commenters on posts that you have written, to discuss any issues or queries raised. But if you get comments that upset you, the first thing to do is keep your cool!
- Contact your editor or translation manager if you are unhappy with any comments;
- Remember, posts on Global Voices are often about complex political subjects that invite commentary from a range of different perspectives. It's unlikely you'll be able to please everyone with everything you write.
Dealing with Comment Problems and Trolls
Did you receive a nasty comment on your post? Unfortunately, not everyone on the internet is equally pleasant, and sometimes individuals will latch on to a blogger or group of bloggers and do everything they can to make them mad.
In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.
There is one piece of advice that nearly anyone who has dealt with trolls tends to agree on: Don't feed them. Or in the words of a “Bloggers’ Code of Conduct” proposed by Tim O'Reilly: “Ignore the trolls”.
Very little can be gained from engaging a troll in conversation because the primary intent of their commenting is to bother you. The more you try to win the argument, the worse it gets.
The best thing you can do is:
- Ignore it;
- Discuss the issue with your editor, managing editor or translation manager what can be done to remove the comments if necessary.
- If you do respond, your key priority should be to correct facts and nothing more.
