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Community Guidelines

We provide numerous opportunities for members to discuss stories that we publish and debate issues that we cover. We aim to provide an environment where members feel that they are able to contribute and that as many as possible actively get involved on a regular basis. We hope that these guidelines will explain the standard of behaviour we expect from members and encourage more people to join in with the discussion. They should be considered alongside our terms of use, which you can read here.

Community standards

We have a number of simple community guidelines that we expect members to abide by while using the UnHerd Platform:

  1. We respect all our users and expect you to respect each other. Please ensure comments are legal, tasteful and civil. Personal attacks, harassment and inappropriate behaviour will not be tolerated.
  2. Choose your words carefully and do not use language that is threatening or offensive to any individual or groups. Understand that words which you deem acceptable may be offensive to others.
  3. We acknowledge that there may be criticism of our journalism but personal insults or repeated attacks directed towards our journalists will not be tolerated.
  4. Maintain a respectful tone, especially when discussing heated or controversial issues.
  5. Help us take responsibility for the level of conversation on the website by ensuring comments are relevant and on topic.
  6. Where you refer to reports, studies, other articles and additional information, do your best to link to the original source.
  7. When commenting we ask all members to use their real names, first name and last name included. We will also accept a combination of a name and an initial.

Our approach to user generated content

We endeavour to allow comments on as many of our articles as possible. All comments made by our members are moderated, apart from articles which are on topics deemed particularly sensitive. If we determine that the comment satisfies these guidelines, then a determination may be made to publish the comment on the site.

In order to ensure our members remain compliant with our participation guidelines, we have created a list of prohibited interactions, which we hope you will find useful. Interactions must not:

  1. promote discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age or links to articles or websites that do the same;
  2. harass, threaten or attack anyone or otherwise behave in a way that could cause annoyance or distress to our members;
  3. be obscene, vulgar, offensive, pornographic, profane, sexually explicit or indecent;
  4. use swear words, act in a threatening or abusive manner or promote violence;
  5. makes libellous or defamatory comments about others;
  6. contain any information which personally identifies another individual (such as name, phone number and address), unless it is editorially justified, in the public domain or express consent has been obtained;
  7. constitute or encourage conduct that would be a criminal offence, give rise to civil liability or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law;
  8. violate, plagiarise or infringe the rights of third parties including any copyright, trademark, patent, rights of privacy or publicity or any other proprietary right;
  9. breach any legal duty owed to a third party, such as a contractual duty or a duty of confidence;
  10. contain any information, software or other material of a commercial nature;
  11. contain advertising, promotions or commercial solicitations of any kind, unless editorially justified;
  12. be likely to upset, embarrass and alarm any other person;
  13. constitute or contain false or misleading indications of origin or statements of fact;
  14. be used to impersonate any person, or to misrepresent your identity or affiliation with any person;
  15. contain any virus, Trojan horse, worm, time bomb, cancelbot or other similar harmful programming routine.

We will not publish content that breaches these guidelines and may edit or remove a comment we feel has caused offence to our members.

If a member seriously or repeatedly violates our guidelines, we will take whatever action necessary to ensure these violations are prevented from continuing and we reserve the right to remove, suspend or discontinue your opportunity to submit, post and/or upload content at our sole discretion and without further recourse to you. If we find a member to be a serial offender of our guidelines, we can and will:

  1. have their posting privileges removed in accordance with our escalation procedure, and
  2. in the most extreme cases, terminate your membership, and if necessary pass your details to any relevant law enforcement authorities or regulatory bodies.

At all times, we reserve the right to take actions that we think will benefit our members. We will always try to communicate any changes that affect our members, although this is not always possible. All actions taken by the moderation team are final.