Nunatsiaq News online commenting policy

Nunatsiaq News welcomes our readers’ insights into the issues raised in our news stories, commentaries, editorials and letters. We think that an intelligent discussion of the topics that concern northerners and those with an interest in the North is of value. Readers often add useful personal perspectives and additional information to the stories we’ve published.

The guidelines set out below are intended to ensure that there is a civil exchange of thoughts and ideas on our website.

How we’ll moderate your comments

1. We welcome debate and constructive criticism, but we’ll delete any comment that contains name calling, deliberate misinformation and personal attacks on any person, including members of our staff, obscenity, vulgarity, commercial promotion, spam, impersonations, claiming to know the motives of others, unsubstantiated inflammatory information and SHOUTING.
2. We’ll delete any comment likely to put our organization into legal jeopardy, especially comments that appear to be libellous, in contempt of court or in violation of copyright.
3. We’ll delete any comment that expresses blatant racism, sexism, homophobia or any form of hate speech. In doing this, we’ll distinguish between the criticism of governments, organizations and ideas and attacks on persons or groups solely on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion or age.
4. We’ll delete comments that we deem to be off topic, irrelevant or impossible to understand.
5. We’ll bar commenters who attempt to engage in online smear campaigns, especially during elections, or those who attempt to flood the site with political propaganda.
6. We will close comments on content that is sensitive for legal reasons, where there is a risk of libel or being in contempt of court, or for editorial reasons, where, for example, there’s an evolving news story, a story about a particularly divisive issue or a story on a topic that we know from experience will receive a lot of comments of the types outlined in point one.
7. We may also close comments on stories after 24 hours if there has been a high volume of comments and we need to turn our attention to moderating comments on more recent stories.
8. Due to the large amount of material that we publish and the high volume of comments we receive, we do not have time to debate a decision to remove a comment, close comments or ban a user. All such decisions are final.

In short, if your comment is focused on a relevant issue and is expressed in a polite manner, your comment is likely to be approved.

These updated guidelines draw heavily on those used by the Guardian, the New York Times and the Globe and Mail.