1. Purpose
Digital Liberty welcomes informed disagreement, relevant questions, corrections, lived experience, and evidence that can improve public understanding.
Comment spaces are provided to facilitate constructive discussion around published material.
They are not intended to operate as an unrestricted hosting service or to replace formal correction requests, editorial complaints, emergency reporting, or confidential communication with sources.
2. Participation Standards
Comments should address the article or the issues it raises and should contribute relevant information, reasoned opinion, questions, criticism, or personal experience.
Strong criticism of institutions, public figures, companies, policies, ideas, and journalism is permitted.
Personal abuse, intimidation, harassment, or attacks based on a person’s identity are not permitted.
Participants should distinguish between established facts, allegations, personal experience, speculation, satire, and opinion.
Claims involving serious wrongdoing should be supported by credible evidence and may be withheld pending verification.
3. Prohibited Content
Digital Liberty may reject or remove content that is:
- Unlawful
- Defamatory
- Threatening
- Harassing
- Hateful
- Discriminatory
- Sexually exploitative
- Unnecessarily graphic
- Supportive of terrorism or violent extremism
- Instructive of serious wrongdoing
- Maliciously deceptive
- Impersonating another person or organization
- Spam
- Automated abuse
- Commercial solicitation
- Copyright infringing
- Privacy invasive
- Unrelated to the discussion
Doxxing is prohibited.
Users must not publish private residential addresses, personal telephone numbers, identity documents, financial information, medical information, children’s information, non-public workplace information, private communications, or other sensitive personal information without a clear lawful and public interest basis.
Digital Liberty may also remove repeated slogans, copied campaign messages, coordinated manipulation, undisclosed paid advocacy, artificial engagement, fabricated evidence, or content generated at scale without meaningful human contribution.
4. Moderation
Comments may be moderated before or after publication.
Digital Liberty may:
- Correct obvious formatting problems
- Remove unsafe links
- Limit repetitive submissions
- Close discussion threads
- Restrict abusive activity
- Remove a specific unlawful or harmful element while preserving the remainder of a comment where appropriate
Material edits that change the meaning of a user’s contribution will not be made silently.
Where a material change would alter the user’s meaning, the comment may instead be rejected or accompanied by an appropriate editorial note.
Moderation is risk based and may not always occur immediately.
Publication of a comment does not mean that Digital Liberty has verified, agreed with, or endorsed the statements contained in it.
Failure to remove one comment does not create an entitlement to publish another comment.
5. Names, Impersonation, and Anonymity
Participants may use a display name where the commenting system permits it.
Impersonation and false claims of authority are prohibited.
Digital Liberty may request verification where a commenter claims to represent an individual, organization, profession, institution, or event that is central to the discussion.
In higher risk circumstances, Digital Liberty may protect a commenter’s publicly displayed identity while requiring appropriate private verification.
Anonymity does not remove a participant’s responsibility to comply with this policy.
6. Privacy and Data
Depending on the commenting system and applicable technical requirements, comment forms may collect information such as a name, email address, website address, IP address, anti-spam information, and other technical data as described in the Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.
Email addresses are not ordinarily displayed publicly through the standard comment function.
Commenters should not submit personal, confidential, or sensitive information that they do not want to appear publicly.
A public comment may be indexed, quoted, archived, syndicated, or discussed as part of Digital Liberty’s editorial record.
Deleting an account or requesting removal of a comment does not necessarily guarantee deletion of lawful quotations, screenshots, moderation records, or archived copies where continued retention is justified by legal, editorial, security, or public interest considerations.
7. Children and Vulnerable Users
Children should not submit personal information through Digital Liberty’s community or comment functions.
Digital Liberty may remove material that appears to identify, expose, exploit, or place a child or vulnerable person at risk.
Adults must not use community spaces to solicit contact with minors or to engage in grooming, coercion, exploitation, manipulation, or other inappropriate conduct.
Where necessary, additional restrictions may be applied to protect vulnerable participants.
8. Corrections and Complaints Are Separate
Comments are not the preferred mechanism for reporting factual errors or submitting formal editorial complaints.
Evidence based correction requests should be sent to:
corrections@digitalliberty.info
Formal complaints should be sent to:
complaints@digitalliberty.info
Using the designated channels ensures that correction requests and formal complaints can be reviewed by the appropriate accountable editorial function.
A comment thread does not replace Digital Liberty’s formal correction or complaints process.
9. Enforcement and Appeals
Responses to violations may include:
- A warning
- Removal of a comment
- Removal of a link
- Closure of a discussion thread
- Rate limitation
- Temporary restriction
- Permanent blocking
- Referral to an appropriate authority where required by law or necessary to address an immediate safety concern
Enforcement decisions may take into account the seriousness of the conduct, apparent intent, repetition, potential or actual harm, previous behavior, and cooperation with moderation.
A person may appeal a moderation decision by contacting:
complaints@digitalliberty.info
The appeal should include:
- The relevant article URL
- The comment text, where available
- The approximate time of publication
- The reason the person believes the moderation decision should be reconsidered
Digital Liberty may decline repeated, abusive, threatening, or clearly bad faith appeals.
10. User License
By submitting a public comment, the commenter grants Digital Liberty a non exclusive, worldwide, royalty free license to host, display, moderate, reproduce, archive, and distribute the comment in connection with the publication, its website, community functions, and editorial record.
The commenter retains ownership of their submission.
The commenter remains responsible for the content they provide, including its legality, accuracy, originality, and compliance with this policy.
This license does not transfer ownership of the comment to Digital Liberty.
11. Changes and Availability
Digital Liberty may disable comments on individual articles or across the website where necessary for:
- Safety
- Legal compliance
- Editorial reasons
- Moderation capacity
- Technical limitations
- Security
- Protection of users or sources
Comment availability may vary depending on the nature of an article, the level of public interest, previous abuse, or Digital Liberty’s ability to moderate discussion responsibly.
This policy may be reviewed and updated as Digital Liberty’s community features, technology, editorial practices, and legal requirements develop.
Last reviewed: 24 August 2026.