Comment policy

Comments under our stories and videos are part of the paper. They are open because the community here has things to tell each other that we would not otherwise hear — and they have rules for the same reason.

You need an account to comment. There is no password: you type your email, we send you a link, and you choose the name that appears beside what you write. That name is public. Your email address is not, and it is never shown.

What gets removed

• Abuse of a person: insults, threats, harassment, or going after someone instead of what they said.
• Attacks on people for who they are — race, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality, disability or immigration status.
• Claims of fact about an identifiable person that you cannot stand behind. Accusing someone of a crime in a comment box is defamation, and it lands on them and on us.
• Someone else's private information: an address, a phone number, a workplace, a photograph they did not share.
• Advertising, spam, and links posted to sell something.
• Impersonating someone else, including anyone from this newsroom.

What does not get removed

Disagreeing with us is not a reason to be removed, and neither is being blunt about it. We have made mistakes that a reader pointed out in a comment, and the correction was published because of it.

A comment is not removed for taking a side, for being critical of the newsroom, or for being written in Portuguese, Spanish or English — all three belong here.

How moderation works

Comments appear as soon as you post them; we read them afterwards. That is a deliberate choice — a conversation that only shows up hours later is not a conversation — and it means the reporting button matters.

Any signed-in reader can report a comment. Two reports take it off the site straight away, before anyone from the newsroom has looked, and someone then decides whether it goes back up. Nothing is deleted by that: a comment we remove stops being visible but is kept as a record of what was moderated and when.

Someone who keeps breaking these rules stops being able to post. What they already wrote is handled comment by comment, not wiped in one go.

If we got it wrong

Moderation is done by people and people misread things. If we removed something of yours and you think we should not have, write to us and say which story it was on and roughly what you wrote. We will look at it and tell you what we decided.

If a comment about you is defamatory or exposes private information, tell us and we will act on it — that is not a matter for the reporting button alone.

Comments that are closed

Some stories go up with the comments closed. It is usually a story about a death, a matter before a court, or something where the conversation would cost the people in it more than it would give anyone else. It is not a judgement about the readers.