1. Purpose
Data Watchdog welcomes informed disagreement, relevant questions, corrections, personal experience, and evidence that can contribute to 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.
Our objective is to maintain discussion spaces that allow meaningful disagreement while protecting participants from abuse, manipulation, privacy violations, and other harmful conduct.
2. Participation Standards
Comments should relate to 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 or removed where verification is not possible or where publication could create unjustified harm.
3. Prohibited Content
Data Watchdog may reject or remove content that is unlawful, defamatory, threatening, harassing, hateful, discriminatory, sexually exploitative, unnecessarily graphic, supportive of terrorism or violent extremism, instructive in serious wrongdoing, deliberately deceptive, impersonating another person or organization, spam, automated abuse, commercial solicitation, copyright infringing, privacy invasive, or unrelated to the discussion.
Doxxing is prohibited.
Users must not publish private residential addresses, personal telephone numbers, identity documents, financial information, medical information, information identifying children, non-public workplace information, private communications, or other sensitive personal information without a clear lawful and legitimate public interest basis.
We may also remove repeated slogans, copied campaign material, coordinated manipulation, undisclosed paid advocacy, artificial engagement, fabricated evidence, or content produced at scale without meaningful human contribution.
4. Moderation
Comments may be reviewed before or after publication.
Moderation actions may include correcting obvious formatting problems, removing unsafe links, limiting repetitive submissions, closing discussion threads, or removing a specific unlawful or harmful element while preserving the remainder of a comment where appropriate.
We do not silently make material changes that alter the meaning of a user’s contribution. Where a material change would be necessary, 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 Data Watchdog has verified, agreed with, or endorsed the statements contained in it.
Failure to remove one comment does not establish 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.
Data Watchdog 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, we may protect a commenter’s publicly displayed identity while requiring appropriate private verification.
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 Data Watchdog Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.
Email addresses are not ordinarily displayed publicly through the standard comment function.
Commenters should not submit personal or confidential information that they do not want to appear publicly.
A public comment may be indexed, quoted, archived, syndicated, or discussed as part of Data Watchdog’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 community or comment functions.
Data Watchdog 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.
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:
Formal complaints should be sent to:
Using the designated channels ensures that correction requests and formal complaints can be reviewed by the appropriate accountable editorial function.
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, or 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 harm, previous behavior, and cooperation with moderation.
A person may appeal a moderation decision by contacting:
The appeal should include the relevant article URL, the comment text where available, the approximate time of publication, and the reason the person believes the moderation decision should be reconsidered.
Data Watchdog may decline repeated, abusive, threatening, or clearly bad faith appeals.
10. User License
By submitting a public comment, the commenter grants Data Watchdog 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 and remains responsible for the content they provide, including its legality, accuracy, originality, and compliance with this policy.
The license does not transfer ownership of the comment to Data Watchdog.
11. Changes and Availability
Data Watchdog may disable comments on individual articles or across the website where necessary for safety, legal, editorial, capacity, moderation, or technical reasons.
Comment availability may also vary depending on the nature of an article, the level of public interest, previous abuse, or the publication’s ability to moderate discussion responsibly.
This policy may be reviewed and updated as Data Watchdog’s community features, technology, editorial practices, and legal requirements develop.
Last reviewed: 18 August 2026