News24 Kenya Editor
News24 Kenya provides users the
opportunity to discuss and debate around the content we publish.
Our comments system allows you, our loyal users and commenters, the
opportunity to help us moderate comments.
Early in 2012 we made two fundamental changes to
the system which greatly improved the quality of comments and our ability to
weed out the trolls.
First, all
commenters must log in before commenting. They can do this only with their
Facebook account. This means that we can track users and their accounts on our
system, and take the necessary steps should they contravene our policies.
Second, users
– logged in or not – can flag any comment as abusive just by clicking the link next to each
comment. This flags the comment with our editors and should ensure the speedy
removal of any comment that we feel does not comply with our terms and
conditions. This means the power is now in your hands to report trolls and get
their comments off our site.
So what are our comment terms and conditions?
News24 Kenya reserves the right to
remove any comment or user profile published on our website.
When moderating, we try not to edit or remove
too many comments, however we do try to maintain certain standards with each
article. We rarely if ever edit individual comments for spelling and grammar -
with thousands of comments coming in to News24 Kenya each month, we just don't
have the time - but we can and may delete comments based on the following basic
criteria:
- The relevance of the comment to the topic
- The extent
to which other users will understand what has been said
- The extent of swear words, the degree of
insulting language and severity of the tone of the comment towards either a
group of people or an individual
- News24 Users who abuse the comments facility
by posting under existing aliases or who post simply to incite arguments on the
board
- Spam posts such as advertisements’ as comments we will
disabled on the site
- Duplication of comments
Most importantly, racist, sexist, offensive
and abusive comments will not be tolerated.
We reserve the right to maintain the quality of
the discourse on the comments board as much as we can.
As per our website’s terms and conditions, we
require that:
11. Users are encouraged to report untrue,
inaccurate, defamatory, illegal, infringing and/or harmful content available
from the News24 Kenya web site to News24 Kenya and News24 Kenya undertakes to correct and/or
remove such content or any part thereof if the person reporting such content
provided reasonable grounds to prove the alleged nature of the content.
12.2 Users undertake not to post content to the News24 Kenya web site that may be
illegal, defamatory, infringing, harassing, obscene, commercial advertising,
personal marketing, profane, untrue, incorrect or harmful and News24 reserves
the right to remove such content in terms of clause 11 above.
As part of our new system, we undertake to
review any comment reported to us within 12 hours. We do, however, reserve the
right not to delete a comment reported as abusive if we feel it has not
contravened our terms and conditions.
All actions and decisions
taken by our moderators are final.
It is unfortunately not
possible to enter into correspondence regarding specific moderation activity.
We will however read all correspondence.
Finally please respect other people's views and beliefs
and consider your impact on others when making your contribution.
Disclaimer: All articles and letters published on MyNews24 have been independently written by members of News24's community. The views of users published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24. News24 editors also reserve the right to edit or delete any and all comments received.