Comment Policy

The purpose of Bwog’s comment section is to facilitate honest and open discussion between members of the Columbia community. We believe that Bwog is a space that should reflect the collective consciousness of our campus. By providing a place for students to comment anonymously, we commit to enabling a free and critical discussion among our peers. We encourage commenters to take advantage of—without abusing—the opportunity to engage in anonymous critical dialogue with other community members. The dialogue we’re interested in is about ideas, not about people.

While we reserve the right to remove any comment at our discretion, we do not view ourselves as arbitrators. So for the most part, we won’t delete comments until we’re asked to. Readers can report a comment by sending an email to editors@bwog.com. The email should clearly identify the comment in question and should provide an explanation of how it violates one or more of the following grounds for moderation.

A comment may be moderated if it contains:

• A slur—defined as a pejorative derogatory phrase—based on ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or spiritual belief
• Hate speech
• Unauthorized use of a person’s identity
• Personal information about an individual
• Baseless personal attacks on specific individuals
• Spam or self-promotion
• Copyright infringement
• Libel
• COVID-19 misinformation

In an effort to further promote humane and civil interactions without increasing the active removal of comments, we encourage readers to moderate one another using the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons. Report a comment if it contains a violation of this policy; comments with three or more reports will be flagged for manual review.

Currently, we are experimenting with collapsing the comments section by default. Give us feedback for this policy at tech@bwog.com, or through our anonymous tips form. The collapse feature may be unavailable on outdated browsers.