Comments
Commenting rules
Comments are a place to talk about the news and the elections. To keep the conversation useful for everyone, these rules apply.
Rules
- 1.
Stay on topic
A comment should be about the story, the elections or Bela golubica. The discussion may wander, but comments with no connection to the topic, such as a personal message to someone, are not published.
- 2.
No insults or humiliation
Do not insult or humiliate other commenters, authors, voters, politicians or anyone else. Sharp criticism of views, decisions and actions is allowed; personal attacks are not.
- 3.
No hate speech
We do not publish comments that spread hatred or intolerance towards people because of their nationality, religion, race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, age or political views.
- 4.
No threats or calls to violence
Threats, intimidation and calls to violence against anyone are not published, not even as a joke.
- 5.
No swearing or vulgarity
Write so that anyone can read your comment. Swear words and vulgar expressions are not published, not even partly hidden with asterisks.
- 6.
No unfounded accusations
If you claim that a named person committed a crime or an electoral irregularity, present it as a suspicion and give a source: a news story, an observers' report, a decision of an electoral commission or a court. Unfounded accusations against named people are not published.
- 7.
No personal data of others
Do not post other people's phone numbers, addresses, e-mails, personal ID numbers, photos of documents or other personal data, nor your own.
- 8.
No advertising or spam
No advertising, sales pitches, chain messages or the same comment posted more than once.
- 9.
No calls to break the law
Do not call for vote buying, pressure on voters, disrupting the vote or any other breach of the law. Bearing witness to such things is allowed, as a description of what you saw, and they should also be reported to the authorities.
- 10.
Under your own name
Your comment is published with the name you enter. Do not pretend to be someone else, especially a well-known person or an institution, and do not use offensive or made-up names.
- 11.
Election silence
From the start of the election silence until the polls close, we do not publish comments urging people to vote for or against a list or candidate, nor estimates of the results.
Checks before publication
Before publication every comment is checked by an automated system, an artificial intelligence model, against the rules on this page. A comment that follows them is published straight away. If the system is not sure, the comment waits for an editor's review. A comment that breaks a rule is not published; the author sees which rule it is and can edit the comment and send it again.
An editor can remove a comment after publication too, and anyone who repeatedly breaks the rules loses the ability to comment. Sharp criticism is allowed: what is checked is how a comment is written, not whom it supports.
A comment can be at most 1,000 characters long. It is published as plain text, without links or formatting. Comments express the views of their authors, not of Bela golubica.
Your data
The name you enter and the time of posting are published with the comment. Your e-mail is not published: it is stored encrypted and used only if the editors need to contact you about the comment.
Only the name and the text of the comment are sent for checking, to Anthropic, or to OpenAI when Anthropic is unavailable. Your e-mail is not sent to them, and these services do not use the data they receive for checking to train their models. We do not store your IP address with the comment. Rejected comments are deleted after 30 days.
We send notices about new stories only if you ask for them: tick the box with your comment, then confirm from the e-mail we send you. Every notice has an unsubscribe link.
To delete your comment or your data, write to [email protected] from the address you entered. The site is run by Betania (betania.io).