Community Rules

Respect. Everyone deserves respect whether you agree with them or not. There is a difference between “I think you’re wrong” and “I think you’re an idiot” (or worse). Please refrain from engaging in personal attacks, posting inflammatory language, or antagonizing other community members.

We define personal attacks as name-calling, insults, accusations, or harassment. We define inflammatory language as that which is intended to incite anger or instigate a dispute outside the context of the discussion. We define antagonizing as provoking or inciting negative action.

Responsibility. Content that you post on any of Common Cause’s community sites is your own. Even when promoting issues and positions that are in line with the work of the organization, your online content does not constitute work or action on behalf of Common Cause. We strive to maintain a safe and sensible place to have discussions, but we are not responsible in any way for the content of the posts, or any actions you may take as a result of the posts. We do, however, reserve the right to reject or remove posts that violate the rules, at our sole discretion and without prior notice.

Focus. Conversations can stray, sometimes to really interesting places, but we ask that you stay on topic. Off-topic posts may become issues for future discussions, but in the meantime may be moved or deleted without notice if we believe they’re interfering with the current discussion.

Posting off-topic in response to someone else’s off-topic post is discouraged and such posts may be moved or deleted without notice.

Prohibited. Community participants may not post messages that are threatening, abusive, harassing, intimidating, libelous, defamatory, obscene, vulgar, pornographic, profane, indecent, illegal or unlawful. Spam is not allowed; we define spam as posting the same message over and over or posts related to commercial promotion or excessive self promotion.

Accountability. In order to manage our community effectively and maintain the integrity of these community guidelines, Common Cause requires that community members agree to be contacted when necessary by community managers. On Facebook, you may not block community managers from using the Facebook message interface to contact you. Blocking community managers is prohibited and doing so may result in your being removed from the community.

Common Cause reserves the right to report unlawful behavior and vandalism of our communities to your Internet service provider or to law enforcement. In addition, we retain sole discretion to reject posts, delete existing posts, or block users from further participation at any time and without prior notice. By participating in our community, you agree to abide by these guidelines.

If you have questions about our community guidelines or their application, please contact us at blog@commoncause.org.