Guidelines for Readers and Sources

User Guidelines and Content Policies

At String our core objective is to bring people and news closer together. We strive to provide a platform for news that facilitates healthy and rational discussion between our users.

Our guidelines exist in order to create an environment that is conducive for higher quality dialogue and journalism.

We ask that you observe the following guidelines accordingly. Users that do not follow these guidelines will be removed at our sole discretion pending review.

For Readers

Reading and Sharing

We highly encourage our users to expand their breadth of sources and to engage in productive and evidence based dialogue with their peers.

Deceptive Practices or Impersonation of Sources and Figures

We do not allow accounts to wrongfully replicate or impersonate or represent organizations, public figures, or journalists. Accounts should not function to coordinate in a way that misleads users, or is in any way ideologically dichotomous to the platform. The aforementioned references accounts that do not represent themselves authentically or mislead users under false pretenses.

Safety and Healthy Dialogue

Our users should be able to get their news in a rational, healthy, and constructive environment.

Although we agree with an open ended dialogue and greater civic discourse - we strongly prohibit violence and the incitement or encouragement of violent behavior on our platform. Specifically threats against other individuals or any attempts at inciting violent behavior to another individual.

Terrorism and Unlawful behavior

We strongly prohibit the use of our platform to incite or otherwise encourage terrorism or unlawful behavior. Attempting to incite terrorism, violence, or unlawful behavior may yield removal from the platform pending review.

Hate Speech and Violence

Do not threaten or bodily harm against individuals on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex.

For Sources

Claim/Add my organization’s source

To claim or add a source that’s already on our platform, simply email “claim my source” from your organization’s email to threads@string.link and we will issue instructions accordingly. Instructions will only be sent back to emails with the same website domain as the source.

Content and Form

Sources who are approved for new accounts or claiming their accounts possess a responsibility to produce content within the domains of news media and within a reasonable standard and regard for common journalistic practices.

The form of ‘posts’ refers to and exists as an article linked to the same source’s domain accompanied by an image url and article url. Tags and the full text to an article may also be provided by a source in order to optimize the user experience reading a source’s content.

Synthetic and/or Manipulated Media

We do not allow synthetic or manipulated content

We do not allow audio, video or image content that has been manipulated to deceive, defraud, or mislead by means of creating a representation of actions or events that verifiably did not take place and would cause a reasonable person to have a fundamentally different understanding or impression thereof - such that it may cause significant harm to groups or individuals, or significantly undermine participation or trust in electoral or civic processes.

We do not allow any form of media or content that has been manipulated in a way that, misidentifies, or wrongly attributes a situation, event, or individual in a way that is congruent with verifiably false information. More specifically in a way that, misleads a reasonable individual in a civic process.

Dangerous Content

Dangerous content intended to incite terrorism, hate crimes, or civic disobedience is prohibited from our platform.

Deceptive Practices

Sources are carefully evaluated internally and objectively to ensure authenticity and uniqueness. See “Claim/Add my organization’s source” for more details on this policy.

Sources may only represent a single organizational entity and not that of an individual.

Note: These guidelines may be edited in the future in order to help us maintain a platform for healthy, evidence based dialogue, and rational discussion.

The most current version will always be available at https://string.link/guidelines