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Community Guidelines

We value our community for the deep participation that occurs within the comment section of each talk — a commenting culture that encourages robust, thoughtful observations, feelings and insights that bring a talk to life. At TED, we love maintaining this culture and take the discussion of ideas seriously. The guidelines below seek to protect the integrity of both.

How to leave an outstanding comment

To help you make the most of your comment, here are four things to do before clicking Submit:

  • Read with your audience in mind: Is your comment appropriate for the community -- including speakers, TED staff, and your fellow commenters? Check out our code of conduct to see how we expect our interactions to be inclusive and respectful.
  • Revise: Can I make this calmer and clearer? Can I be more concise?
  • Support what you say: Can I make negative feedback more constructive? Can I elaborate further on positive feedback? Can I provide sources that support my claim?
  • Review how you say it: Does my comment encourage a healthy discussion or is it going to put others on the defensive? The idea expressed in a comment may be a valid point, but if it is combative or rude to community members, it will be removed.

Comment removal

To maintain the overall health of the TED.com community, occasionally comments will be removed. Here are some possible reasons why:

  • Hate speech and sweeping generalizations of any group or individual based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, identity or age. This also includes calls to violence, encouraging harassment and combatively postured comments.
  • Zealotry, proselytizing and self-promotion.
  • False information, rumors, hearsay or pseudoscientific themes. If you don’t know it to be true, please don’t say it.
  • Personal requests to speakers for goods, services or promotion.
  • Excessively posting the same comment or link across multiple talks or in response to multiple comments containing the duplicated material.
  • Any violations of TED.com Terms of Use.

A note about comment moderation and our moderators

  • Our comments are moderated by both humans and automated systems that have been trained to filter out words and phrases that do not follow our guidelines. You might receive messages that your post is phrased in a way that may potentially need a moderator’s approval before appearing in our conversation. You will have the ability to edit your message before submitting, or if you think it was flagged incorrectly (everybody makes mistakes sometimes, even computers), you can submit it anyway. A moderator will look over the message before approving or rejecting it.
  • If we determine there are multiple violations of our policy, it may result in the removal of your TED.com account.
  • As a reminder, our policy described and defined for the community is aligned with our TED.com Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.