‘Our university is a place of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. We are committed to respectful, honest and trusting interaction with each other, regardless of position, origin, religion, gender and other forms of diversity.’

Of course, this also applies to the platforms that we provide for you to exchange ideas via our social media channels.

We welcome a constructive dialogue and your constructive feedback on our university, the content we publish and our positions. However, we insist on compliance with some basic rules of discussion and reserve the right to remove individual posts (even without comment) and/or to exclude users from our channels.

When evaluating and classifying comments, we naturally observe the principle of proportionality. But please remember that you have no right to publish posts on our social media platforms: when we delete posts, we are not censoring, but exercising the right to exclude anyone from our online discussion services in order to ensure a constructive exchange and the participation of all.

We also regret that this is not that uncommon.

• We do not accept any form of discrimination or defamation of people or groups on the basis of their origin, religious affiliation, nationality, physical condition, sexual identity, gender, income or age.
• We do not tolerate the labelling of opinions or people as pathological.
• We do not activate, conceal or remove offensive, defamatory, pornographic, inciting, harmful or even punishable statements.

Since the law to combat right-wing extremism and hate crime came into force in 2020, we are obliged to report certain serious cases, including, for example, threats of dangerous bodily harm or the approval of crimes not yet committed, to the relevant authorities.

• We also reserve the right to file a complaint if a criminal offence has been committed, for example if others are publicly insulted on the internet.
• The University of Duisburg-Essen regards the safeguarding of scientific quality standards, in particular the sincerity and accuracy in research, as a central task of its members and affiliates. Therefore, we do not accept it when false information is deliberately or negligently provided in scientifically relevant statements, when the intellectual property of others is violated or when their research activities are otherwise compromised.
• We can remove unprovable theories just as easily as unproven allegations and suspicions, especially if they are defamatory or damaging to business.
• For links to external websites, we reserve the right to check linked content and, if necessary, to remove the URL or the entire comment.
• Please refrain from posting commercial messages, political party or election advertising, calls for demonstrations, campaigns and petitions. We will remove such content. This also applies to comments that are obviously part of a campaign.
• Please don't spam!
• Posts that have been automatically or mechanically generated have no place on our platforms: we want to discuss with people, not with machines or programmes – however intelligent these artificial constructs may be.

Other things to bear in mind - useful tips for writing a comment: 

• Refer to the topic of the post.
• Discuss the matter objectively. We do not allow unobjective or offensive comments.
• Justify your opinion – especially if you want to disagree.
• Please remain polite, as you would in a face-to-face conversation. And please refrain from personally provoking others.
• Very important: Make sure that you have the rights to distribute the content you publish. Quotes must be correctly identified as such, even if they are very well known. Respect copyright.
• Respect the personal rights of your fellow human beings, especially the right to their own image. Never publish personal data that requires protection, such as addresses or phone numbers.
• To avoid excluding anyone, it would be nice if you could use the English language as much as possible.