Social Media Comments Policy

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s (NSERC) social media platforms are home to news, stories, videos, and events for and about Canada’s science and engineering research community. We encourage you to jump into the discussion by sharing, liking and commenting on new updates in a respectful manner.

To ensure that everyone is welcomed and respected, NSERC requires that all comments adhere to its Social Media Comments Policy.

NSERC will moderate and review comments to ensure that discussions are respectful and topical. NSERC may participate or intervene, when appropriate.

NSERC has a zero tolerance policy towards comments that:

• Are hateful, discriminatory or threatening towards another person, group or belief.
• Contain profanity, obscene language or pornographic content.
• Are offensive to any individual or organization.
• Are made with regard to declined research proposals, or are otherwise related to private, privileged communications between NSERC and the recipients of its funding.
• Are considered to be spam, advertising or not sent by the author.
• Contain announcements from political or labour organizations.
• Are not relevant to the original post or are considered “off-topic”.
• Are written in a language other than English or French.
• Are repetitive comments or spamming of threads.
• Do not, in the moderator’s opinion, contribute to the normal flow of discussion or overall content of the social media platform.

NSERC reserves the right to remove comments that violate the guidelines listed above. Repeat offenders will be banned.

Moderating of comments will generally occur during normal business hours  (9 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST) Monday to Friday. Comments posted outside of these hours will be read and addressed as early as possible. Comments that violate our Comments Policy will be removed as soon as possible the next business day.

Comments published on NSERC social media platforms are public. If you wish to communicate with NSERC in private or if you have a question you wish NSERC to answer, please visit our Contact Us page to find specific contact information.

NSERC does not respond to queries received through its social media platforms.

To protect your own privacy, we recommend that you do not post any personal or contact information in your comments.

As a federal agency, NSERC does not endorse or promote third party interests or products. Use of third party products does not indicate endorsement. Comments, links, images, videos and any other content posted do not indicate endorsement by NSERC or its employees.

The views and opinions expressed on third party sites do not necessarily represent the views of NSERC. Furthermore, NSERC does not vouch for the accuracy of third party links, images and/or comments on its social media platforms.

For more information on NSERC’s policies regarding copyright, non-commercial reproduction and Web privacy, please read the Important Notices.