About this site

Editorial standard

Every contribution is read and approved before it appears. This page is what it gets checked against, published so you can hold us to it.

Nothing publishes without review

There is no route by which anything reaches this site unread. Contributors submit; an editor reads it against the rules below; only then does it go live. That is slower than the alternative and it is not negotiable, a single reckless paragraph published under this name would cost more than every good article on the site earns.

What we require

Factual claims carry sources. If you assert a number, a quotation or a legal position, cite where it came from, with a title and a publisher. "Everyone knows" is not a source. A claim we cannot check is a claim we will cut.

The other side gets its strongest version. Where we answer an argument, we state that argument as its most capable advocate would put it, before we answer it. Knocking down a weak version of someone's position teaches a reader nothing and leaves them unprepared for the real thing.

Criticism and bigotry are distinguished. Political criticism of a government, including harsh criticism, is legitimate and is not the same thing as hatred of a people. Blurring that line makes the site useless for the readers who most need it, and it is dishonest.

Guidance must be lawful and safe. We do not publish anything that requires a reader to break the law, and we do not publish tactics that put people at avoidable physical risk. Where an action carries legal or personal risk, we say so before we describe it, not afterwards.

What we will not publish

Anything targeting a private individual. No names, images, employers, addresses or contact details of private people, and nothing that functions as an invitation to contact, follow or confront someone. Public officials acting in their public role are a different matter, and are discussed by reference to what they did in that role.

Anything organising harassment. Including pile-ons, coordinated reporting campaigns, mass contact of an individual, or material whose practical effect is to direct people at a person rather than at an argument or an institution.

Racism and religious hatred of anybody. Including against Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims. Campaigning against antisemitism while tolerating another bigotry is both wrong and self-defeating.

Dehumanising language, gloating over death, and celebration of violence. Regardless of who the subject is.

Pirated material. We link to sources people can lawfully read. One of the handbooks we studied linked repeatedly to a pirate book library, which hands its opponents a free discrediting line and undermines every properly credited source in the document.

How we write

Assume every sentence will be screenshotted on its own. Not as paranoia, as a discipline. It rules out the internal-sounding aside, the joke that only works in context, and the line that reads differently alone than it does in the paragraph. If a sentence would embarrass us standing by itself, it gets rewritten.

Guides are maintained; field reports are dated. A guide is corrected when it is wrong and reviewed on a schedule. A report in From the ground is an account of what happened to one person at one time, and it stays as published. It carries no staleness warning, because an account of something that happened in 2024 is not out of date, it is from 2024. We do not quietly rewrite history in either direction.

Say what you actually mean. No euphemism, no throat-clearing, no borrowed jargon. Someone reading this at eleven at night before a difficult conversation tomorrow needs to be able to understand it first time.

Corrections

When we get something wrong we change it and say that we changed it. Corrections to legal or safety content take priority over all other work. Report an error through the contact page.

Contributors

Contributors choose the name they publish under, full name, first name only, or a handle. We do not require photographs, employers or locations, and we do not publish them. The person carrying the risk of being identified makes that decision, not us.