EDITORIAL: The Northerner does not tolerate hate

After the impeachment vote of SGA President Lauren Goodwin during Monday’s SGA meeting, many people took to social media to voice their opinion. 

Some people were upset at the decision to not impeach Goodwin. Some people didn’t understand why SGA voted to impeach Goodwin at all. 

Many people commented on The Northerner’s Twitter account with hatred and harassment, preventing a healthy conversation to occur in the replies of our tweets.

As the leaders of this organization, we want to make one thing clear: The Northerner does not tolerate hate. 

The Northerner does not tolerate racism. 

The Northerner does not tolerate sexism. 

The Northerner does not tolerate homophobia. 

The Northerner does not tolerate transphobia. 

The Northerner does not tolerate discrimination of any kind.

As members of the campus community, you have every right to engage in thoughtful, respectful feedback on any of our articles and posts and the conversations that come from them. We enjoy reading comments left by our readers and seeing their thoughts on a certain topic.

When the conversation replies turn into hate, harassment and discrimination—we do not allow it. 

The Northerner removed* certain comments on Twitter that encouraged cyberbullying, harassment and/or were harmful to students—many of which are BIPOC and LGBTQ+ students—which is an ability that we have because of our social media and commenting policy which is as follows:

“The Northerner welcomes and encourages comments from readers on thenortherner.com. With that, it is necessary that the comments also further the discussion on a given article or subject.

The Northerner reserves the right to remove any comments that are off topic, invade privacy, or contain racist, sexist, discriminatory or potentially libelous remarks. The Northerner generally will not allow comments on articles or subjects dealing with sexual harassment, assault or related topics because of the potential harm to subjects and legal implications. These types of comments often are the basis for personal attacks, therefore are not advancing the discussion.

The Northerner reserves the right to disable comments on any article. The Northerner reserves the right to block, remove or unfollow any social media account on any platform.

This policy is not meant to inhibit constructive criticism, diverse perspectives or a free flow of meaningful communication. Rather, it is a means to raise the level of healthy discussion among readers.”

We want all of our viewers to feel safe when visiting our website or any of our social media platforms which is why we made this decision. 

Thank you for supporting student journalism. 

-Editor-in-Chief Natalie Hamren and Managing Editor Josh Kelly.

*Editor’s Note: On Twitter, you cannot remove or delete a Tweet made by another user. The author of the original tweet that someone replied to can hide the tweet, which limits who can see the original comment.