Sway strives to adhere to the Code of Practice as set out by the Fourth Estate, an institution which promotes best practices in journalism and media reporting.
Because the statements from organizations will appear on the Sway platform, Sway expects organizations to follow this content policy as closely as possible.
As such, Sway will vet statements to ensure they are:
We understand that legislation can be complex. Supporting evidence of a position may therefore exist in a gray area. However, any evidence added to support one's position should be verifiable and not blatantly inaccurate or false. To clarify, any evidence presented to support a position should pass the Duck Test or the Elephant Test.
Statements should be relevant to the piece of legislation in question. For example, if Council Ordinance 123 is about providing money for roads, statements should be about roads and/or transit. If a statement is off-topic (e.g., gun violence in Baltimore City), that statement would not be accepted.
Please keep your statements civil and free of profanity, attacks, sexual language, explicit or implicit racist or xenophobic language, or broad generalizations about groups of people that may be construed as offensive. Don't be a jerk.
We realize the above guidelines may seem overly broad, however, that's kind of the point - we would like to leave your statements up to you. If we discover something in your statement that we believe violates one of the principles above we will work with you to revise it and get the statement onto our platform.
For more information on the Code of Practice that Sway adheres to please see https://www.fourthestate.org/journalism-code-of-practice/