Food and Drug Administration maintains Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X and other social media accounts to share updates about FDA activities and public-health-related information about FDA-regulated products. The FDA has instituted the following policy regarding comments posted to FDA’s social media accounts:
General Comment Guidelines
To maintain respectful interaction on this page, we encourage that all comments:
- Stay focused. All viewpoints are welcome, but comments should be relevant to the specific post under which it appears.
- Be respectful. Respect others’ opinions and share your opinions in a respectful way.
- Tell the truth. Spreading false or misleading information about FDA-regulated products harms the public health.
- No spam. This includes unsolicited commercial messages and a single user’s repeated comments on a topic unrelated to the underlying post. Comment Expectations
Although we hope that you choose to contribute your comments, to protect privacy, please do not disclose personally identifiable information about yourself or other individuals. We welcome your comments and request that you respect the informational resources provided by FDA’s social media accounts. Also, any comments, posts or links that seek to defame, slander or libel any current or former employees (including contractors) of the FDA will be hidden or removed. We will consider your comments when posting new updates, but we may not respond directly to individual inquiries. We are unable to answer questions about your specific health care situation. The FDA does not endorse the comments or opinions provided by visitors to its social media accounts. FDA following users or sharing content does not imply FDA endorsement. We retain the discretion to determine which comments violate our comment policy. We also reserve the right to hide or remove comments and/or disable commenting. The views expressed within posted comments do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Comment Moderation
Depending on the platform, comments may be filtered, hidden, and/or removed. We are using these terms to mean the following:
“Filtered” or “filtered and hidden” means that the platform or agency system automatically flagged the comment. It is typically hidden from most users but may still be visible to a limited subset of users.
“Hidden” means that the agency manually flagged the comment to be hidden from most users, but that it may still exist on the platforms in a limited fashion.
“Removed” and “deleted” have the same definition and mean that the agency manually removed the comment from the platform. A record of that removed comment is preserved in accordance with FDA’s Social Media Policy and the Records Retention Schedule. Comments may be automatically filtered and hidden by the social media platform if:
- The comment contains profanity.
- The comment contains an image.
- The comment contains a video.
- The comment contains a link/URL.
- The comment contains keywords from known scam attempts.
- The user does not have a profile picture.
- The user has had their account for one week or less.
- The user does not have any friends or followers.
- The user has had at least three comments reported, deleted, or hidden in the previous 30 days. Comments visible on social media accounts may be hidden or removed by FDA if they:
- Were not hidden despite matching the automated filter criteria as outlined above.
- Appear to be spam, including comments containing commercial endorsements, commercial solicitations, WhatsApp numbers, or a single user’s repeated comments on a topic unrelated to the underlying post.
- Contain discriminatory, racist, offensive, obscene, inflammatory, threatening, or unlawful statements, language, or content.
- Include personally identifiable information for individuals such as email addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses.
- Violate the comment policy. Because we want to avoid commercial solicitations and malicious links in our comments, our filters hide comments that contain URLs. To the extent a commenter wishes to reference relevant material available from other sources, please provide a citation or other bibliographic information without including a link. If you think your comment may have been hidden or removed in error, please contact us at [email protected] with details. Records will be kept of all comments that are removed by FDA for the above reasons. We reserve the right to block offenders of this policy.
