Because of the presidential campaign, the tenor of some comments this year has grown more emotionally charged and inflammatory. While we put a premium on lively, informed and well-reasoned dialogue, and we don’t expect everyone to share our beliefs, we do expect a certain level of discourse. We appreciate sarcasm and snarkiness — they are our stock in trade — but we will not tolerate hate speech, insults, threats or lies. If you want to engage in those behaviors, get your own web site.

For these reasons, Pensito Review recently updated its comments policy. We now moderate messages that fall into the categories laid out below, along with others that might crop up that we haven’t anticipated. Commenters who persist in abusive behavior will be banned and their comments may be expunged.

What we consider “abusive behavior”:

Abusive language: Comments that contain racial epithets, personal insults, intimidating language, threats and the like.

Troll behavior: Comments that are primarily intended to disrupt regular discourse, annoy, harass and aggravate, to be purposefully and persistently unreasonable, or that are malicious.

Purposefully spreading falsehoods: Since it is the practice of certain ideologues to spread falsehoods, particularly about candidates (also known as “Swiftboating”), as well as to attempt to rewrite history in order to mask the nefariousness or incompetence of their leaders, we reserve the right to flag these statements as false by posting the truth within the comments.