Summary

The #1 priority of the Florida Open Debate for U.S. Senate is to have candidates answer questions that truly represent the will of the people. The participation guidelines and platform moderators are in place to create a safe, welcoming environment for all users, to make sure your question is eligible to be asked on TV and livestreams, and to protect the integrity of the voting process. The guidelines that help us accomplish that are as follows:

• No hate speech, graphic content, threatening or abusive language, or profanity.
• No commercial promotion, spam, or other unrelated content.
• No trolling (questions offered without intellectual honesty or in effort to discredit the site).
• All submissions must be worded as a question.
• Questions must be able to be posed to either candidate.
• Questions and supporting text may not reference the candidates participating in the debate. However, citations may link to candidate-specific material.
• Only one vote per person per idea is permitted.

Moderation

We reserve the right to remove questions that violate these terms, and to remove and reverse suspicious or fraudulent voting activity. All linked content will be reviewed to make sure it adheres to these criteria and is relevant to the question before being published.

In addition, we reserve the right to re-categorize submissions to better align with the overall organization of the site, and to modify, moderate, or combine ideas to maintain the integrity of the voting process and the quality of user experience. This includes the right to remove submissions that are duplicates.

We define a duplicate as any question that shares the same or very similar intent as a previously submitted question. The Florida Open Debate is about building support for unique ideas; having multiple submissions of a single question dilutes the votes and advocacy for it.

Examples of questions considered to be duplicates:

(A) “What steps would you take toward ensuring that college students don’t enter the workforce saddled with debt?”
(B) “How would you reduce students’ post-college debt-load?”

We have implemented several measures to ensure the transparency and fairness of all changes.

First, moderation is a community effort. Users may flag questions for violations of the Participation Guidelines and suggest merges between similar questions.

Second, a team of well-respected experts from a diverse range of organizations and websites will be on hand to weigh in on questions of policy when the similarity between questions is ambiguous.

Third, authors will be notified of all changes made to their submissions and given the chance to clarify their intent or request a reversal.

And finally, all changes will be logged publicly at www.floridaopendebate.com/changelog and anybody may request an additional review.

Best practices

Beyond the hard and fast rules listed above, these tips will help you win more votes, increase your question’s chance of being selected for the live event, and get the answers you’re looking for from candidates.

• Limit each question to a single, clearly articulated topic. Be specific!
• Americans are tired of “gotcha” questions and the endless focus on the political horserace. In previous Open Events the top questions were all substantive, and many were on issues that the media rarely ask about. Focus on serious questions of policy and the votes will follow.
• Submit questions as a civically engaged person, not as an organization. This debate is about the concerns of regular voters, and thus preference will be given to questions that were submitted by individuals.