Terms of Service | Public Comment

Agreement

By using Public Comment, you agree to these Terms.

If you access or use Public Comment, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

Public Comment is designed to help people compare viewpoints, understand public issues, and participate in structured civic dialogue. We may change, limit, suspend, or discontinue any part of the service at any time.

Eligibility

You must be old enough and allowed to use the service.

Public Comment is not intended for children under 13. By using the service, you represent that you are at least 13 years old and that your use of the service is lawful in the place where you access it.

Accounts and identity

You are responsible for your account and public display choices.

Account responsibility

You are responsible for the activity that occurs through your account. You must provide accurate information where required, keep your sign-in credentials secure, and notify us if you believe your account has been compromised.

Public identity settings

Public Comment may allow you to choose how your account is publicly identified, including anonymous or limited-profile display options where supported. These options affect display behavior, but they do not guarantee that activity cannot be inferred from public context or connected within Public Comment systems.

No impersonation

You may not impersonate another person, official, candidate, organization, administrator, moderator, or representative, or falsely suggest that you are authorized to act for someone else.

Role-based use

If you use Public Comment as an official, candidate, administrator, moderator, representative, or similar role, you must have the authority to do so and must comply with any additional rules, review processes, or verification requirements that apply.

Public civic activity

Some activity is public, some is aggregate, and some depends on feature settings.

Public Comment includes public and semi-public civic features. Polls, arguments, write-ins, endorsements, reports, profile information, official actions, representative actions, moderation actions, and related activity may be public, private, attributed, anonymous, pseudonymous, aggregated, limited, or visible to authorized reviewers depending on the feature, settings, and context.

Poll responses may be used to produce aggregate public results. Individual views may become inferable if you choose to publish related arguments, write-ins, endorsements, explanations, or other public activity.

User content

You keep responsibility for what you submit.

Your content

You are responsible for content you submit, publish, upload, endorse, report, or otherwise provide through Public Comment, including poll content, arguments, write-ins, profile information, reports, and related materials.

Rights you need

You represent that you have the rights needed to submit your content and to grant the license described in these Terms. You may not submit content that violates another person’s rights or applicable law.

Public content

Content that is public or feature-visible may be viewed, shared within the service, preserved, ranked, summarized, aggregated, moderated, or otherwise used as part of Public Comment’s civic dialogue and platform operations.

No guarantee of display

We do not guarantee that any content will be displayed, ranked, retained, promoted, summarized, or treated in any particular way. We may remove, limit, preserve, or change the display of content as described in these Terms.

License to Public Comment

You grant us rights needed to operate and improve the service.

When you submit, publish, upload, endorse, report, or otherwise provide content to Public Comment, you grant Public Comment a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable license to host, store, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, display, distribute, analyze, summarize, aggregate, create derivative works from, and otherwise use that content to operate, provide, secure, moderate, enforce, analyze, improve, develop, promote, and support Public Comment and related tools or services.

This license includes the right to use public content, public profile information, platform activity, aggregate sentiment data, and de-identified or non-identifying data for research, analysis, reporting, public-interest, civic, product-development, machine-learning, artificial-intelligence, and similar purposes.

This license is granted to Public Comment. Nothing in these Terms grants any third party a license to copy, scrape, harvest, reproduce, distribute, train on, evaluate models with, or otherwise use Public Comment content or data outside the permitted use of the service.

Prohibited conduct

You may not misuse Public Comment.

You may not:

Manipulate civic activity

Create fake accounts, coordinate inauthentic activity, submit fraudulent responses, manipulate rankings or endorsements, evade limits, interfere with poll integrity, or misrepresent public support.

Abuse other users

Harass, threaten, intimidate, defame, dox, exploit, or target others, or submit content that is unlawful, abusive, hateful, sexually exploitative, violent, or otherwise harmful.

Interfere with the service

Probe, scan, attack, overload, disrupt, reverse engineer, bypass access controls, compromise accounts, introduce malware, or interfere with the security, availability, integrity, or operation of Public Comment.

Violate rights or laws

Submit unlawful content, infringe intellectual property or privacy rights, violate election, campaign, lobbying, transparency, records, consumer protection, or other applicable laws, or encourage others to do so.

Automated access and AI use

Public visibility is not permission to scrape or train models.

You may not access or use Public Comment through automated means, including scraping, crawling, harvesting, bulk downloading, data mining, indexing, dataset creation, model training, model evaluation, retrieval-augmented generation, or other machine-learning or artificial-intelligence uses, unless Public Comment has given you prior written permission or entered into a separate written license or agreement with you.

Content or data being publicly visible on Public Comment does not mean it is free to scrape, copy, harvest, republish, train on, evaluate models with, or use outside the service.

You may not use robots, spiders, crawlers, scrapers, browser automation, scripts, data extraction tools, or similar methods to collect, copy, monitor, or use Public Comment content or data except as expressly permitted by Public Comment in writing.

Moderation and enforcement

We may review, restrict, remove, preserve, or act on content and accounts.

We may review, moderate, remove, limit, label, preserve, restore, rank, de-rank, suspend, restrict, or otherwise act on content, accounts, roles, permissions, or activity at our discretion, including to enforce these Terms, comply with law, protect users, prevent abuse, preserve platform integrity, or operate the service.

Reports and moderation submissions are generally not public, but may be reviewed by Public Comment operators, moderators, administrators, service providers, or other authorized reviewers.

Platform integrity and results

Public Comment results are informational, not guaranteed measures of public opinion.

Public Comment is designed to organize civic dialogue and help users compare viewpoints. Polls, rankings, arguments, endorsements, summaries, and aggregate results may be incomplete, non-representative, affected by participation patterns, changed by moderation or integrity controls, or limited by feature design.

We do not guarantee that Public Comment results represent the views of any population, jurisdiction, constituency, electorate, organization, or group.

Service changes and availability

The service may change or be unavailable.

We may add, remove, suspend, limit, modify, or discontinue any feature, content, account, role, permission, policy, or part of the service at any time. We do not guarantee that Public Comment will be uninterrupted, secure, accurate, error-free, or available at any particular time.

Intellectual property

Public Comment owns the platform; users are responsible for their content.

Public Comment and its software, design, branding, logos, interfaces, systems, organization, and related materials are owned by Public Comment or its licensors and are protected by intellectual property and other laws. These Terms do not grant you ownership of Public Comment or any right to use our branding except as expressly permitted.

You retain whatever ownership rights you have in content you submit, subject to the license and other rights granted to Public Comment in these Terms.

Third-party services

Public Comment may rely on third-party services.

Public Comment may use third-party services for hosting, authentication, storage, analytics, crash reporting, email, security, payments, support, or other operations. Those services may be subject to their own terms and policies.

Disclaimers and limits

Public Comment is provided as-is.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Public Comment is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, availability, accuracy, reliability, security, or error-free operation.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Public Comment and its owners, operators, employees, contractors, service providers, and affiliates will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, punitive, or lost-profit damages, or for loss of data, goodwill, use, or other intangible losses arising from or related to your use of or inability to use the service.

Indemnity

You are responsible for claims caused by your misuse.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Public Comment and its owners, operators, employees, contractors, service providers, and affiliates from claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including reasonable attorneys’ fees, arising from or related to your content, your use of the service, your violation of these Terms, your violation of law, or your violation of another person’s rights.

Termination

We may suspend or end access.

We may suspend, restrict, or terminate your access to Public Comment at any time, with or without notice, including if we believe you violated these Terms, created risk, caused harm, or used the service in a way that is unlawful, abusive, or inconsistent with platform integrity.

Provisions that by their nature should survive termination will survive, including provisions about user content licenses, prohibited scraping and automated access, intellectual property, disclaimers, limitations of liability, indemnity, and enforcement.

Changes

We may update these Terms.

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we update them, we may change the “Last updated” date above. If changes are material, we may provide additional notice as required or appropriate. Your continued use of Public Comment after updated Terms become effective means you accept the updated Terms.

Contact

Contact Public Comment.

For questions about these Terms, contact us at hello@pcomment.com.