NIH Hid Public Comments Package — page 119

OGC 2. When NIH was manually moderating comments, what was the frequency? For example, was the manual hiding of comments weekly? daily? every 4 hours Monday-Friday? constantly? It was sporadic, as we haven't had the support to manually moderate, so we let the filters do most of the work. At most, we'd maybe manually hide a comment 1-2 times a month. If a comment was hidden manually it was most likely because it had an expletive or violent threat, which may not have always been related to PETA. 2. Comment Guidelines- In its complaint, PETA states NIH's Facebook was created on October 14, 2008 (and Instagram created in 2018). From our emails, you stated OGC approved the Comment Guidelines in January 2015. 1. Do you know the exact date the Comment Guidelines become in effect? OGC approved blog comment guidelines January 2015. The guidelines page was posted on March 30, 2015. 2. Before these Comment Guidelines, were any other comment policy or guidelines in place from 2008-2015 for Facebook commenting? There were existing guidelines from November 2, 2012 that were not vetted by OGC as far as we are aware. 3. Pro-Animal Testing Comments 1. Is there any way you could find examples of pro-animal testing comments that were hidden? This can either be the comment itself, or a comment thread where there was an anti-animal testing comment and a pro animal testing advocate replied to that comment, but the entire comment thread with replies to the original comment was hidden? It would be very helpful if you could find 2-3 examples of this and provide us with screenshots. If the comment was manually hidden, that is fine. It would be preferable if you could find this during the time frame of the complaint, which is between September 2020 to September 2021. No, but if someone threaded a pro-animals in research response to a comment that had been manually hidden because it was off topic, their response would be hidden as well. 4. PETA effect on NIH Goals- The DOJ would like to include an argument showing how PETA's spamming of off topic comments inhibits NIH's mission. As the keyword blocking does target animal testing and PETA as we've discussed, the DOJ wants to justify this targeting to state that the case isn't a debate about animal testing but about harassment from PETA. 1. Do you have any statistics about how often PETA comments compared to other comments? Or statistics about how many comments are about animal testing? If there is any way DOJ could state animal testing comments are 50% of the comments received but the NIH has only posted about animal testing for 5% of its posts, that would be helpful.