Social Media Rules (Netiquette)

Welcome to our social media channels! 

Your interest and feedback in the form of comments, questions, messages, and likes is always appreciated. During our office hours (9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.), your messages will be answered promptly on weekdays.

We are very interested in a lively and respectful exchange. Since participants in the discussion are free to express their opinions on our posts, we attach significant importance to politeness and objectivity, constructive and respectful wording, and the avoidance of personal provocation, even in the event of disagreement on content.

We reserve the right to delete individual posts in the event of violations and to block individuals.

These are our rules in detail:

• Offensive, inciting, defamatory, pornographic, inflammatory, harmful to minors or even criminal statements will not be activated, but hidden or removed.
• Any form of discrimination or defamation of people or groups based on their origin, religious affiliation, nationality, physical condition, sexual identity, gender, income or age is unacceptable.
• We reserve the right to press charges if a criminal offense has been committed.
• We also reserve the right to check links to external websites and linked content and to remove the URL or the entire comment if necessary.
• Offensive, hateful, defamatory, pornographic, inflammatory, harmful to minors or even criminal statements will not be activated, but will be hidden or removed.
• Any form of discrimination or defamation of people or groups based on their origin, religious affiliation, nationality, physical condition, sexual identity, gender, income or age is unacceptable.
• We reserve the right to press charges if a criminal offense has been committed.
• We also reserve the right to check links to external websites and linked content and to remove the URL or the entire comment if necessary.
• We ask that you refrain from posting commercial messages, election or party advertising, calls for demonstrations, campaigns and petitions. This also applies to so-called spam. We will remove such content.
• Unsubstantiated theories, allegations and suspicions may also be removed.
• Machine-generated comments may also be deleted. Here too, we reserve the right to block individuals.
• For German users
  We use group-specific forms of address in our posts. On Instagram, we consistently use the form of address you, while on LinkedIn and Bluesky we use the polite form of address you. We ask that this not be understood as a lack of appreciation; rather, it is an accepted language culture for the social media sector and an expression of our desire to act as equals with our users. Incidentally, the rule of thumb is: if you are on first name terms, you want to be on first name terms. If you are on first name terms, you want to be on first name terms.

We observe the principle of proportionality when assessing and classifying comments. There is no entitlement to publication of all contributions. We do not censor, but rather exercise the domiciliary rights of our online discussion services. In this way, we want to ensure a constructive exchange and the participation of everyone.

We thank you for adhering to our netiquette and wish you an informative exchange on our social media channels.