Poster controversies

When should conference organizers take down a poster?

Author

Zen Faulkes
June 12, 2025

Over a year ago, I saved a few tweets about controversies that erupted over a couple of posters at a Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference. At the time, I was aware that there was a lot of discussion on social media but didn’t have the bandwidth to follow it closely.

Today I went looking for summaries of the controversy, and found a couple, which I have linked below. I don’t pretend that these summaries are complete or perfect, but I think they give at least a hint of what happened.

Most conferences do minimal screening of conference posters. They also do not necessarily do great monitoring of what goes up on unused poster boards, or whether people post the work they originally submitted. Normally, these are harmless.

But I do think it is worth asking under what conditions posters should be removed by conference organizers. If an organization doesn’t have policies for that, they should make them, and make them public, rather than trying to react on the fly.