Our various social media channels across the council are there to provide you with news, information and advice about our services and those of our partners within the public and community sector.

The guidance on this page is to make sure our social media channels are safe for everyone to enjoy and we expect everyone interacting with our social media channels to follow them.

Our active hours

Our social media pages are monitored between 9am and 5pm, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays). We’re unable to respond outside these times, even if we post content (we use a magic scheduling tool for this!)

Sometimes social media isn’t the best way to get in touch with us. Use our contact us page if you have an urgent query or if you need to report an issue, for example a pothole or faulty streetlight, please do this via our website. Using the right service means the information goes directly to the relevant team and into our system as quickly as possible so your enquiry can be dealt with correctly.

Debate not hate

We’re sociable people, and welcome your comments and engagement with our content. We want it to be safe space where people can share ideas and have open, useful and healthy discussions. 

We’re also real human beings, so would like to be treated kindly, in the same way that you would.

We understand that people have differing views on many issues, but any form of online hate, abuse or bullying is unacceptable on any platform, not just ours. We monitor our channels regularly, but if you notice any inappropriate comments on platforms, please send us a private message and let us know.

How we expect everyone to behave:

Here’s some simple ‘do’s and don’ts’ for interacting with us and others on our social media channels.

Don’t do anything that breaks the law.
Be polite, even if you disagree. Name-calling, profanity, fighting words, discriminatory terms, sexual harassment, bullying, and defamatory language will not be tolerated. You may think your comments are funny, but others may not.
Stay on topic. Keep the conversation relevant to the post and contribute to the dialogue. We’ll remove off-topic content, out-of-context, spam, promotional or links to third-party sites.
Keep it real. All posts should come from a real person and a real profile. Content from fake or anonymous profiles will be deleted, and profiles will be blocked.

We reserve the right to remove content posted to our social media pages that violate these guidelines and to report or block users (or both) who do so. We’ll take immediate action on our accounts if content in any format (such as comments, videos, images, gifs, attachments, links, emojis) is:

defamatory, misleading or false
making allegations without any evidence that would be deemed slanderous and malicious
abusive or threatening – this includes swearing, adapted spellings with the same meaning etc
name-calling directed towards our employees, elected members or other platform users
intimidatory towards our employees, elected members or other platform users
inciting hate crime or hate crime words
obscene, profane or sexually oriented language
discriminatory in any way
promoting illegal activity
promoting individual products or services
promoting political activity
publicising anyone’s contact details or other personal information
completely off-topic
the same message is posted multiple times, i.e. ‘spamming’
controversial, irrelevant and off-topic messages
in violation of any intellectual property rights, including copyright
in violation of any law or regulation

We have an automatic profanity filter on our pages. If you include a keyword in your comment we’ve added to the filter, the platform will automatically hide your comment so that it doesn’t appear on our page. Our list of keywords includes terms relating to the bullet point list above.

If your content relates to the list above, we’ll hide or delete it, and will report it to the social media platform or block the user (or both) depending on the severity. Depending on the content, we also screenshot posts and consider legal action or send them to the police for investigation.

As standard, we do not disable comments from our posts. It’s our discretion to disable comments from posts if we think this is the right action to take to protect the public and our employees.

Allegations against council employees and elected members

We have a zero-tolerance approach toward fraud and corruption in our organisation. If you make an allegation on our social media accounts against the council, our employees or elected members, we’ll ask you to report it along with evidence via our complaints webpage.

If you make allegations against our employees and elected members without any evidence, you may be subject to legal action.

Safeguarding allegations or disclosures

If you make any safeguarding allegations or disclosures on our social media pages, these will be passed on to the relevant organisations as part of our duty of care. Please raise these concerns directly to us via our safeguarding adults webpage or child protection webpage.

Politics

The council itself, and the people who work for the council, are politically neutral (as opposed to its political administration made up of elected members). This means we are unable to endorse or engage with any content of a party political nature.

Please do not use any of our pages to promote party political messages or other content. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the run-up to an election. Whatever type of election, if your comment could be interpreted as supporting a party or candidate during the pre-election period, we’ll delete it. If you want to discuss political issues please contact your local councillor.