Social media house rules

Canterbury City Council’s social media team is responsible for the council’s accounts on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Youtube.

We want to ensure our social media channels are safe spaces for healthy, open discussion which is why we have a set of house rules that all users should respect when engaging with us on social media.

What we need from you

By engaging with us on our social media channels, we expect all users to understand and act in accordance with the following house rules:

• You are wholly responsible for all the content you post, including any content that you choose to share.
• We will report and remove social media profiles that are set up using the council’s name or imagery without permission.
• We will not censor healthy, open debate. However, we will remove messages, hide comments or block and report users who post messages which we believe:
  • bully, harass or intimidate any individual or organisation
  • are unlawful, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene or profane
  • promote discrimination based on the protected characteristics: age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy, race, religion and sexual orientation
  • are deceptive or misleading
  • are spam (persistent, abusive or off-topic comments which aim to provoke a response)
  • infringe or violate someone else’s rights
  • violate the law
  • violate any intellectual property rights, including copyright
• We will also block or report users who:
  • encourage others to post such messages
  • use offensive images as their profile picture
  • have offensive usernames

What we’ll do for you

• We know many users turn to our social media channels for support and we will do our best to help you or direct you to people and/or departments who can, wherever possible.
• We will be politically neutral in our communications.
• We will monitor our channels during working hours from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, and will always try to respond to your enquiries as quickly as possible.
• We will answer enquiries and messages sent outside of this time as soon as possible when working hours resume.
• When comments or queries posted outside of working hours present a risk to an individual’s safety or a serious risk to the council’s reputation, the Communications manager on-call will respond.

Please note that comments and postings by users on our social media channels do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Canterbury City Council.

Accessibility

We aim to make our social media content as accessible as possible by:

• Adding alternative text descriptions to photos
• Using CamelCase in hashtags to ensure screen readers interpret hashtags correctly
• Adding subtitles to videos
• Including all key information within the post caption if a graphic image is used

We reserve the right to modify or change these house rules at any time.

Published: 23 January 2024