Moderation and social media

We welcome debate and opinion about the services we offer (even if they criticise us). However, we reserve the right to delete posts that feature any of the following:

• offensive material such as swearing, sexism, racism or homophobia
• posts that libel or defame someone
• messages that name or identify specific council employees
• posts that contain incorrect information that could mislead others
• posts containing personal information that it would be unwise to share in public
• posts or comments which seek to publicise campaigns by individuals, groups or organisations
• spam, advertising or phishing/scam messages
• copyrighted material from other sites without permission
• messages of a political nature
• anything else we consider upsetting/misleading or sensitive

If someone repeatedly posts such material on any of our social media outlets we may block them from posting anything further to protect other users. We may also reserve the right to report those posting inappropriate material to the relevant authorities. 

Asking us to follow or like you or share one of your messages

We follow and like a small number of people, mostly our partners and other organisations we work with. This allows us to monitor important information that we may need to make you aware of. To enable us to do this we cannot follow or like a large number of other people as we would risk missing key messages. Therefore please don't be offended if we don't follow or like you back.

Please note: following or liking someone does not necessarily mean that we support or endorse them or their views.

We will only very rarely retweet and this will most likely be important information from our partners that we think residents and visitors need to be aware of. We may also occasionally support national campaigns or retweet information from partners relating to larger events that we are playing a part in.

Please don't be offended if we don't retweet something that you have asked us to. We are required to be very careful about what we retweet as people can see this as an endorsement of the person/organisation/event.

Use and monitoring of social media during pre-election periods (purdah)

If the period leading up to and including an election the law requires us to not promote any particular political party. During this time we will continue to post messages on our social media however we will not mention any specific councillors who may be involved. We will continue to remove responses to any of our posts that feature an opinion on a particular political party/representative.