Introduction
The Council has a number of social media outlets, which we invite the public to interact with us.
Our online communities have rules and guidelines, which we will always follow. We reserve the right to remove any contributions that break the rules or guidelines of the relevant community, or any of the following:
- Be civil, tasteful and relevant.
- Do not post messages that are unlawful, libellous, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or racially offensive.
- Do not swear.
- Do not post content copied from elsewhere, for which you do not own the copyright.
- Do not post the same message, or very similar messages, more than once (this is called “spamming”).
- Do not publicise your, or anyone else’s, personal information, such as contact details.
- Do not advertise products or services.
- Do not impersonate someone else.
Defamation
Please take care not to make defamatory statements. In law this means a statement that lowers the reputation of a person or organisation in the eyes of a reasonable person.
By publishing such a statement we can both get into serious trouble.
We will therefore take down any statement that could be deemed to be defamatory.
Pre-election period
The Council itself, as opposed to its political administration, must be politically neutral in its communications. Therefore, 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 and we need to be mindful of how content may be perceived (regardless of what was intended).
The Council will remove any comments that, in its view, may compromise its obligation to maintain political neutrality.
Complaints
If you want to raise a concern or a complaint about something posted on a page that the Council is responsible for, you can find details about our complaints procedures and make a complaint online.
Please note that you should not rely on a social media platform itself to raise concerns. Not all platforms will be monitored continuously, especially out of normal working hours.