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Barnsley Council social media acceptable use policy

Our active hours

Our social media pages are managed by Barnsley Council staff between 9am and 5pm Monday to Thursday and until 4.30pm on Friday.

We’ll be unable to respond to questions or complaints outside these hours, even if we post from our pages. Please use our contact us page if you have an urgent query.

We monitor our social media pages for coverage during critical and major incidents, adverse weather and events.

Overview of house rules

• Don’t do anything that breaks the law.
• Be polite, even if you disagree. We have a zero tolerance to any level of name-calling, slander, profanity, fighting words, discriminatory terms, sexual harassment, bullying, and defamatory language. You may think that your comments are funny and you’re airing your personal views, 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 violates these guidelines.

The detail

Barnsley Council reserves the right to remove from its social media pages, or refuse to interact with, any content (such as comments, videos, images, GIFs, attachments, links, emojis, etc) which is: 

• defamatory, slanderous, misleading or false 
• name calling – at any level
• 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
• referring to our staff, elected members or other platform users in a negative or threatening way
• inciting hate crime or hate crime words - find out more about hate and harassment
• obscene, profane or sexually-oriented language
• discriminatory in any way
• promoting illegal activity
• promoting individual products or services
• commenting on a party political or promoting political party activity
• completely off-topic
• the same message posted multiple times, otherwise known as 'spamming'
• controversial, irrelevant and off-topic, otherwise known as 'trolling'

Action

The staff who manage these pages are people working to support Barnsley and its residents. They could be your family, friends or neighbours. They don’t deserve to be abused or read abuse – this is why we will take the following action:

• We have an automatic profanity filter on our pages. If you include a keyword in your comment that 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 related to the bullet points listed above.
• If your content relates to the list above, we will remove it and block you from the relevant social media page. We won’t give you a warning before we do this.
• Depending on the content, we also screenshot posts and consider legal action or send them to the police for investigation.
• 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. 

Hate crime

A hate crime is any incident motivated by prejudice or hate towards a person’s actual or perceived social identity. Social identities include:

• disability
• gender identity
• race, ethnicity or nationality
• religion, faith or belief
• sexual orientation

Hate and harassment can be criminal or non-criminal behaviour and include offensive comments or images on digital channels such as online, social media or text messages.

Find out how to report hate and harassment.

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 form.

If you make allegations without any evidence, that would be deemed slanderous and malicious against our employees and elected members, this may be reported to the police.

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 webpage.

Prevent and Channel (preventing terrorism) allegations or disclosures

If you make any Prevent and Channel allegations or disclosures on our social media pages, these will be passed on to the relevant organisations as part of our duty of care. You can also raise concerns with the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321 or via South Yorkshire on 101 or 999 if it’s an emergency. Find out more about Prevent and Channel on our website.

Complaints

We understand that sometimes you may be unhappy with something we have or have not done, and you want us to deliver a service to you (such as emptying your bin) or to report an issue (such as a pothole). You don’t have to use our complaints procedure to report something - you can complete one of our online forms to report or tell us about something.

Find out how to make a complaint.

Pre-election period

Whatever type of election, if you post content which could be interpreted as supporting a party or candidate during the pre-election period, we’ll delete it. You can read more about the pre-election period on the Local Government Association website.