The council's social networks were set up to provide information on news, events and jobs for residents, businesses and visitors.
Most online communities have their own 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 messages that:
- are unlawful, libellous, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, discriminatory, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or racially offensive
- contain swear words
- have content copied from elsewhere, for which you do not own the copyright
- post the same message, or very similar messages, more than once (also called "spamming")
- publicise your, or anyone else's, personal information, such as contact details
- advertise products or services
- impersonate someone else
Following on Twitter and retweeting
Our follow policy on Twitter is based on relevance and usefulness to the council but does not mean we necessarily endorse any individual or organisation or any comments they make on Twitter.
We will only Retweet (RT) messages from feeds or share posts on Facebook which the council follows or if we believe it will be helpful or interesting for our followers.
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
Councils have to be very careful not to do or say anything that could be seen in any way to support any political party or candidate. This is even more relevant in the six week run up to an election (local, general or European).
We will continue to publish important service announcements using social media but may have to remove responses if they are overtly party political.
If you would like to talk to us about this policy, you can contact the Communications team.
Service requests
We have a lot of followers on social media who take pride in their area and want to report environmental or street cleaning issues in their local area. Please report these on our website.
When you make a request you will receive a reference number which you can then use to track the progress of your request. Reporting an issue yourself also means you will be able to provide exact details of the issue and the location our teams need to visit.
Our social media team do not make requests on your behalf. We hope you understand that waiting for the social media team to see your issue during normal office hours, find out further details if necessary and then passing this on will cause unnecessary delays to your issue being resolved, especially at weekends.