Social media policy

Our social media platforms are an important part of the lives of the people of Wakefield – a place to actively talk and listen together. We’re here to provide you with news, information, and advice and we welcome your comments and engagement with our content.

We understand that people have differing views on many issues. However, any form of online hate, abuse or bullying is unacceptable on any platform, not just council-owned.

We monitor our platforms actively, but if you notice any inappropriate comments on our sites, please send us a private message and let us know.

Our active hours

Our social media pages are monitored 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 the council’s contact us webpage if you have an urgent query.

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

Our house rules

don’t do anything that breaks the law
be polite, even if you disagree (name-calling, profanity, fighting words, discriminatory terms, sexual harassment, bullying, and defamatory language will not be tolerated) - you may think that your comments are funny, but they can hurt others
stay on topic - keep the conversation relevant to the post and contribute to the dialogue (we’ll remove any spam content, 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 violate these guidelines

The detail

We’ll take immediate action on our accounts and remove any content, in any format (such as comments, videos, images, gifs, attachments, links, emojis), if it is:

defamatory, misleading, or false
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
name-calling directed towards our employees, elected members or other platform users
intimidatory towards our employees, elected members or other platform users
inciting hate crime or hate crime words - find out more about hate crime
obscene, profane or sexually oriented language
discriminatory in any way
promoting illegal activity
promoting individual products or services
promoting political activity
the same message posted multiple times, otherwise known as 'spamming'
controversial and irrelevant messages posted to deliberately cause conflict, hostility or arguments in an online community, otherwise known as 'trolling'

Action

If your content relates to the list above, we’ll hide or delete it depending on the severity. We’ll respond publicly to your content or via direct message to tell you why we’ve removed it. We then reserve the right to block your profile’s access to our social media pages if you continuously publish content that breaks our house rules. We’ll tell you that we’re doing this.

Depending on the content, we also screenshot posts and consider legal action or send them to the police for investigation.

As standard, we do not disable comments from our posts. 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

Hate crime is when someone breaks the law by hurting another person because of prejudice or hostility based on (or perceived to be based on) their:

race
religion or belief
disability
gender identity
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 more about hate crime, including 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 and compliments webpage.

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 adults webpage and our safeguarding children webpage.

If you make any Prevent allegations or disclosures on our social media pages, these will be passed on to the relevant organisations as part of our duty of care. Find out more about reporting a concern on our Prevent in Wakefield webpage.

Complaints

We understand that sometimes you can be unhappy with something we have or have not done, and you want us to deliver a service to you (such as empty your bin) or to tell us about something (such as where there’s a pothole). We’re always looking for ways to improve – find out how you can make a complaint on our compliments and complaints webpage.

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.