During the pre-election period, councils have to be particularly vigilant in monitoring what is posted on their accounts. Comments or posts that could be seen as relating to any political party or candidate will be deleted.
Social media house rules
Updated July 2024
The communications and marketing team is responsible for the council’s social media presence on Facebook, X, LinkedIn and YouTube. These accounts aim to explain services, initiatives and decisions taken and to answer questions you may have on them.
We want you to join the conversation and to comment on what we and others are saying. While we read all comments and aim to be as responsive as possible, we cannot respond to every individual comment. We will however ensure that any common themes or helpful suggestions are passed to the relevant council team.
We have a short set of house rules to help everyone to understand what we consider to be acceptable and unacceptable.
We support and encourage free speech and don't want to have to remove any content, so please try and keep your contributions within these house rules. If these rules are broken, we may issue you with a warning about your future contact.
For serious or persistent breaches of these rules, we reserve the right to prevent users from accessing our pages and/or report them to the platform and/or the relevant authority.
Political comments during the pre-election period
Be kind
We will not tolerate any form of direct or indirect bullying, harassment or victimisation of other users or of our staff or councillors and we take this behaviour extremely seriously. Please let us know if you feel people are using our page to bully or intimidate you and we will remove the offending comments and consider removing that person from our site. We won’t reply to abusive messages and may take sanctions against anyone posting messages of this nature, in line with our Unreasonable Behaviour Policy.
Don’t spam or troll us
Spam is the term that describes any kind of unwanted online communication. If you spam our page, we reserve the right to delete it and may ban persistent spammers.
We will not respond to people who post hostile, abusive, condescending, sarcastic or offensive language that is intended to belittle or intimidate and will take action, which could include banning them.
This is because these types of posts can spoil other people’s experiences of using our page.
We will also remove any posts that advertise private businesses or services.
What you say is public
You are wholly responsible for any content that you choose to post or share on our social media accounts. Any posts containing misleading or deceptive information will be removed. We will also remove posts that unnecessarily name council officers or staff.
We reserve the right to restrict comments on our posts where appropriate.
Be respectful
We will not accept swearing, abusive or offensive language and will remove any comments that contain them. This includes racist, sexist, sexually explicit, homophobic or otherwise offensive remarks.
In cases where comments incite hate based on race, religion, gender, nationality, sexuality or other personal/protected characteristics (as defined in the Equality Act 2010), we will consider reporting the comment to the police.
We also reserve the right to hide or remove comments that are likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others.
What to do if you don't agree with comments by others
People are encouraged to submit comments on our social media channels in the spirit of free and open dialogue and debate. If you disagree with a comment on our page, you are welcome to add a reply to express this, provided you stay within these house rules. However, if you do wish to formally complain about material posted, by another person, you can let us know by emailing communications@basingstoke.gov.uk.
False identities
If it's clear you aren't who you say you are then not only are you breaking Facebook and X's rules but you’re also breaking our house rules and we will remove any content you've posted and may block you from our page.
Respect confidentiality
Please don’t post confidential or private information on our pages, as they are a public forum. This includes sharing your own phone number, email address or other contact details, or anyone else’s. If you need to share this kind of information with us, please send it in a private message.
Report abuse
If you are offended by another user's post, please report it to Facebook or X. If you would like us to remove it, please contact us at communications@basingstoke.gov.uk and we will look into the issue.
What we will do if users contravene these rules
If we see users on any of our social media channels breaking any of the rules, we may hide the comment/s or replies. This means although your comment/reply is still posted, it will not be easily visible to other people and depending on the channel this may only include you and your connections.
If you post personal information (your own or other people’s) we will hide the comment or reply and advise you to remove it. If you need to provide personal information please only use a private or direct message. Personal information may include your address, phone number, email address.
If a user is spamming us from what is clearly a fake profile, we will immediately report the post to the channel and block the user. A fake profile is unlikely to have a real name or may be purporting to be an official channel profile, will typically have no or few followers, a new or relatively new account and have no connection to the UK or Basingstoke. Spam posts often tag multiple accounts and direct to links unrelated to the channel in an effort to phish log in details.
If you repeatedly break these rules from a genuine profile we will consider blocking you from the council profile/page on the channel/s you are posting on.
If appropriate, we will issue you with a warning on the channel/s you are posting on and then monitor your comments over a period to provide a record if you continue breaking the rules. This record will be presented to the Communications and Marketing Manager to confirm if a block is warranted. If it is confirmed that a block is warranted, this will take place without any further warnings.
In some cases, behaviour may warrant an immediate block at the discretion of the Communications and Marketing Manager without a warning. We may also report comments to the appropriate authorities, such as the police, depending on their nature and content.
A block is not time limited. If your account is blocked and you wish to discuss this, please contact the Communications and Marketing Manager by emailing communications@basingstoke.gov.uk. If you have been blocked and wish to raise a service enquiry, please use a reporting form or contact the council.
If you have any questions you can contact us by emailing communications@basingstoke.gov.uk.