Social media policy
Use of social media
Social networking sites are an important way of engaging with our local community. We will use social media to inform people about what we are doing and to discuss local issues.
Social media platforms
We currently use Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter) LinkedIn and YouTube for our corporate Wyre Forest District Council accounts.
Social Media Rules and Guidelines
Monitoring, responding and replying
You are welcome to post your comments on our social media accounts, however, please be aware that your contributions are public and available to anyone visiting the accounts. Therefore to protect your privacy, and the privacy of others, do not include personal or confidential information in your comments or responses.
Comments made on our social media accounts reflect the views of the person(s) submitting them and do not reflect Wyre Forest District Council policies.
We will try to respond to as many comments as possible but this won’t always be possible. Our social media profiles are not monitored 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and it is easy to miss posts during busy social media traffic.
Where significantly inaccurate comments are made about the council, we will publish a correction so that others are not misled. We also reserve the right to remove such comments.
Where possible, we will rely on the measures of protection and intervention which the social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn or Instagram) already has in place (e.g.; against illegal, harmful or offensive content), for example by flagging comments or alerting them to any breaches of the site’s terms and conditions.
We also have some of our own rules.
We reserve the right to remove any contributions that break the rules or guidelines of the relevant community, or:
- Are not civil, tasteful and relevant.
- Are unlawful, libellous, cruel, insensitive, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or racially offensive.
- Contain swearing.
- Contain content copied from elsewhere, for which you do not own the copyright.
- Are repeat postings or very similar messages (also called "spamming").
- Publicise your, or anyone else's, personal information, such as contact details.
- Advertise products or services.
- Impersonate someone else.
- We do not permit posts containing material which promotes or might be interpreted as promoting, a political party or parties on our social media sites. Any such material will be removed.
Repeated violation of these rules will result in your account being blocked from our social media accounts. In serious cases we may report a post to the police.
Wyre Forest District Council reserves the right to remove the comments functionality at any time if it is being abused.
Comments made on our social media accounts will not affect or influence the service you receive from Wyre Forest District Council.
Libel
Please take care not to make libellous 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 libellous.
Pre-election period
In the six week run up to an election; local, general or European, councils have to very careful not to do or say anything that could seen in any way to support any political party or candidate. We will continue to publish important service announcements using social media but may have to remove responses if they are overtly party political or that seeks or could be perceived to seek to influence people to vote for a particular candidate.