Isle of Wight Council

Social Media

Moderation Policy

The following advice is given by the council to external users of our social media profiles. This advice is provided in addition to the rules of the social media providers themselves, such as Facebook or Twitter:

  • We will try to respond to comments or replies where we can, however this isn’t always possible.
  • Our social media profiles/accounts are not monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
  • We may miss posts you feel we should respond to in busy media traffic.
  • The nature of your comment/question may mean it is difficult to respond swiftly.
  • If your query is serious, urgent or involves personal details please get in touch by email with the relevant council department.
  • Please don’t be offended if we don’t ‘like’ or ‘follow’ you on social media – this doesn’t mean we are not interested in what you have to say, it’s just that numbers can get too high to manage.
  • If we do ‘like’ or ‘follow’ someone, or re-tweet or share their information, it doesn’t mean that we endorse them.
  • If we block your account, this may be because you’ve followed or liked the council purely to promote a product or service, or because you continue to contravene moderation rules.

Moderation guidelines

  • Posts on our social media sites will not be moderated before they appear.
  • If we become aware of a published post that is in breach of our guidelines then we reserve the right to delete it.
  • Posts with objectionable content will be deleted as opposed to any content being edited out.
  • Posts in languages other than English should be avoided as we do not have the facility to moderate these (the council reserves the right to remove such posts).
  • If you post a comment which is removed and you do not believe it is in breach of the guidelines, please contact us, our details are available by clicking here
  • If you have any questions about these guidelines, please contact us, our details are available by clicking here
  • These guidelines may be updated from time to time.

Prohibited content

Please ensure you do not post any material that:

  • Is abusive, obscene, indecent, discriminatory or offensive;
  • Is defamatory, harassing or hateful and capable of damaging the reputation of a person or organisation;
  • Invades anyone’s privacy or impersonates anyone;
  • Encourages conduct that may or would constitute a criminal offence, give rise to civil liability or violate any other law;
  • Includes personal information of others, such as name, address, place of employment, contact details;
  • Includes inappropriate user names that are vulgar or offensive;
  • Is far off-topic (irrelevant posts that devalue debate for other users may be removed);
  • Contains irrelevant or excessive links or appears to contain code;
  • Constitutes spam, unauthorised advertising or which may solicit such material;
  • Contains long, embedded weblinks;
  • Contains logos, slogans or other trademarks;
  • Includes excessive use of capital letters, which may create the impressive of shouting or anger;
  • Is overtly political or which contains links to overtly political sites (this is especially relevant in pre-election periods);
  • Contains confidential information;
  • May breach copyright law or infringe intellectual property.