Social Media House Rules

We believe that social media is an important part in how people live their lives and want to ensure our channels are safe spaces that allow healthy and open discussion.

To ensure our platforms are run effectively and fairly for everyone, we have a simple set of house rules in place.

Monitoring and responding

We monitor our accounts in office hours from Monday to Friday. We read all messages and will reply to them where appropriate.

If you contact us requesting our help, we will try to assist you wherever possible. We’ll treat each message with the politeness you’d expect if you were dealing with us face-to-face or on the telephone.

However, if your request is serious, urgent or we are unable to help you on social media, we will ask you to contact our customer service team directly.

Please do not rely on our social media profiles to raise concerns, as they are not continuously monitored and may not be the most appropriate platform to contact us on.

Our house rules

Please be polite. We know that sometimes things don’t go to plan and you’ll want to flag things up with us. But do remember, we’re human and the person monitoring the social media account is only trying to help. So are other people who use social media.

We will remove any rude, unlawful, or offensive comments and posts, including:

swearing, personal attacks, or threats
promotion of individual products and services
posts and comments that are misleading or false
posts and comments that are libellous, defamatory, harassing, discriminatory or violate the legal rights of others
comments or posts that are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive, or otherwise offensive
comments which share personal or confidential information or that disrupt, provoke, attack, or offend others
spam and off-topic content (persistent negative and/or abusive posts in which the aim is to provoke a response).

Allegations against council employees and elected members

If you have a complaint to make against an individual, we’ll look into it. But please report it through our official channels for investigation.

If you name individual council workers or make offensive comments about anyone who works for us, we will remove these comments.

If you have any questions about our social media or feel a post may have be taken down unfairly, please email us at communications@eastherts.gov.uk

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