Moderation
Most online communities have their own rules and guidelines.
We have some of our own rules.
We reserve the right to remove any contributions that break the rules of the relevant community, or any of the following guidelines:
- be civil, tasteful and relevant;
- don’t post messages that are unlawful, libellous, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or racially offensive;
- don’t swear;
- don’t post content copied from elsewhere, for which you do not own the copyright;
- don’t post the same message, or very similar messages, more than once (also called “spamming”);
- don’t publicise your, or anyone else’s, personal information, such as contact details;
- don’t advertise products or services;
- don’t impersonate someone else.
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 or ‘Purdah’
In the six-week run up to an election – whether local, general, referendum or European – all 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.