Thanks for taking a look at our rules. It's not the most exciting part of our website, but it's something we feel is important – mainly to help explain why sometimes we may need to remove the odd comment now and again on our social media profiles.
We want everyone to get the best out of social media profiles and feel like you can come to us for information about the council and our services. We also want our online community to be a safe and friendly place so that you feel comfortable to join the chat.
Please have a look at our social media house rules:
It's public
It might sound obvious, but when you post on social media it's public and everyone can see it. You are legally responsible for any content you post or share.
Here's a tip, only post comments you would feel comfortable saying to someone in person.
Remember, you can always send us a direct message if you don’t want your message to be public.
Keep it clean
We really don't want swearing or rude comments on our profiles. If you're rude or offensive we will remove your comments (this includes racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive remarks). We will also remove comments that are likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others.
Keep it on track
We want to use our profiles to tell you about the council, the vital work our staff do and how we can all make Derbyshire a great place to live. We want it to be a place you can share with us too.
Monitoring our profiles can take a lot of time, so we need to make sure discussions stay on track. If we feel that you are trying to detract from our message or conversations of others on our page, or dominate it with your own concerns that are not relevant to the majority of other people, or post any fake news, we may delete your post.
Repeat offenders may be banned from our profiles.
Bullying
We won't tolerate any form of bullying, harassment or victimisation on our profiles and we take this extremely seriously. Please let us know if you think anyone is using our profiles to bully or intimidate and we will remove the offending comments.
Facebook offers advice to help people who feel they are being bullied. Just visit the Facebook help pages and search 'bullying'. X also offers support for online abuse.
If you're offensive about the council, or anyone who works for us, or runs the organisation we may remove these comments. We'll also remove comments which name individual council officers. If you want to make a complaint about the council or any council staff then please do this through our formal complaint channels.
Reporting abuse
If you're offended by a user's post please report it directly to the social media network (Facebook or Twitter).
Find out how to report things on Facebook or how to report abuse on X.
Our responses
We'll do our best to respond to your enquiries as soon as possible, in most cases it will be within a few hours.
Our working hours are 9am to 5pm from Monday to Friday. We'll deal with enquiries sent outside these times as soon as possible when working hours resume.
Misinformation
As with other topics, we're happy to see debate and opinion expressed on our social media profiles. However, when we believe a post is incorrect, contains misinformation or is against accepted guidance we will remove it.
We will also remove posts which incite people to break the law.
As the public health authority we have a responsibility to keep people safe and any information which we believe contradicts this will be taken down.
Terms of use
It's important to us that you comply with the terms of use of the social media networks. You can read Facebook's terms of use and X's terms of service.
Any comments that breach these terms will be deleted and reported to the social media networks.