Social media acceptable use

Staffordshire Moorlands District Council will process your comments and direct messages about our services by sending them to an appropriate officer in order that we can respond with relevant and correct information.

The council's social media accounts have been set up to provide information on news, events and jobs for residents and businesses.

We reserve the right to remove any posts or contributions that break the rules or guidelines of the relevant community, or any of the following:

• Be civil, tasteful and relevant when commenting or messaging the council.
• Do not post messages that are unlawful, libelous, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, discriminatory, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or racially offensive.
• Do not swear.
• Do not post content that you do not own the copyright to or that has been copied from else where.
• Do not post spamming messages which means the same message more than once.
• Do not post yours, or anyone else's, personal information, such as contact or bank details on our open social media pages. Our customer service staff will only ask for your information to be sent in a personal message. Once the transaction is complete you may request for the messages to be deleted.
• Do not advertise products or services.
• Do not impersonate someone else.

Following on Twitter and retweeting

Our follow policy on Twitter is based on relevance and usefulness but does not mean we endorse any individual or organisation or any comments they make on Twitter.

We will only Retweet (RT) messages from feeds or share posts on Facebook which the council follows or if we believe it will be helpful or interesting for our followers.

Defamation

Please take care not to make defamatory 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 defamatory.

Pre-election period

In the six week run up to an election - local, general or European - councils have to be very careful not to do or say anything that could be 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.