Doncaster Council has social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, LinkedIn and TikTok.

We’d love you to follow us on these accounts – they’re here to provide important information and advice to our residents/users. We understand that our residents have different views on the issues we discuss on our social media channels and we welcome your comments and engagement with our content.

We do however have some ‘Rules of Play’ we ask all residents and respondents to adhere to when engaging with our social media accounts.

Any form of cyber-bullying is not acceptable on any platform.

While we will actively monitor our platforms, if you do notice any offensive comments on our sites at any time, please send us a private message and let us know. 

We’ll take immediate action on our accounts if content in any format (such as comments, videos, images, GIFs, attachments, links, emojis) is: 

• defamatory, slanderous, misleading or false
• abusive or threatening – this includes swearing, adapted spellings with the same meaning, etc
• intimidatory towards our staff, elected members or other platform users
• inciting hate crime or hate crime words. See our Hate Crime page for more information.
• obscene, profane or sexually oriented
• discriminatory in any way
• promoting illegal activity
• promoting individual products or services
• completely off topic
• the same message posted multiple times, otherwise known as 'spamming'
• controversial, irrelevant and off topic, otherwise known as 'trolling'
• private or identifying information about a particular individual, typically posted with malicious intent, otherwise known as doxing.

Action 

If your content relates to the list above, we may hide or delete it.

We may also respond publicly to your content and via direct message asking you to remove it immediately. 

If you do not take action, we may block your access to our social media accounts. We’ll tell you that we’re doing this.

Depending on the content, we will also screenshot the posts and consider legal action or sending them on to the police for investigation and/or, we will take immediate action to delete the post and block your access to our accounts.

Allegations against council staff and elected members 

We take any allegations of misconduct against Council Officers and Elected Members very seriously. If you make any such allegation on our social media accounts  we’ll ask you to report it to the most appropriate body so that it can be fully investigated. Any posts will be removed whilst the allegations are being investigated.

Safeguarding allegations or disclosures

Safeguarding concerns are of paramount concern to the Council. If you make any safeguarding allegations or disclosures on our social media accounts, these will be passed onto the relevant organisations to be properly investigated. Any posts relating to safeguarding issues will be removed whilst they are being investigated. It is better to raise these concerns directly to us via our Safeguarding pages for adults and for children.

Complaints

We understand that sometimes you can be unhappy with something we have or have not done, and you just want us to deliver a service to you (such as empty your bin) or to tell us about something (such as where there’s a pothole). If you do have any of these issues, you can send us a DM on Facebook and our customer services will pick it up – but we’d suggest reporting your issue via our website.

Before elections

In the period running up to an election of any type, there are strict rules on the information a Council can publish in order to maintain political neutrality. In order to comply with the law, if you post anything which could be interpreted as supporting a party or candidate during the pre-election period we may have to delete it.

Hours

Our social media pages are monitored regularly Monday to Friday and potentially over weekends during any major incidents.

We will not be able to respond to questions or complaints outside of these hours, even if we are posting from our accounts. If you have an urgent query please use the council’s contact us page.

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