Overview
We recognise that social media plays an important part in how people live their lives and how we communicate – providing important information and advice to our residents.
Somerset Council has social media accounts on:
We’d love you to follow and engage with us on these channels, but we do have some social media ‘House Rules’ that we ask all users to adhere to when interacting with our channels.
We reserve the right to hide or remove any contributions that break the rules or guidelines of the relevant community, or anything that we consider to be:
- Disruptive, abusive, obscene or inflammatory, including swearing
- Personal attacks or intimidation towards council staff, councillors or other platform users
- Defamatory, slanderous, misleading, or false
- Discriminatory or offensive
- Spam or off-topic content (persistent negative or abusive posts that aim to provoke a response)
- Promoting individual products or services
- Promoting illegal activity
- Private or identifying personal information
We will not tolerate abusive comments, posts and messages and we will block and or report users who repeatedly engage with us using content or language that falls into the categories above.
Depending on the content, we may also:
- screenshot the posts and consider legal action or
- screenshot the posts and send them on to the police for investigation
While we know that everyone has different views and opinions on the topics posted on our channels, we ask that you remember that the people monitoring and responding to comments on our channels are human too – please be respectful.
Allegations against council staff and elected members
Allegations of misconduct against Council Officers and Elected Members are taken very seriously. If you make an 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. Posts will be removed while the allegations are being investigated.
Defamation
Please take care not to make defamatory statements. In law, this means a statement that lowers a person’s or organisation’s reputation in the eyes of a reasonable person.
Publishing such a statement can get a person or organisation into serious trouble and as a result, we will take down any statement that could be considered defamatory.
Pre-election period
The Council itself, as opposed to its political administration, must be politically neutral in its communications. Therefore, please do not use any of our pages to promote party political messages or other content.
This is a particularly sensitive issue in the run-up to an election and we need to be mindful of how content may be perceived (regardless of what was intended).
We will remove any comments that, in its view, may compromise its obligation to maintain political neutrality.
Complaints
If you want to raise a concern or a complaint about something posted on a page that the Council is responsible for, you can find details about our complaints procedures and make a complaint online.
Please note that you should not rely on a social media platform itself to raise concerns. Not all platforms will be monitored continuously, especially outside of normal working hours.