Social Media Rules and Guidelines
Monitoring Accounts, Responding and Replying
Our social media accounts are monitored during office hours and are not currently monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week unless there is an emergency.
Our main GMCA, GMFRS and Mayoral social media pages are run by officers who will try and answer as quickly as possible or signpost you to further information.
If your query is serious, involves personal details, or requires a formal response, please refer to our website to contact us.
Liking and Following
Please don't be offended if we don't 'Like' or 'Follow' you on social media. This doesn't mean we don't like you or are not interested in what you have to say, it's just that the numbers can get too high for us to manage.
We sometimes follow or like people who provide information that is pertinent to our work as a local authority (for example government accounts, local media, and our partners) or those services and accounts whose information we can pass on for the benefit of many local people.
Occasionally, we'll also try and lend our support to vetted local and national campaigns. Please don’t be offended if we don’t respond to your request to support or promote your specific cause or fundraising activity. It is not always possible for us to do the background research required to ensure such activity is genuine.
There will also be times we'll need to like or follow an account in order to take part in conversations. However, just because we “like” or “follow” someone, retweet or share their information, it doesn't mean that we endorse them.
Sharing and Retweeting
We try and share or retweet information that we think will be of interest or of use to the people of Greater Manchester, however please don't be offended if we don't retweet something you want us to. It's important that we remain impartial and protect the Combined Authority’s reputation.
Blocking and Unfollowing
If we block your account, this will probably be because you've followed or liked the the channel purely to promote a product or service, or you've contravened our social media rules (see Moderation).
If for some reason we unfollow you, it might just be that we're going through a sort out or simply cutting down on numbers: if you see that we've unfollowed you, please don't take this a sign of personal rejection!
Moderation
Most online communities have their own rules and guidelines, which we will follow.
Where possible, we will rely on the measures of protection and intervention which the social networking site already has in place (e.g. against illegal, harmful or offensive content), for example by reporting content, flagging comments, hiding comments, muting nuisance accounts or trolling behaviour, or alerting social platforms to any breaches of the site's terms and conditions.
We also have some of our own rules and we reserve the right to block, mute or remove any contributions or individuals 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 comment on a post with a response that is irrelevant to the post itself
- 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
- don't post any party political comments
- don't directly insult our staff and leadership; constuctive criticism is fine, but don't be rude
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
In the six-week run up to a local, general or European election (known as the pre-election period), local authorities have to 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, biased or controversial.