Social media use

How we use social media to communicate with you.

Our social media channels

We use our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube channels to share information with public and professional court users, and organisations that represent that represent them. This includes updates about HMCTS, our staff, our services and our reforms.

We aim to reply to general enquiries from public and professional courts users to help reduce contact through other enquiry channels.

Twitter

We have four Twitter channels:

LinkedIn

We have one corporate LinkedIn channel.

Facebook

We have one corporate Facebook page.

YouTube

We have one YouTube channel where we publish videos about the services we provide.

How we moderate our social media channels

We moderate and respond to direct enquiries on all our social channels during office hours, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm.

We’ll deal with enquiries sent outside of this time as soon as possible when working hours resume.

We’ll do our best to respond to your enquiries within two working days, but in most cases it will be within a few hours.

We’ll try to help you, or direct you to people who can, wherever possible. We may ignore, delete or report comments that include:

  • threatening, offensive or abusive language or content
  • posts that violate a law or regulation such as content condoning or encouraging illegal activity, revealing classified information, or infringing on a copyright or trademark
  • content that discriminates against an individual or group based on age, disability, gender reassignment, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation
  • personal information such as telephone numbers or address details (we do not keep a record of deleted personal information)
  • content that actively and obviously identifies individual HMCTS staff members without their consent
  • content that advertises a commercial product or service or asks for donations or any kind of money
  • content considered to be spam (including persistent negative and/or abusive tweeting where the aim is to provoke a response)

How we interact on our social media channels

Across all our social media channels we:

  • welcome feedback, ideas and engagement from all our followers
  • may follow you or ‘like’ your content (a like or follow does not imply endorsement of any kind)
  • may share your content if relevant to our followers (sharing does not imply endorsement of any kind)
  • read all inbound messages to our social media accounts (including replies to our posts, posts where we are tagged and direct messages)
  • reply to general enquiries from public and professional court users to help reduce contact through other enquiry channels, directing users to GOV.UK where appropriate
  • make no commitment to respond to every individual comment or post where we are tagged
  • monitor all our social media channels to ensure any emerging themes or helpful suggestions are passed on to relevant colleagues in HMCTS
  • do not discuss personal details and ask you to contact us via private message, phone or email in these instances
  • cannot engage on issues of party politics or break the rules of the Civil Service Code
  • do not accept responsibility for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or YouTube being unavailable

Go to our GOV.UK page for information on how to contact us for official correspondence.

If you would like to complain, please visit our complaints page.

How we process your data

When you sign up to social media, you accept terms and conditions set out by the social media platform. All users must comply with the social media platforms’ terms, as well as these terms of use.

You are wholly responsible for any content you post including content that you choose to share publicly or privately via direct message.

HMCTS operates a network of Courts and Tribunals Service Centres (CTSCs) that deal with many aspects of court and tribunal cases in several jurisdictions. This includes dealing with enquiries received through our social media channels.

When you contact us via social media, we may keep a record of the text of online conversation for training and reporting purposes.

Personal data will be processed in line with HMCTS’s personal information charter, and not used for any other purpose, such as advertising.

Contents