Social media use

What we share and how we moderate comments on CICA’s Twitter feed.

The Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) is an Executive Agency of the Ministry of Justice which provides compensation to victims of violent crime in accordance with the statutory Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme 2012. We deal with compensation claims from people who have been physically or mentally injured because they were the victim of a violent crime in England, Scotland or Wales. We aim to provide a service which is sensitive in dealing with applicants, fair in deciding applications and efficient in managing all cases. It does not cost anything to apply.

CICA’s Twitter Policy

If you follow us on Twitter you can expect posts covering some or all of the following:

  • service updates (for example, disruption to our customer service team or our online service)

  • important information about changes to our service

  • important information on any changes to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme 2012

Use of our account is bound by the Civil Service Code. We cannot engage on issues of party politics.

We are unable to answer specific questions regarding individual applications on Twitter. You can also find more information about our service and how to contact us at GOV.UK.

If you want to make an application, you can apply online. If you need help applying, you can call our Customer Support Team on 0300 003 3601.

Availability

We will update and monitor our Twitter account from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday, excluding Bank Holidays. We will occasionally update and monitor our accounts outside of these times. Twitter may occasionally be unavailable and we accept no responsibility for lack of service due to Twitter downtime.

Moderation

The @CICA account is reactively moderated.

We encourage and welcome open, lively debate that is civil and relevant.

We want to ensure people’s safety online, so we’ve provided the following guidelines.

You should:

  • respect other comments and individuals – comments should not be malicious or offensive in nature, and should not constitute a personal attack on a person’s character
  • be reasonably concise, and not spam the channel
  • use plain English, unfortunately we can’t moderate comments in other languages
  • stay on-topic

You must not:

  • reveal personal details, such as CICA reference numbers, private addresses, phone numbers, email addresses or other online contact details
  • use these channels to discuss or comment on individual compensation claims
  • break the law (including libel and defamation), condone illegal activity or break copyright
  • swear, make malicious or offensive comments
  • incite hatred on the basis of race, religion, gender, nationality or sexuality or other personal characteristics
  • advertise commercial products and services, you can mention relevant products and services as long as they support your comment
  • impersonate or falsely claim to represent a person or organisation
  • post messages that are unrelated to the topic of the original web post
  • make comments which are party political in nature

We reserve the right to remove comments at any time for any of the above.

For serious or persistent breaches of the moderation policy, we reserve the right to prevent users from posting further comments.

Following

We will not automatically follow you back. Being followed by us does not imply endorsement of any kind.

Hashtags

We may refer to existing hashtags that are in common use. This is in order to categorise messages for ease of reference. It does not imply endorsement of any kind.

Media enquiries

All media queries should be directed to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) press office on 020 3334 3536.

@messages and direct messages

We will review @messages and direct messages and try to make sure that any emerging themes or helpful suggestions are passed to the relevant people in our organisation. However, we are not always able to reply individually to all of the messages we receive.

If you need additional help and support, there are organisations which may be able to help you if you live in England and Wales or Scotland who may be able to help you.