Social media use
Information about the Department of Health and Social Care’s social media accounts and how we moderate them.
We use the Department of Health and Social Care’s social media channels to provide our audiences with information on the latest public health announcements, policy updates and campaigns.
Our social media channels are public platforms where we welcome views and comments. We want them to be safe places for our followers to comment, discuss and engage in conversation. As such, all published comments and the names they are submitted under will be visible for anyone to read.
We moderate all our channels to encourage constructive debate, manage abusive comments and remove misinformation shared on posts.
Please observe our community guidelines (set out below) when posting comments.
All users must comply with the social media platform’s community guidelines as well as our own. See the guidelines for individual platforms: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter)
Community guidelines
We reserve the right to determine, at our discretion, whether contributions to our social media channels breach our community guidelines. We will take action to hide or delete comments made on our channels, as well as block users who continuously breach our guidelines.
If your post is discriminatory, you will be blocked from our social media channels.
Action will be taken on comments that:
- promote discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation or age - we will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism or other forms of hate speech or content that could be interpreted as such
- are defamatory or abusive of any person, deceive others, threaten or promote sexually explicit material or violence
- use language that is offensive, hateful, harassing, inflammatory or provocative (this includes, but is not limited to, swearing, profanity and obscene or vulgar comments)
- breach any of the terms of any of the social media platforms themselves
- make any commercial endorsement or promotion of any product, service or publication not relevant to the discussion
- are critical of the department’s internal processes or colleagues, including naming colleagues
- break the law (this includes libel, condoning illegal activity and contempt of court)
- contain personal information in comments such as addresses, phone numbers, email addresses or other online contact details, which may relate to you or other individuals
- impersonate or falsely claim to represent a person or an organisation
- share disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theories including links to content that purposefully spread misinformation
- mislead others and have the potential to cause harm to our users
In addition to the above, we will remove comments that we feel are inappropriate. For example:
- repetitive, persistent comments from the same user across several posts which aim to provoke a response
- repetitive use of links, memes or gifs that aim to contravene any of the above guidance
By engaging on our social media channels, you agree to follow our community guidelines and:
- be respectful of others who comment on our posts - you do not have to agree with what other people say or share, but please treat everybody with dignity, courtesy and respect
- stay on topic - spam, unintelligible comments as well as comments from fake accounts or bots that seek to hijack comments on posts will be removed
On Facebook we use filters to automatically hide obscenities and will use our own discretion to hide comments that go against these guidelines. Your comment may still be visible to you but will not be visible to others using the site.
Moderation
While we monitor and moderate our social media channels regularly, we cannot always read all individual comments due to the volume we receive.
As a general rule, we do not respond to queries on our social media channels, with the exception being during a major incident, alongside advice and guidance about the incident itself.
Report a comment
If you encounter an inappropriate comment that infringes our community guidelines, report the comment on the platform. However, this should only be used for serious complaints and not simply because you disagree with the sentiment of a post.