Social Media Community Guidelines

Glenorchy City Council has Social Media Community Guidelines to help create a safe environment on all its social media channels.

Glenorchy City Council’s social media channels exist to share information about:

  • what’s happening in Glenorchy and surrounds
  • Council activities
  • issues that affect Glenorchy residents
  • information about Council’s services
  • information that community might be interested in.

We want our social media channels to be a safe place where members of our community are free to ask questions and make constructive comments or suggestions.

We ask that anyone engaging with our social media channels show courtesy, kindness and respect for Council, Elected Members, Council staff and all other contributors.

To help everyone enjoy our social media channels, we have set out some guidelines which apply to any engagement with us or other members of the community on our social media channels.

When you post or comment on our social media channels, or respond to one of our posts, you are agreeing to follow these Social Media Community Guidelines:

  • Comments, posts or direct messages must not be defamatory of any person, disruptive, derogatory, threatening, intimidating, hateful, inflammatory or promote sexually explicit material or violence. Personal attacks, harassment, name-calling, bullying, trolling and abuse will not be tolerated.
  • We do not allow obscene, profane, indecent, pornographic, unlawful or offensive comments, posts or direct messages, including masked profanity where symbols, initials, intentional misspellings or other characters are used to suggest profane language.
  • Comments, posts or messages must not contain personal information or breach a person’s privacy in accordance with the Personal Information Protection Act 2004.
  • Content must not be off-topic, false, fraudulent, deceiving, misleading, irrelevant, repetitive or unintelligible.
  • Discrimination or hate speech based on race, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or age is not permitted.
  • Comments, posts or direct messages must not contain spam or links to any kind of virus, malware, spyware or similar program that could cause harm to a user’s computer.
  • Content must not breach any of the terms of any of the social media platforms themselves. Glenorchy City Council’s social media channels must not be used for making complaints about the Council, Elected Members or Council staff. To make a complaint, contact Glenorchy City Council here.
Why Can’t I See My Comment?

Your comment might be undergoing moderation, a preliminary review process, for various reasons. It could be flagged by Glenorchy City Council’s system filter or require human intervention based on the article’s content. Specific keywords or phrases trigger Facebook’s system filter, marking comments as potential spam or inappropriate.

Please be patient. Often comments are held for moderation and will be assessed and released in accordance with our Social Media Community Guidelines. The Communications Team reviews comments within Glenorchy City Council business hours.

If your comment is removed, please review our guidelines to see what sort of comments are welcome. The Communications Team has the right, at its sole discretion, to remove comments that violate our guidelines and terms.

This policy is to ensure the safety and well-being of Glenorchy City Council staff, as well as to legally protect Glenorchy City Council. Please be aware that comments on our Facebook page are filtered during work hours. This measure helps maintain a safe, respectful environment for everyone involved. While we welcome feedback and open discussion, comments that do not meet our community standards or contain harmful language may be removed.

Thank you for helping us keep this a positive space for all.

Breach of guidelines

Glenorchy City Council reserves the right to decide if contributions to our social media channels breach our Guidelines. We reserve the right to remove any content that we have decided does not follow our guidelines. We will hide or delete comments made on our channels that breach our guidelines, as well as block users who do not follow these guidelines. We will restrict comments if we decide the conversation no longer meets our guidelines.

We also reserve the right to send any comments we deem inappropriate to law enforcement authorities for investigation as we feel necessary or is required by law.

Blocking or banning

If a person breaches Glenorchy City Council’s Social Media Guidelines on one of its channels on three occasions they will be blocked from that platform, however, if a person uploads content that the moderator deems to pose a risk to health and safety or another substantial risk (such as the uploading of defamatory content), an interim block or ban may be imposed immediately for 28 days.

A person may request a review of a decision to block or ban them from a social media platform. The request must be made in writing to the Manager Stakeholder and Executive at communications@gcc.tas.gov.au and state the grounds on which the request is being made.

Enquiries via social media

While we try to assist with simple questions or issues, many matters can’t be resolved via social media.

You should contact Glenorchy City Council online, by phone or in writing if you:

Third-party post requests

Organisations can make a request to be featured/shared on Glenorchy City Council’s social media pages. These requests can be sent to communications@gcc.tas.gov.au and will be assessed within business hours. Glenorchy City Council’s communications team will assess the request, based on the adopted Communications Policy (TBA). If the request is approved, the post will be scheduled around regular content.