Orange City Council has Social Media Community Guidelines to help create a safe environment on all its social media channels. Orange City Council’s social media channels exist to share information about what’s happening in the City of Orange and surrounds, Council activities, issues that affect Orange residents, information about Council’s services and content of community interest. We want our social media channels to be a safe place where members of our community can engage in debate and are free to make constructive comments, questions and suggestions. We encourage you to join in the discussion, ask questions and share your ideas with us. We ask that anyone engaging with our social media channels shows courtesy, kindness and respect for Council, Councillors, 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 otherwise respond to one of our posts, you are agreeing to abide by 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, post or messages must not contain personal information or breach a person's privacy in accordance with the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998.
* 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. Orange City Council's social media channels must not be used for making complaints about the Council, Councillors or Council staff. Breach of guidelines
Orange City Council wants its social media platforms to be a tool of constructive, open discussion and debate, however, without limitation, we reserve the right to determine whether contributions to our social media channels breach our guidelines. We reserve the right to remove any content that we have deemed 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 determine the conversation no longer meets our guidelines. We also reserve the right to send any comments we deem appropriate to law enforcement authorities for investigation as we feel necessary or is required by law. Blocking or banning
If a person breaches Orange 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 substantive 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 Chief Executive Officer and state the grounds on which the request is being made.
