Social Media Use and Service Standards

The Council uses different social media accounts to communicate most effectively. In addition to the Council's corporate accounts, services such as Leisure, Theatres, Youth Engagement and Heritage all have social media accounts.

Social Media Use – What Rhondda Cynon Taf Council Expects:

We want to engage and interact with residents, service users and visitors to RCT as effectively as we can through Social Media.

Most social networks and blogs have rules and guidelines which we will always follow. Additionally, we reserve the right to remove or report any online comments that break the following guidelines:

• poses a security or privacy risk
• personal attacks against individuals, Council employees and Elected Members
• contains confidential information about yourself, or somebody else
• refers to council employees by name or posts images of Council employees
• are considered spam, commercial advertising or unauthorised promotion of websites or services
• are considered disruptive, unlawful, uncivil, distasteful, harassing, abusive, threatening, defamatory, aggressive, harmful, offensive, inappropriate, objectionable or extremist.
• are considered propaganda, misinformation and fake news
• are obscene, sexually suggestive or contain swearing (this includes swear words where letters are asterisked out, substituted with acronyms or replaced with other letters)
• are racist, homophobic, ageist, ableist, sexist or perceived to be offensive, deceptive, misleading or derogatory to any group of individuals.
• are an infringement of intellectual property or copyright law
• are repetitive, off-topic or irrelevant (persistent negative and/or abusive posts in which the aim is to provoke a response)
• Impersonation of someone or use of an anonymous account
• discuss ongoing legal proceedings
• are political comments/promotion or use our social media accounts for political debate

Violating these rules will result in us deleting your post and blocking your account from our social media accounts without warning. In serious cases, we may report a post or account to the police.

Libel

Please take care not to make libellous statements. In law, this means a statement that lowers a person's or organisation's reputation in the eyes of a reasonable person. By publishing such a statement, we can both get into serious trouble. Therefore, we will take down or request you take down any statement deemed libellous.

Pre-election periods

Our accounts are non-political, and we ask fellow users to respect this and understand that we cannot engage in any political debate. In the six-week run-up to an election (Local, Senedd or General Elections), councils have to be especially careful not to do or say anything that could be seen in any way to support a political party or candidate. We will continue to publish important service announcements using social media. However, we may have to remove responses or ask you to remove responses if they are construed as party political or inflammatory.

What Users Can Expect from Rhondda Cynon Taf Council

Please do not use our social networks to report information in an emergency. If your query is urgent, please visit www.rctcbc.gov.uk/contactus to find the best way to get in touch.

Before you ask a question on social media, check to see if the information you need is already available on this website. This will prevent you from waiting longer than necessary to find the answer to your question. We may signpost you to our website for more information, a response to a question, or to one of our e-forms for you to report an issue.

If required, we will log your issue with our customer services team and will provide you with a reference so you can check progress. In certain circumstances, we may refer you to the Council's FOI email address to ensure we capture all necessary details to answer your query comprehensively.

We recognise that people expect to be answered quickly on social media, and we will do our best. However, appropriate time must be taken to ensure we respond accurately, and we may need to check details with colleagues in other departments before doing so. If a response is required, we will provide an acknowledgement within one working day before providing an answer within 15 working days. This is in line with the Council's Customer Care Charter.

We may ask you to provide contact details via DM or Messenger if we cannot help resolve your query. Please do not post personal information publicly.

In some circumstances, we may ask you to contact the service directly with your enquiry. This means you will get a quicker response by contacting the department directly and allowing us to focus on answering other peoples' questions.

General comments or questions not relating to Council business or services may not receive a response due to the amount of traffic we receive on our accounts.

Where possible, we will rely on the measures of protection and intervention that the social networking site already has in place (e.g. against illegal, harmful or offensive content), for example, by flagging comments or alerting them to any breaches of the site's terms and conditions.

We take a zero-tolerance approach to abuse of staff and Elected Members. We will provide advice to staff and Elected Members who face online harassment and abuse as a result of their employment/position, and where appropriate, we will report abuse to the police.

We may re-tweet or share content which we think would be of interest and/or follow or like pages or accounts – this is not an endorsement of an account or other content from that account. As a rule, we do not re-tweet members of the public and only share posts from official organisations or public figures.

Members of the public are invited to post comments, pictures and videos on our social media accounts. However, please be aware that your contributions are publicly available to anybody visiting our accounts.

We must remain politically neutral on social media at all times, which is why council officers cannot reply to, endorse or engage with any party-political content. If you wish to discuss political issues, please contact your local Councillor.

Comments and replies on our social media accounts reflect the views of the person submitting them and do not reflect Rhondda Cynon Taf Council policy.

To protect your privacy and the privacy of others, do not include personal or confidential information in your comments or responses – unless we request these directly via private or direct messages.

Rhondda Cynon Taf Council does not endorse or take responsibility for any material you reach through links posted on our social media accounts. When you follow a link, please note that you are leaving Rhondda Cynon Taf Council accounts.

Rhondda Cynon Taf Council may share information about community groups on social media if it is appropriate to our audience and is in keeping with the purpose of the account.

Rhondda Cynon Taf Council does not guarantee that any information posted by individuals on our social media accounts is correct and disclaims any liability for any loss or damage resulting from reliance on this information.

Only Rhondda Cynon Taf Council employees acting in their official capacity are authorised to administer our social media accounts.

Rhondda Cynon Taf Council reserves the right to remove the comments functionality at any time.

If you are a member of the media or a politician who wants to get in touch, please use: publicrelations@rctcbc.gov.uk instead of contacting us on social media.

All our social media posts in the Welsh language are translated/approved by qualified translators employed by the Council. We do not control automatic translations provided by third-party software/platforms.

We have set up social media accounts to filter posts/comments with certain words, such as swear words, that people might find offensive. A user may still be able to post something offensive to our wall. In this instance, we will quickly remove it and prevent similar content from appearing again.

The Council will not respond to social media posts which do not comply with the above and, if necessary, will take action to block, hide, delete or report as appropriate in line with the Council’s Unreasonably Persistent Customers Policy.

Safeguarding Children and Adults at Risk

We are committed to safeguarding children and adults at risk. Our social media activities must reflect these responsibilities, ensuring a safe and respectful online environment. All council employees and representatives must remain vigilant to potential safeguarding concerns that may arise through social media interactions. Any signs of abuse, neglect, or risk to vulnerable individuals must be reported in line with our safeguarding procedures.

We actively monitor social media to prevent the exploitation or harm of at-risk individuals. Posts and comments involving our accounts are subject to review for compliance with our safeguarding policies. Any concerns raised on social media regarding children or adults at risk will be forwarded to the appropriate safeguarding team for immediate action, reinforcing our zero-tolerance stance on neglect, abuse, or harm.

Our approach supports wider corporate safeguarding measures to ensure our digital presence reflects our duty of care towards our community.

Find out more about our Safeguarding responsibilities and read our Corporate Safeguarding Policy: Safeguarding is Everyone's Business