Social media community guidelines

These guidelines cover all our social media channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. 

We want to foster an informed and engaged online community, where everyone can be part of constructive conversations about the disabled community in Aotearoa. 

Community guidelines

To ensure that our social media platforms are used appropriately, we ask that people follow our community guidelines:  

• Be respectful. Please use common courtesy and do not make comments that contain offensive, profane, defamatory, threatening language or which are otherwise inappropriate in a public forum. These comments will be removed in accordance with the Harmful Digital Communications Act. 
• Do not spam us. Making the same point over and over either on the same or different posts is considered spam. If this happens, we will leave your first comment but hide the duplicates. 
• Stay on topic. Only make comments that are relevant to the topic or theme of the post. If you disagree with our view on something and decide to make that point every time we post, your comments will be considered spam. 
• Creating a conversation. We often share links to third-party websites to encourage thoughts and discussions. This does not mean we endorse all the views expressed on third-party website. We also don’t necessarily endorse the views expressed by others on our social media channels.  
• Protect your own and others' privacy. Never post comments containing personal, identifying, or confidential information such as account details or other personal information including address, telephone number, email, passwords, etc.   

• Do not post advertisements or solicitations on our comments section. Do not use fake accounts or ‘bots’ to troll our pages. Do not tag us in profane and offensive posts or tweets. Such tags will be removed. 

Private messages

You're invited to contact us by Private Messages. We try to respond to all Private Messages within two working days, though typically response times are much shorter. 

Monitoring outside of business hours 

Social media pages are not monitored outside of business hours. If you need to contact us or any of our services, please use the contact us information on the Whaikaha website.

Breach of Guidelines

Users will be blocked if they breach the above community guidelines three times. We have the right to block users from our social media communities and follow a three-strike process. However, we will not tolerate anyone who uses our channels to spread malicious information or threatens this organisation, its employees or others. Any users who do will be blocked without warning. 

Blocked users will still be able to read content when logged out but will not be able to comment. 

If we block you from our social media channels and you think we’ve made a mistake, you can contact us by emailing socialmedia@whaikaha.govt.nz to seek an explanation. 

Got something you want to post?

If you have something you think worthwhile sharing on our social channels, please get in touch and we will see if we think we can post it! Contact us by emailing socialmedia@whaikaha.govt.nz