Social media guidelines
Through our social media platforms, you can follow us and stay up to date with:
- Council news
- Events
- Consultations
- Emergency information
- Council meetings
- Live coverage of events
- Service updates and information
- The nice things around the borough
Hours
We regularly monitor our social media platforms Monday to Friday (9am to 5pm), and over weekends during any major incidents or events that run out of hours.
We aim to respond to as many replies, comments and requests as we can during this time. However, the best way to report issues or find information is through our website.
When we respond to your queries, we may send this to services so that we can find out information for you. This may mean that sometimes it will take a while before we can get back to you, but we will acknowledge your message and update you.
We won’t be able to respond to all enquiries outside these hours, even if we are posting out of hours. If you have an urgent query please use the contact us section of the website.
Let’s chat about the rules – be kind, be respectful
Harrow Council has the following accounts:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
We’d love for you to follow us on the accounts mentioned above and engage with our content. They are there to provide information, news and advice for those who live, work and visit our borough.
Your feedback and ideas are always welcome, and we’ll join in the conversation where we can. It’s okay to have different views on the issues and topics we post about, however, there are some rules that we ask everyone to follow when engaging with our posts.
We will not condone swearing, discrimination or abusive posts, and any form of cyber-bullying is not acceptable. If you notice anything offensive on any of our pages please let us know or send us a private message and let us know.
We’ll take immediate action on our accounts and this may result in blocking/banning a user for:
- Sharing or posting defamatory, slanderous, misleading or false information
- Being abusive or threatening –includes swearing
- Being abusive towards our staff, elected members or other platform users
- Inciting hate crime or using hate crime words
- Posting obscene, profane or sexually oriented comments
- Promoting illegal activity
- Promoting individual products or services
- Posting the same message posted multiple times, otherwise known as 'spamming'
- Posting controversial, irrelevant and off topic, otherwise known as 'trolling'
- Private or confidential information about an individual or business, posted with malicious intent, otherwise known as doxing.
Rule breakers
If your content breaches any of the above that’s listed, we will hide or delete it. We may also respond to you publicly or via direct message asking you to remove your post immediately.
If you do not take action, we may block you from engaging with/accessing our social media accounts. We’ll tell you if we do this.
Depending on the content, we will screenshot posts and consider legal action or sending them on to the police for investigation.
Before elections – keeping it neutral
In the run-up to elections, the pre-election period means there are strict rules on the information we can publish in order to maintain political neutrality.
During this period we may have to delete or remove any comments or posts that could be interpreted as supporting a party or candidate.
Complaints
We understand sometimes you can experience a problem with a service – be it your bins, street cleansing, school admission or parking. We encourage you to report issues via the relevant section of the website, or you can DM us if you’re having trouble.