Our social media community guidelines

We use social media to provide information and support about mental health problems, and to keep you, our supporters, up to date with our work and opportunities to get involved. It's also a place for people to share experiences if they wish, and to start wider conversations about mental health. It's important to us that our social media channels are a safe place for debate and conversation.

To make this possible, we ask people to appreciate the sensitive nature of discussions and to follow the guidelines below while interacting on our social media channels:

• Be respectful of others and their opinions.
• Do not make personal attacks in your comments.
• Do not post content that is discriminatory, obscene, inflammatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, profane or personally abusive.
• Do not post anything that could be libellous or defamatory: if an accusation is made against a named person, for example at a member of staff at a service, we will hide it.
• Do not post content with explicit or technical detail of self-harm or suicide.
• Do not post adverts for commercial products or services.
• Do not post repeatedly about issues that are off-topic i.e. spam

On Facebook we use filters to automatically hide obscenities, and will use our own discretion to hide comments that go against these guidelines. If we do so, we will comment to let you know this is the case, unless your comments have repeatedly contravened the policy and we have explained this to you previously. Your comment may still be visible to you, but won't be visible to others using the site. On rare occasions, we may block users from the page if the nature of their comments does not change, but we will always warn you of this and highlight our commenting guidelines before doing so. Facebook's general community guidelines should also be considered when using the site.

Our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram channels are moderated daily all year round (LinkedIn and YouTube Mon-Fri only), with reduced hours on weekends and bank holidays. If you have questions, need support, or guidance we always aim to respond. If you see something that doesn't seem right, or that makes you feel uncomfortable, do try and make us aware if you feel able to do so.

If you have any ideas for how we can moderate our channels better, please email [email protected].