House Rules
We use social media as an additional means to engage with our communities. We want to keep you, our followers, informed of what’s happening in your area and provide you with crime prevention advice. We also know that you can be invaluable in assisting us with appeals for information. We want our social media accounts to be safe spaces for all who use them, so we ask that all followers
adhere to our House Rules. We reserve the right to hide or delete comments or block users who break these House Rules.
1. Reporting
This is really important. Public comments on our posts are not moderated 24/7, and are not monitored by our control room; if you want to report a crime or provide information in response to an appeal via social media, this MUST be done via our website or by calling 101. In an emergency, always dial 999. If you come across something you think breaks a social media platform’s terms and conditions, you should report it to that platform. If you think a crime is being committed online, you should report it to us on our website or via 101. Contact 999 only in an emergency. Please don’t post links to unlawful material in a public comment.
2. Posting on our accounts
Remember everything you say on our social media accounts is public. You are legally responsible for what you say and post on our pages. We do have the ability to disable comments but we prefer to do this as a last resort or when we judge there is a need to do so, for example in order to protect the integrity of investigations. Our social media was always intended to allow a two-way dialogue between us and our followers and we want to restrict this as little as possible. With that in mind do not post content which is:
• Abusive (including expletives)
• Defamatory
• Hateful
• Racially offensive
• Sexually offensive
• Obscene
• Threatening
• Inflammatory
• Unlawful (for example comments which could prejudice a trial or content which you don’t own the copyright to)
• Spam or unrelated to the post
• Includes sensitive information, such as your own, or someone else’s personal details
• Includes links to any material containing any of the above
Comments are moderated, although this is not on a 24/7 basis; in addition, due to the volume of public comments received, we don’t always see them straight away. However, we do reserve the right to delete or hide comments, or block any users, that breach these guidelines, without explanation, and to change our guidelines at any time and without notice. For those comments/users which may cross the criminal threshold, we will also seek to prosecute if necessary.
3. Complaints
If you want to make a complaint against South Wales Police or one of its officers/members of staff, you can do so on our website: https://www.south-wales.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/c/af/complaints/
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More information: https://www.south-wales.police.uk/socialmedia
