Social Media Community Guidelines

Welcome to the social media community guidelines for the Soil Association.

We post content on our social media channels throughout the week, mostly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. We make our posts based on what we think our community will find interesting and thought-provoking. Every now and then we will also publish posts which tell you a little about what we've been up to. If we are doing our job correctly, the content we post will encourage conversation, questions and debate on our channels which we very much welcome.

We manage our social media channels between 9-5 Monday to Friday and always try to respond to comments and questions as quickly as can.

Our Social Media ‘House Rules’

We want our social media channels to be places where people can share how they feel about the Soil Association and all aspects of our work including their own experiences. We also want to make sure that people feel able to express their opinions in a warm, considerate and comfortable environment without being exposed to offensive content or feeling personally attacked by other members of our community.

On our channels, we ask you to be respectful and polite to one another. Please ensure your contributions are civil, polite, tasteful and suitable for all ages. We will not tolerate disruptive, offensive or abusive behaviour, unlawful or objectionable content. This includes any material which might be defamatory, offensive, infringing, obscene, lewd, pornographic, violent, abusive, insulting, threatening, harassing, discriminatory, blasphemous, indecent or otherwise unlawful or objectionable. It also includes any material which is aggressive, argumentative or likely to be construed as bullying, and it includes spamming or repetition - in particular, the repeated posting of off-topic material in subject-specific threads or areas including widely unevidenced conspiracy theories. This includes comments on posts from individuals in special interest groups, using methods to swamp posts with en-masse, targeted activity which seeks to dominate and shut down posts, rather than allow room for conversation and debate.

Moderation policy

In general, we don’t moderate posts and comments, except on the rare occasions - for example where someone has posted offensive or threatening content including posts aimed at other commenters on our page. We do not like to ban or delete comments - we don’t believe in obstructing individuals rights to express their opinion.

At the same time, we have a duty of care to make sure our page remains a respectful, friendly and considerate area for our supporters and followers. If an individual repeatedly breaks the 'House Rules', we will without hesitation delete comments and ban the individual from our page. In certain scenarios, where an individual is clearly spamming our pages and posts, or clearly being offensive to other users, we will without hesitation, ban them from our channel.

If you’re concerned that a post or specific user has broken any of our house rules or you’re worried about any comment or content then please send us a direct message on the platform you are using.