Guidance

Social Media House Rules

Disclosure and Barring Service's social media house rules outline how we will engage with customers and the behaviours we expect from users.

Documents

Social media house rules

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Details

The social media team at the Disclosure and Barring Service are responsible for social media channels on platforms including X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Our channels feature a variety of information from the services we provide, keeping you informed about news from the organisation and work with our partners.

We are happy to help you in any way that we can. We do however expect our users to offer us the same level of courtesy that we offer them. We have a short set of house rules to help us work together:

  • All users must comply with the social media platform’s Terms of Use as well as our own terms of use.

  • You are responsible for any content you post including content that you choose to share. Only post information you are happy for everyone to see.

  • We will remove, in whole or in part, posts or comments that we feel are inappropriate, or discriminatory against any individual or group.
  • We will remove messages and/or disable comments (where function allows) including reporting and/or blocking users on our social media channels who post messages at us which we believe are:
    • Abusive or obscene
    • Deceptive or misleading
    • In violation of any intellectual property rights, including copyright
    • In violation of any law or regulation
    • Spam (persistent negative and/or abusive posts in which the aim is to provoke a response)

Users repeatedly engaging with us using content or language which falls into the above categories will be blocked and/or reported to the associated social media platform. We will not tolerate or respond to abusive messages.

We understand that many of our users contact us for support and advice about our services.

  1. We will do our best to respond to your enquiries within two working days, in the majority of cases, it will be within a few hours.
  2. We are unable to assist with questions about individual applications. We’ll try to help you or direct you to people and/or departments who can assist, wherever possible.
  3. Our working hours are 9.00 – 17.00 Monday to Friday. We’ll deal with enquiries sent outside of this time as soon as possible when working hours resume.

Please note:

  • The Disclosure and Barring Service accounts are not political accounts and cannot respond to political comments.

Updates to this page

Published 3 October 2023

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