Social media house rules

Guidelines

We welcome your comments, questions and feedback on our social media channels. But we ask that you are respectful and follow these guidelines.

Your content is public

Once your comment is online, it is in the public domain — everyone with internet access can read it. You are legally responsible for the content you post.

All content on our social media channels — whether generated by us or you — is a public record. To ensure we comply with New Zealand legislation we keep records of all content posted, even if it is deleted or edited.

Private information

Please do not share any of your own, or anyone else’s, private information on our social media channels.

To remove any doubt, private information includes — but is not limited to — your own or someone else's:

• bank account number
• email address
• home address
• IRD number
• National Health Index (NHI) number
• phone number
• social welfare number (SWN)
• work address.

Please contact us by phone, email, or in writing if there's something you need to discuss with us that involves private information about you or another person.

Any posts or comments on our social media channels which contain private information will be removed.

Behaviour

• Be respectful of other users.
• Do not use language or content that:
  • appears to be spam
  • is racist, sexist or discriminatory
  • contains insults or put-downs
  • is likely to be offensive, inflammatory or provocative. This includes swearing and obscene or vulgar comments
  • contains potentially harmful advice, or
  • is not accurate.
• Do not break the law or encourage others to do so. This includes defamation, breaching privacy, breaching another person’s intellectual property rights such as copyright, condoning illegal activity and contempt of court.
• Do not impersonate or falsely claim to represent a person or an organisation.
• Do not attempt to log on using another user's account.
• Do not make any commercial endorsement or promotion of any product, service or publication.
• You are wholly responsible for any content you post including content that you choose to share.

How we'll respond

We'll do our best to respond to social media posts directed to us.

We will:

• strive to respond to your enquiries within four working hours. Our working hours are 8am to 5pm Monday to Friday, and
• try to help you, or if we can't, we will direct you to people or other agencies who can.

We cannot:

• respond to posts of a political nature, and
• respond to posts of a commercial nature as we are governed by strict procurement rules.

Removing comments and banning users

We will remove any comments or posts that breach these guidelines. If an individual repeatedly violates this policy, that user will be blocked from posting in the future.

Giving permission

By publicly contributing to our social media channels — including comments, photos, audio or videos — you are granting us permission to reuse this content inside that platform.

We will seek your permission if we wish to use the content outside of the platform.