Berneslai Homes social media acceptable use policy

Our social media platforms are here to provide you with news, information, and advice, and we welcome your comments and engagement with our content.

We understand that people have differing views on many issues. However, any form of online hate, abuse or bullying is unacceptable on any platform, not just Berneslai Homes-owned.

We monitor our platforms regularly, but if you notice any inappropriate comments on our sites, please send us a private message and let us know.

Our active hours

Our social media pages are monitored by our communications and customer services teams. We will respond to you in office hours which are:

  • Monday-Thursday 9am-5pm 
  • Friday 9am-4.30pm

Excluding Bank Holidays and pre-arranged closedown periods (for example between Christmas and New Year) which will be published on the page. 

We’ll be unable to respond to questions or complaints outside these hours, even if we post from our pages. Please call 01226 787878 if you have an urgent query.

Overview of house rules:

Make sure that you:

  • Don’t do anything that breaks the law.
  • Be polite, even if you disagree. Name-calling, profanity, fighting words, discriminatory terms, sexual harassment, bullying, and defamatory language will not be tolerated. You may think that your comments are funny, but others may not.
  • Stay on topic. Keep the conversation relevant to the post and contribute to the dialogue. We’ll remove off-topic content, out-of-context, spam, promotional, or links to third-party sites,
  • Keep it real. All posts should come from a real person and a real profile. Content from fake or anonymous profiles will be deleted, and profiles will be blocked.
  • We reserve the right to remove content posted to our social media pages that violate these guidelines.

The detail

We’ll take immediate action on our accounts if content in any format (such as comments, videos, images, gifs, attachments, links, emojis) is:

  • Defamatory, misleading or false
  • Making allegations without any evidence that would be deemed slanderous and malicious
  • Abusive or threatening – this includes swearing, adapted spellings with the same meaning etc.
  • Name-calling directed towards our employees or other platform users
  • Intimidatory towards our employees or other platform users
  • Inciting hate crime or hate crime words. Find out more about hate crime.
  • Obscene, profane, or sexually oriented language
  • Discriminatory in any way
  • Promoting illegal activity
  • Promoting individual products or services
  • Promoting political activity
  • Completely off-topic
  • The same message is posted multiple times, otherwise known as 'spamming'
  • Controversial, irrelevant ,and off-topic messages, otherwise known as 'trolling'

Action

We've an automatic profanity filter on our pages. If you include a keyword in your comment we’ve added to the filter, the platform will automatically hide your comment so that it doesn't appear on our page. Our list of keywords includes terms relating to the bullet point list above.

If your content relates to the list above, we’ll hide or delete it depending on the severity.

We may respond publicly to your content and by direct message asking you to remove it immediately. We’ll tell you why we’ve removed it.

We’ll block your access to our social media pages if you don’t amend or remove your content. We’ll tell you that we’re doing this.

Depending on the content, we also screenshot posts and consider legal action or send them to the police for investigation.

As standard, we don’t disable comments from our posts. It’s our discretion to disable comments from posts if we think this is the right action to take to protect the public and our employees or if we’re simply sharing important information.

Hate crime

Hate crime is any incident motivated by prejudice or hate towards their actual or perceived social identity. Social identities include:

  • disability
  • gender identity
  • race, ethnicity, or nationality
  • religion, faith or belief
  • sexual orientation

Hate and harassment can be criminal or non-criminal behaviour and include offensive comments or images on digital channels such as online, social media, or text messages.

Find out more about hate crime, including how to report hate and harassment.

Allegations against Berneslai Homes employees and contractors

We have a zero-tolerance approach toward fraud and corruption in our organisation. If you make an allegation on our social media accounts against Berneslai Homes or our employees, we’ll ask you to report it along with evidence using our Whistleblowing eform or complaints webpage.

If you make allegations without any evidence that would be deemed slanderous and malicious against our employees, this may be reported to the police.

Complaints

We understand that sometimes you can be unhappy with something we have or haven’t done, and you want us to deliver a service to you (such as a repair) or to tell us about something (such as anti-social behaviour). You don’t have to use our complaints procedure to do this - you can complete one of our online forms to report or tell us about something. Find out more on our complaints and compliments webpages.

Pre-election period

During any type of election, if you post content of a political nature or content which could be interpreted as supporting or opposing a party or candidate, we’ll delete it.