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Social Media House Rules

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Our Social Media channels offer you a way to engage with us on a wide range of topics in Welsh and English. They include our latest news and updates, and you can find out how to get involved in our work.

It’s important that our online channels are safe and our followers and contributors feel respected. We’ve drawn up a moderation policy to ensure that everyone feels comfortable sharing views and opinions on these channels.

The safety and wellbeing of our online communities are very important to us, and therefore we ask you to adhere to the following:

  • Do not use offensive, indecent or obscene language that could be discriminatory or promotes discrimination of any kind.
  • Do not incite, condone or encourage conduct which could result in a criminal offence, civil liability, or otherwise breach any laws.
  • Do not post anything that could be considered defamatory, embarrassing, or damaging to an individual or company. 
  • Stay on topic and avoid posting irrelevant comments.
  • Do not post confidential or personal information. If we need further information, we will ask you to contact us via email, telephone or in writing.
  • Do not target, harass or intimidate Healthcare Inspectorate Wales staff or community members.
  • Do not impersonate someone else or falsely claim to represent a person or organisation.

The following types of enquiry and comments are against our general house rules and will not be responded to on any of our social media channels:

  • questions which cannot be answered through provision of public domain information (these questions, including potential FOI Requests, will be taken offline and redirected where appropriate)
  • comments on the virtue, absence or likelihood of any policy
  • personal comments directed at Ministers or staff
  • abusive comments or comments that are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit or otherwise objectionable rhetorical comments or questions, or those which have been auto-generated

Posts of the above nature will be removed from our pages.

Please recognise that these online communities may not be the best way for us to respond to certain questions you raise and we may ask you to use alternative ways of communicating with us. Sometimes we will be unable to answer certain questions due to legal restrictions. 

We do not investigate individual concerns about the care you have received, but we do welcome information about your experiences which will feed into our intelligence process. Please email: hiw@gov.wales

We want our online spaces to be positive communities. We are independent and objective and we will not censor comments unnecessarily, however we will hide or delete your posts if they are in violation of our rules. Continuous breaches may lead us to take a decision to block you from our page.

Management of our Social Media accounts

  • Our pages are managed by staff from 9am to 4pm, Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays and civil service privilege days). Whilst we may post outside of these hours, we are not able to respond to posts or queries outside of these hours.
  • Our Social Media Admin team will check all Facebook posts before they are published to ensure they adhere to the rules above.  This means there will be a delay from posting a comment to the published comment appearing on our pages.
  • We aim to respond to all posts with 48 hours and within office hours only. For example, if you post a comment on Friday or Saturday, we aim to respond by Tuesday.
  • Social media platforms may occasionally be unavailable and we accept no responsibility for lack of service due to downtime or problems with the internet. We reserve the right to delete our accounts at any time.

If you have concerns or queries please email hiw@gov.wales