Social media community guidelines

Fire and Emergency New Zealand is active across a number of the major social media platforms. We use them to provide important risk reduction and community readiness and recovery information to the public. We encourage contributions to our pages but reserve the right to remove posts which breach our community guidelines or the platforms’ terms and conditions.

To ensure our social media platforms are used appropriately, we ask that people follow our community guidelines:

Be respectful. Please be courteous and do not make comments that contain offensive, profane, defamatory, or threatening language or which are otherwise inappropriate in a public forum. These comments will be removed in accordance with the Harmful Digital Communications Act.

Stay on topic. Only make comments that are relevant to the topic or theme of the post. If you disagree with our view on something and decide to make that point every time we post, your comments will be considered spam and you may be banned from the page.

Protect your own and others’ privacy. Never post comments containing personal, identifying, or confidential information such as account details or other personal information including address, telephone number, email, passwords, etc.

Fire and Emergency reserves the right to:

determine what constitutes inappropriate content
edit or entirely remove inappropriate content
ban users from its social media communities.

We may delete posts which contain:

language or content that is harmful, defamatory, racist, sexist or discriminatory, insulting or offensive
confidential information (including contact details and personal or health information)
misinformation or spam
commercial activity, including advertising
unapproved use of Fire and Emergency’s brand
off-topic or irrelevant information to the thread of conversation
nudity, pornography or child abuse
excessive violence
content that is illegal, gives instructions for illegal activity or advocates illegal activities.

When active on our social media pages, you are expected to also comply with the terms of service for each platform:

Monitoring

Our social media accounts are monitored between 8am and 5pm on business days, and periodically in the evenings and on weekends and public holidays. We try to reply to questions within 24 business hours.

Use of social media by our employees and volunteers

All personnel are free to engage on social media in a private capacity. Any opinions or views expressed in these posts or discussions belong to the individual staff member and should not bring Fire and Emergency into disrepute.

Employees and volunteers may engage on social media as a representative of Fire and Emergency. All content posted in this capacity is bound by our media policy and these guidelines.

Political neutrality

Fire and Emergency is politically neutral. We do not advocate for a particular political party and our social media channels will not be used to promote any party’s political messages or other content.

We reserve the right to remove any comments that may compromise our obligation to maintain political neutrality.

Endorsement.

Fire and Emergency does not implicitly or explicitly endorse any individual or organisation merely by creating a social media connection, regardless of the terms used by social media providers such as 'follow' or 'like'.

We will maintain social media connections with individuals and organisations that are critical and/or have opposing views. We do not hold any responsibility for the content of such profiles.

Disclaimer

The content of our social media channels is intended for informational purposes only. We will not accept any liability for loss or damage suffered by any person or body due to information provided on this site or linked sites.

We do not necessarily endorse a particular person or organisation when we follow, share, retweet, or ‘like’ content from them.
The information on our social media channels are provided on the basis that persons accessing the website undertake responsibility for assessing the relevance and accuracy of its content.

Contact us

If you find content on one of our official pages which you feel breaches these guidelines, please let us know by emailing media@fireandemergency.nz