The Hills Shire Council

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Participants are requested not to post controversial, incorrect, off topic, opinionated comments or misleading materials. Council may remove or hide comments at its sole discretion and takes no responsibility for their removal.

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Community standards and participation guidelines

This document covers all aspects of community interaction and moderation on the Council Facebook page including comments on posts.

Moderation aims
The Facebook page provides a growing number of opportunities for the community who wish to discuss content we publish or debate issues more generally. Our aim is to ensure this platform is inclusive and safe.
Community standards
These guidelines which we expect all participants in the community to abide by, all of which directly inform our approach to community moderation (detailed below). These moderation decisions are also informed by the context in which comments are made.
1. We welcome debate and dissent, but personal attacks (against authors or other users), persistent trolling and mindless abuse will not be tolerated. The key to maintaining the page as an inviting space is to focus on intelligent discussion of topics.
2. We acknowledge criticism of the articles we publish, but will not allow misrepresentation to be published on our page. For the sake of robust debate, we will distinguish between constructive, focused argument and smear tactics.
3. We understand that people often feel strongly about issues debated on the page, but we will consider removing any content that others might find extremely offensive or threatening. Please respect other people’s views and beliefs and consider your impact on others when making your contribution.
4. We reserve the right to redirect or curtail conversations which descend into flame-wars based on ingrained partisanship or generalisations. We don’t want to stop people discussing topics they are enthusiastic about, but we do ask users to find ways of sharing their views that do not feel divisive, threatening or toxic to others.
5. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of hate-speech, or contributions that could be interpreted as such. We recognise the difference between criticising a particular government, organisation, community or belief and attacking people on the basis of their race, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or age.
6. We will remove any content that may put us in legal jeopardy, such as potentially libellous or defamatory postings, or material posted in potential breach of copyright.
7. We will remove any posts that are obviously commercial or otherwise spam-like. Our aim is that this page should provide a space for people to interact with our content and each other, and we actively discourage commercial entities passing themselves off as individuals, in order to post advertising material or links. This may also apply to people or organisations who frequently post propaganda or external links without adding substantively to the quality of the discussion on the page.
8. Keep it relevant. We know that some conversations can be wide-ranging, but if you post something which is unrelated to the original topic (“off-topic”) then it may be removed, in order to keep the thread on track. This also applies to queries or comments about moderation, which should not be posted as comments.
9. Be aware that you may be misunderstood, so try to be clear about what you are saying, and expect that people may understand your contribution differently than you intended. Remember that text isn’t always a great medium for conversation: tone of voice (sarcasm, humour and so on) doesn’t always come across when using words on a screen.
10. The platform is ours, but the conversation belongs to everybody. We want this to be a welcoming space for intelligent discussion, and we expect participants to help us achieve this by notifying us of potential problems and helping each other to keep conversations inviting and appropriate. If you spot something problematic in community interaction areas, please report it.

In short:
- If you act with maturity and consideration for other users, you should have no problems.
- Don’t be unpleasant. Demonstrate and share the intelligence, wisdom and humour we know you possess.
- Take some responsibility for the quality of the conversations in which you’re participating. Help make this an intelligent place for discussion and it will be.
Moderation approach
Participants who seriously, persistently or wilfully ignore the community standards, participation guidelines or terms and conditions will hide or delete posts and you may have your posting privileges for all the Facebook page areas withdrawn.
This is not an action that we take lightly or arbitrarily. However, we are aiming to create and maintain a quality online experience, and we reserve the right to make decisions which we feel support that.
We will, when necessary, remove or hide user postings or comments from our articles, and posts.
If a contribution to the Facebook page is perceived as breaching these guidelines set out above, then it may be removed by the communications team, in the interests of keeping community areas of the site appropriate for the vast majority of the people who visit.
We reserve the right to take steps or implement measures which we hope will benefit the whole community.
Because we are ultimately responsible for everything which appears on this page, all actions and decisions taken by our moderators are final. Unfortunately, the growing quantity of user content on the page means that we can’t enter into correspondence regarding specific moderation activity, although all correspondence will be read.
If you have suggestions or questions about any aspect of community participation on the Guardian website, you can send us a Direct Message.