Terms and Conditions

Social Media offers the opportunity for us to communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas online and to create, share and consume content. We believe that Social Media offers a range of important ways that we can engage with you, our stakeholder, to both deliver our key messages about the organisation and to hear back from you and continue to build the important relationship we have with you.

While we encourage your use of our Social Media websites to be as open and free from constraint as possible we have a duty of care to our service users, to you, and to the organisation to ensure that the conversations, comments and images in our website provide a positive and caring space for discussion.

This document, along with the Guidelines for Using our Websites, provides some guiding principles for you and clarifies any legal areas covering data protection, privacy and statutes that are relevant to our organisation’s activities and your use of our Social Media sites. Please read through them so that we continue to build an active positive, trusting, respectful and caring online community.

Core Principles of the Organisation’s Engagement with the Online Social Media Community

Transparency in every social media engagement. We believe that transparency is one of the cornerstones of building a successful community of users. We will ensure that comments, postings and content contributed by our employees is clearly flagged and we request the same level of transparency from our users. We do not allow the use of nicknames or pseudonyms when posting to our sites and will remove posts or comments where false or misleading attributions are made.
Protection of our your privacy. We are conscientious regarding any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that we collect, including how we collect, store, use, or share that PII, all of which is done pursuant to applicable Privacy Policies and laws.
Respect of copyrights, trademarks, rights of publicity, and other third-party rights in the online social media space, including with regard to user-generated content (UGC).
Responsibility in our use of technology. We will not use or align ourselves with any organisations or Web sites that deploy the use of excessive tracking software, adware, malware or spyware.
Utilisation of good practices, listening to the online community, and compliance with applicable regulations to ensure that these Online Social Media Principles remain current and reflect the most up-to-date and appropriate standards of behaviour.

Monitoring

We will monitor and evaluate Comments and User Generated Content before publication to ensure that it meets the standards set out within this policy. We undertake to do this as quickly as possible to enable a smooth flow of communication on our sites.

Legal Obligations

Given the sensitive areas that we work in, our legal responsibilities are perhaps more demanding than many other organisations. If you are unsure how these legal obligations may relate to something you wish to contribute to one of our Social Media sites please contact us for clarification. Email contact digital@burnside.org.au

Criminal Acts

Any evidence of criminal activity discovered during monitoring or review will be provided to the appropriate law enforcement organisations.

Confidentiality and Privacy

You must respect the privacy of others and not submit content (text or image) that compromises a person’s privacy. You are legally bound by the relevant Privacy Acts but we will also remove any posting, comment, image or link to material that we feel compromises the privacy of an individual or individuals.

Libel, Slander and Defamation

We will remove any material submitted by a user of our sites that damages the reputation of an individual and/or organisation/company. Appropriate action will be taken as needed.

Discrimination and Harassment

We will not tolerate any and all direct or indirect private and/or public display of discrimination, harassment or bullying, based upon an individual’s sex, race, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion or any other legally protected characteristics. We will remove postings that contain any such content. We may also take further action as needed.

Negligence

We will remove posting and content that damages an individual or an organisation’s reputation or exposes someone to hurt through postings appearing on our websites or Social Media network sites. We will take action if needed.

Spam, Marketing links

Spamming comments or embedding marketing links within content will lead to the postings being removed and may result in the user being banned from using our sites.

Pornography and Inappropriate Language

We will not tolerate any links to pornography, use of pornographic images or text or the use of vulgar, violent, or racist language will not be tolerated. Postings will be removed and the user banned from using the sites. Further action will be taken as needed.