Community policy

Drinkaware social media communities’ guidelines 

This is an overview of the Drinkaware Social Media Community Guidelines. It is, a set of guidelines for people engaging with Drinkaware online and on social media. This is relevant for anyone who posts on any of the Drinkaware social media platforms. This document includes 

• the purpose of the Drinkaware social media pages,
• how Drinkaware should handle and resolve any issues that arise from platforms,
• how to keep the Drinkaware communities useful and safe for everyone,
• the types of content and language that will be removed,
• how the Drinkaware community can share their content with the team to repost.

The definition of community for the purpose of this document is: “Online communities using social platforms. This can be an organised page, group or site that an audience engages with. It can also be an undefined but active follower base who are highly engaged with the content posted by a brand or organisation.” 

As an independent alcohol education charity, Drinkaware’s social media pages are designed to provide evidence-based and engaging content to people who interact with us. We encourage anyone who participates in our social media communities to be honest, friendly and open, and it is important to us that our social media channels are a safe place for debate and conversation. We therefore reserve the right, to remove comments or discussion posts which stop this happening.

We use social media to provide information and support to reduce alcohol-related health harms in the UK, and to keep you, our audience, up to date with our work and opportunities to get involved in relevant conversations.

We ask people to follow the guidelines below when interacting on our social media channels: 

• Be respectful of others and their opinions 
• Do not make personal attacks in any of your comments 
• Do not post content that is discriminatory, obscene, inflammatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, profane or personally abusive
• Do not post anything that could be libelous or defamatory: if an accusation is made against a named person, we will hide or remove it 
• Do not post adverts for commercial products or services

To keep our social media communities useful and safe for everyone we reserve the right to remove content which: 

• Is considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others 
• Is racist, sexist, homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, disablist, religiously aggravated, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable 
• Contains swear words or other language likely to offend, or language that is defamatory, derogatory, or inflammatory and unsupported accusations or material from unverified sources 
• Could break the law or condone or encourage unlawful activity (this includes breach of copyright, defamation and contempt of court) 
• Advertises products or services for profit or gain 
• Is seen to impersonate someone else 
• Includes contact details such as phone numbers, postal or email addresses, or other confidential information 
• Describes or encourages activities which could endanger the safety or well-being of others 
• Is considered to be 'spam' 
• Is false, inaccurate or misleading or contains excessively redundant comments / suspected bot engagement 
• Is “trolling”, or posting deliberately disruptive statements meant to hijack comment threads or throw discussions off-track, or are repeatedly off-topic for the comment, discussion or post on which you are posting

Comments and content should also meet the general community guidelines of each individual social media channel when using their sites or apps to engage with Drinkaware content. 

Members of the community interact with social media communities at their own risk, taking personal responsibility for your comments, posts and any information provided. People who are continually detrimental to others’ enjoyment of our pages risk being permanently banned. 

We encourage members of our social media communities to flag/report any content that violates the platform’s terms and conditions. 

Our social media channels are moderated all year round during working hours (9am-5pm, Monday to Friday except for bank holidays and the Christmas period.) If you have questions, need support, or need guidance, we will try to respond as quickly as we can. If you see something that doesn’t seem right or content that makes you feel uncomfortable, please feel free to get in touch and let us know on the email address below. 

If you would like us to consider reposting your content on the Drinkaware social channels and other digital platforms, please tag us in your content using the hashtag #Drinkaware and tagging our handle @drinkaware.

Drinkaware welcomes all feedback so if you have any ideas or suggestions, please contact us via email: contact@drinkaware.co.uk.