How we manage our social media
We welcome conversation, comments, and questions on our social media accounts. Our aim is to create an environment where our communities can engage with us, and each other, safely and respectfully.
We moderate our accounts 24-hours a day, which is a manual process undertaken by police staff managing multiple actions including crime reporting.
Head to our social media accounts page for a full list of Northumbria Police's official channels.
How we manage comments
In order to maintain a respectful and lawful environment, we follow community management guidelines which are applied to any comments made on our accounts.
We moderate comments after they are posted and reserve the right to determine whether these comments breach the guidelines below.
Comments that breach our guidelines are removed and we use additional moderation controls to automatically hide foul and abusive language, ahead of the manual review of comments.
We may keep a copy of comments we delete if needed for investigation or legal reasons.
- Are irrelevant to the content of the post.
- Prejudice active criminal proceedings and impact a person’s right to a fair trial by:
- Implying guilt of a person
- Allege bad character of a person
- Detail previous offences of a person
- Breach a reporting restriction or inciting others to do so, which includes naming a person under the age of 18 arrested or charged with an offence.
- Risk the identification of a person who has been granted anonymity by the court by sharing information relating to them, either by naming them directly or otherwise.
- Are considered as doxxing - publishing someone's private personal information online without their consent, usually with malicious intent.
- Are defamatory, malicious, obscene, offensive, threatening, abusive, hateful, inflammatory or intends to cause distress to another person.
- Promote sexually explicit material or references.
- Threaten or incite violence, illegal activity or vigilante justice.
- Promote discrimination based on race, sex, gender, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age.
- Contain unapproved services advertising or promotion.
- Make allegations that are false.
- Seek to defraud, financially abuse, or deceive another.
- Are identical in nature and repeated more than once. Or are spam and phishing-type links or content, where we suspect the aim is to defraud or deceive.
Why do we switch off comments on certain posts?
Comments are switched off where court proceedings are active to prevent speculation, which could jeopardise the legal process.
When we share tributes from loved ones to an individual who has tragically lost their life, we leave our comments open for 24 hours for those wishing to share condolence messages. Following this period, they are then switched off to keep our channels free for people who are looking to report a crime or incident.
To assist with keeping our channels free to receive digital reports, we also switch comments off for posts focused upon court sentencing outcomes.
Why do we remove some posts from our channels?
We remove appeals to trace people (for example those who are missing) once they have been successfully identified and/or located.
This is to protect their privacy and/or the integrity of an ongoing investigation.
Comments on other social media accounts
Social media platforms operate their own community standards. If you see comments on social media outside of Northumbria Police’s own pages that may break those standards, you should report it directly to the platform. This may result in the comment being hidden or deleted.
Northumbria Police is not affiliated with any community-run social media accounts including any crime-related Facebook Groups or Pages. These accounts are administrated by members of the public who have access to the same public-facing information as any other member of the community.
Northumbria Police have no mechanism to act on your behalf to contact the platform. You can find the community standards for the platforms which we are members of, below:
Blocking users
Where we have the ability, we reserve the right to block people from following or contacting us on our social media accounts. Blocking a user from our social media accounts does not affect their ability to contact us through other means e.g. 999/101, or via our website.
- Repeatedly post sensitive information regarding an incident or victim.
- Send abusive messages to police staff as part of a direct messaging conversation.
- Invite others to add them as friends, where we suspect the aim is to defraud or deceive.
- Post defamatory, malicious, obscene, offensive, threatening, abusive, hateful or inflammatory content.
- Make serious and false allegations or allege fictitious circumstances.
- Contain discriminatory language.
- Contain unsolicited indecent material.
- Are persistent, creating volumes of contact that could cause service disruption.
We record our decision to block users in our social media management platform. This information is disclosable via a subject access request.
Use of the images we post on social media
Images are subject to Northumbria Police copyright and must not be used without permission from Northumbria Police Communications & Engagement team. This does not affect your right to share our posts under fair dealing.
Report a crime to us on social media
You can report non-emergency crime, such as theft, anti-social behaviour or criminal damage to us online. Find out more about Getting in touch with us online | Northumbria Police.