We want to foster an informed and engaged online community, where everyone can be part of constructive conversations about New Zealand’s environment.
To ensure that our social media platforms are used appropriately, we ask that people follow our community guidelines:
- Be respectful. Please use common courtesy and do not make comments that contain offensive, profane, defamatory, threatening language or which are otherwise inappropriate in a public forum. These comments will be removed in accordance with the Harmful Digital Communications Act.
- Do not spam us. Making the same point over and over either on the same or different posts is considered spam. If this happens we will leave your first comment but hide the duplicates.
- 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.
- Creating a conversation. We often share links to third-party websites to encourage thoughts and discussions. This does not mean we endorse all of the views expressed on third-party website. We also don’t necessarily endorse the views expressed by others on our social media channels.
- Give credit where credit is due. When you share an interesting image or video from our page/s, please the time to tag us or include the handle responsible for the original post.
- 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.
- Do not post advertisements or solicitations on our comments section. Do not use fake accounts or ‘bots’ to troll our pages. Do not tag us in profane and offensive posts or tweets. Such tags will be removed.
Users will be blocked if they breach the above community guidelines three times. We have the right to block users from our social media communities and follow a three-strike process. However, we will not tolerate anyone who uses our channels to spread malicious information or threatens this organisation, its employees or others. Any users who do will be blocked without warning.
Blocked users will still be able to read content when logged out but will not be able to comment.
If we block you from our social media channels and you think we’ve made a mistake, you can contact us at socialmedia@mfe.govt.nz to seek an explanation.
At the Ministry for the Environment, we work with a large and diverse range of stakeholders who share the intent of building a flourishing environment for every generation. While we encourage a rich and diverse kōrero to support this purpose, we acknowledge that as a Ministry we must strike a careful balance when sharing different viewpoints. Where individuals opinions and viewpoints may differ from our own we will acknowledge this in the social media copy.