Enabling the community to engage online to help achieve South Australia’s Strategic Plan
Moderators instructions - 1
We offer the community a set of welcoming, post-moderated online spaces where people can find information, share their ideas and views, and have conversations.
This document outlines the approach we take to moderation. We use a post moderated approach – this means that we provide spaces for the community to participate in online discussion.
Members of the community register to participate (comment or post content) on our website. To do this they log on to our site and they provide us with their email. They also agree to guidelines for participation called the acceptable terms of use.
Once the spaces (social media and our website) are enabled we monitor and moderate the content. Content is not vetted or viewed in advance. This is post moderation. We do not take comments or post down because they are negative or critical – they need to be in breach of our acceptable terms of use.
Your role as a moderator
Your role is to moderate the website presences covered by your engagement as agreed with your sponsor authority.
Your purpose in doing so is to provide clear and up to date information, correct inaccuracies in matters of fact and to alert the Lead Moderators where you identify material in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy. You will be assigned a contact person.
In this sense your role is akin to a customer service role to provide correct and factual information and correct inaccuracy. You may however, refer a blogger to a discussion happening in another part of the website and, or suggest that their comment may be of interest to others and suggest they might form a group.
You should not enter into debate on points of view or where in doubt that information is a matter of interpretation.
Moderators must use the official user name to provide advice. Moderators should not use their own personal profiles to comment on matters in the realm of moderation. If you wish to post a comment as a private member of the community this is possible, however you should refer to the government of South Australia’s Social Media Guidelines.
The group and blogs allocated to you must be monitored consistently – on coming to work each morning and upon leaving work in the afternoon and possible, depending on the assessment of the risk in the evenings. If you are unable to attend work you should ensure that the Lead Moderators are alerted to this to enable a consistency of moderation.
If you think that a comment is in breach of the acceptable terms of use you should immediately call the contact list – unless we are alerted to the situation we will not be responsible for the delayed removal of content from the site.
Inappropriate or offensive postings
Under this agreement, any post that is not in accordance with the Acceptable Use Policy will be removed by a Cabinet Office Lead moderator.
If there is any doubt about the appropriateness or offensiveness of a posting, the Director, Community Participation and Partnerships, South Australia’s Strategic Plan will be consulted and will be asked to make the final and binding decision.
The person who made the post will be contacted via email (if available) and informed why their post was removed. If the post is made by entry through Facebook removal is possible.
If appropriate, the person will be encouraged to re-post excluding the inappropriate and/or offensive material.
NB: Any posting that is in breach of the Acceptable Use Policy is very likely to be in breach of the Terms of Use of which may lead to the cancelling of a members account.