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Our social media channels aim to support and champion our members and inform, inspire and educate people about how counselling changes lives.

It’s important to us that they’re a safe place for debate and conversation. We can’t control everything that’s said on social media or what we’re tagged in, but these guidelines outline what we expect from people who interact with our channels and how we’ll act if comments fall short of these expectations.

We’ve published guidance on the use of social media for our members to support them in their use of these channels as professionals.

We’d also encourage social media users to follow our community guidelines when interacting with our social media pages and content.

We monitor our social media channels between 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday, excluding bank holidays.ÌýOther ways to get in touch with us are listed on our Contact us page.

Where our guidelines are breached, we may use our discretion to take action.

Our guidelines

Please follow these community guidelines when interacting with our social media channels:

• don’t post anything that could identify a client – see our social media guidance for members for more about client confidentiality and social media
• be respectful of others and their opinions
• don’t make personal attacks in your comments
• don’t post content that is discriminatory, obscene, inflammatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, profane or personally abusive
• don’t post anything that could be libellous or defamatory
• don’t post repeatedly about issues that are off-topic - ie spam

Hiding or deleting comments

It’s important we allow discussion on our social media channels and don’t try to close down constructive criticism, healthy debate or challenging views. However, if comments on our posts breach the above guidelines we may consider hiding or deleting them.

Facebook and LinkedIn give us an option to delete comments on our posts. We would only ever do this if the guidelines above have been breached. If we did, we’ll comment under our post to say we’ve deleted a comment and why, unless we’ve already explained this to you elsewhere. We may ask you to delete your comment yourself, and if so, we’ll explain why we’re asking you to do this.

X doesn’t give the option to delete comments. So, if a comment breaches the guidelines, we’ll hide it. You may still be able to see your comment, but it won’t be visible to others looking at our post or feed. Again, we may ask you to delete your comment yourself, and if so, we’ll explain why we’re asking you to do this. If you don’t, we’ll hide it.

While we may take these actions if needed, we can’t control everything that’s said on social media or which posts we’re tagged in. There may be posts that breach our community guidelines that can’t be deleted.

Reporting comments

If we believe a comment left under one of our posts in in breach of our guidelines and of the social media platform’s own community rules, then we’ll report it to the platform in question.

Blocking users

On very rare occasions we may block users from our page if they break these guidelines and the nature of their comments does not change. If we do this, we may warn them that they risk being blocked and highlight our guidelines before blocking them if they continue this behaviour. However, we reserve the right to block any followers at any point.

Member complaints

We can’t comment on specific complaints about our members or ongoing conduct cases on social media. You can read more about our conduct procedures on our website or contact our professional conduct team at professional_conduct@bacp.co.uk.

Contact us about our social media

If you have any questions or comments about our social media channels, please email communications@bacp.co.uk.

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