Here at Young Scot, we use social media to share content with young people across Scotland. Please look at our Community Guidelines to understand more about how we use social media, and what we ask of you when you engage with our content.
Young Scot’s Online Community
Here at Young Scot, we use social media to share information with you on a range of issues and topics.
We provide information for you on how to keep safe online through #DigiKnow.
We also have policies (like this one) to help keep you safe and we are always checking our channels but also the wider social media environment to make sure we can take actions to keep our community and staff safe.
Supporting You and Our Community
Our social media channels are managed by our team who are available between Mon-Fri (09:00-17:00) to answer your questions, comments and direct messages. At the weekends and during public holidays, our social media channels aren’t monitored.
We are unable to provide advice to you. But we can share information about other organisations that can help and support you.
If we ever feel that you or someone you know is in danger, we will take appropriate action. This could include contacting the emergency services or another organisation that can help, or if you’ve worked or volunteered with us before, getting in touch with your next of kin or another trusted adult.
If you need to speak to someone confidentially or urgently, look at our information on support and helplines with information about their opening times and how to get in touch.
If you write a comment in a language other than English or Scottish Gaelic, we will use in platform translation tools to understand your comment. Unfortunately, we’re only able to reply to people in English or Gaelic.
Keeping You Safe
We want to make sure nothing is shared on our social media that could put you or anyone else viewing our content in danger.
Remember, social media is a public place, so think before you post. You can find out more about how to check and manage the privacy settings on your own social media accounts on our #DigiKnow page.
To help keep you safe, we may remove and/or report comments that:
- Share that you or someone else has been harmed. This includes sharing information that you’ve been abused or neglected. Sharing this information can make you vulnerable. We will contact you through a direct message, if we are able to, to explain why we’ve removed your comment and will provide you with information on support that might be helpful.
- Share that you or someone else is feeling suicidal or has self-harmed. It’s OK for you to post about these topics, but if you share something that might make you vulnerable, we will remove the comment. We will contact you through a direct message if we are able to, to explain why we’ve removed your comment and will provide you with information on support that might be helpful.
- Include any personal details. This might include your date of birth, your home address or name of your school. Sharing this information can make you vulnerable. It’s OK to share a general location, like your local authority or city.
- Comments that show you’re under 13-years-old. The social media platforms that we use, except YouTube, require you to sign terms and conditions that say you’re 13-years-old or older. If you’re under 13-years-old and use YouTube, you need the permission of your parent or carer.
Keeping Our Community Safe
We want our social media to be a place where everyone is safe and welcome. We understand that people have different opinions, and we encourage you to comment and share your thoughts and experiences, whilst being respectful of other people’s thoughts and experiences.
On some occasions, we may need to remove comments, and where appropriate report comments on the social media platform, this includes comments about:
- Hurting someone else or wanting to hurt them
- Personal insults or threats
- Bullying or aggressive comments
- A person’s race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or belief, disability or other protected characteristics
- Swearing or intention to swear
- Link to something inappropriate or offensive
- Spam – where someone posts the same or a similar message continuously on one or multiple posts
- Adverts for commercial products or services
- Anything that may be in breach of the law
- Deliberately share misinformation
Misinformation is defined as information that is false, factually incorrect or inaccurate. This may be shared without the writer realising but can also be intended to deliberately deceive a reader.
Where appropriate, for example, where you post something that goes against that platform’s community guidelines, we may need to report comments on the platform using in platform reporting tools. This may result in actions being taken on your account. So, please be careful about what you say when commenting. We also make use of in platform monitoring and safety tools, that remove comments that contain offensive language.
On rare occasions, we may block users or restrict users. This would happen if you continue to post comments that go against our community guidelines or take any other actions that may result in other young people seeing harmful or potentially harmful content, including misinformation. We may restrict an account to ensure our team is able to respond to comments and to ensure comments aren’t left on a post when staff aren’t available, for example overnight or over a weekend. Before blocking an account, we will warn you of this and provide you with a link to this page.
Young people often feature in a range of our content and complete a permission form before any content is published, this covers how the content might be used and the actions we take to keep them safe. One of the measures we take is to turn comments off on adverts that feature young people. We do this as part of our duty of care to the young people in our adverts.
If you have any ideas on how we can make our digital channels better, please email contents@young.scot