Understanding community guidelines
Advice for Parents & Carers
Learn more about social media community guidelines to help your child have a safer and more positive time online.
Community guidelines are a set of rules created by each social media platform to ensure a standard of behaviour expected on the platform to create a safe environment for users to interact and have fun.
They tend to cover advice on what is prohibited, i.e. illegal activity and actions that can lead to accounts being suspended or permanently deleted.
Why are they important for your child to follow?
Consequences of breaking these guidelines could range from 24 hour suspension, a permanent deletion of an account to steps taken to refer the case to the authorities to take action.
To make sure that your child is able to have a more positive time interacting online, take some time to review the community guidelines on the platforms they use so they are aware of what behaviour is acceptable and what is not acceptable.
Here are a list of the community guidelines from the most popular social, live streaming and gaming apps for you to review with your child.
When you check with your friends on your favorite game, or share a post with your friends
on social media, it helps to know about the tools you can use to report and block anything or anyone that may upset you.
Where do I go to report issues on social media?
Most sites or apps should have advice and tools you can use to block or report anything that breaks their Community Standards.
Look out for Community Standards or Guidelines, which are a set of rules that everyone is supposed to stick to, to keep out any abuse or negative things that could put you at risk of harm.
When you open a social media account or if you already have one, check what tools there are, so you know where they are and what to do if you need to report anything or block someone.
If you are playing a game or using social media that does not have any way for you to report or block something that upsets you, take a moment to decide if it's safe for you to use or not.
What type of things can I report?
You can report anything that goes against the platforms’ Community Standards like abuse, fake accounts, privacy violations and self-harm.
What happens after I report something?
When you report something on most social media sites, the report is checked and taken down, if what happened is against the community guidelines.
Each social media platform will have its own way of letting you know what's happening with your report.
Not everything that is upsetting is against the rules. So please remember that reporting something does not always mean it will be taken down. You might see that something you don't like on social media is still up there. This is because it's not against the Community Standards.