The City of Edmonton’s social media presence is a component of Administration's overall communications strategy, designed to inform, engage and build trust with Edmontonians.
Social media helps the City build relationships, share timely information and celebrate Edmonton’s local community. It also provides opportunities to support emergency communication and create spaces for listening and learning.
Supporting Open and Safe Dialogue
The City encourages open dialogue and welcomes a wide range of perspectives in our online spaces. To ensure these spaces remain safe, respectful and accessible to our audience, City Administration may moderate comments that contribute to a harmful and/or unsafe environment. These actions are not intended to suppress critical feedback or differing viewpoints, but to safeguard public dialogue from abuse and uphold the City’s commitment to fostering safe online spaces.
The City’s goal is to balance the value of healthy public dialogue with the need to provide an online space that is welcoming for all Edmontonians and provides an accurate source of information.
Moderation decisions are made transparently and in alignment with these guidelines, with ongoing review to ensure fairness, equity and consistency across platforms.
The City reserves the right to remove comments that include:
- Profanity, offensive, insulting language or abusive behaviour
- Hate speech, threats or content that fosters discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, age, creed, gender, marital status, socio-economic status, disability, sexual orientation or other protected grounds
- Sexual or explicit content
- Spam, advertising, repetitive or excessively posted content, including that which appears to be generated by automated accounts (for example: bots)
- Content that encourages or depicts illegal activity
- Breaches of personal privacy or public security
- Misrepresentation, impersonation, false attribution or abuse towards City staff or elected officials
- Mis, dis or mal-information that could leave the public with an incorrect understanding of the City’s operations or governance
- Content that discriminates on the basis of race, religious beliefs, colour, gender, gender identity, gender expression, physical disability, mental disability, age, ancestry, place of origin, marital status, source of income, family status or sexual orientation.
- Personal information like phone numbers, email addresses or other identifying details
In some instances, finding the appropriate balance may require a more precise approach than comment deletion.
| When actively moderating conversations, City Administration may choose to: | |
|---|---|
| Hide | Comments may be hidden when they include content that is offensive, harmful, misleading or disruptive to discussion but does not require permanent removal |
| Delete | Comments will be deleted if they contain hate speech, threats of violence, serious discrimination, illegal activity or other severe violations. |
| Block/Ban | Users may be blocked or banned if they repeatedly post content that is abusive, harmful or disruptive or if they engage in a single incident of severe misconduct. This includes threats to City staff and elected officials. |
| Disable Comments | If a post receives repeated abusive or disruptive comments that cannot be reasonably moderated, the City may disable commenting on that post. When this occurs, all existing comments (positive, negative, and neutral) may also be hidden to maintain neutrality. Comments may also be disabled in advance on posts where there is a high likelihood based on historical interactions of harmful, unproductive or polarizing conversation, particularly when they could negatively impact vulnerable or equity-deserving groups. |
Moderation Decisions
The City of Edmonton may exercise discretion and shall retain the final decision on which content is actively moderated.
Content that may contravene applicable laws (for example: hate speech or credible threats) may be reported through appropriate channels, including the platform and, where warranted, law enforcement.
Please Note
The City of Edmonton is not responsible for any use of material posted by users.