2 Formal social media policies

In the last section you learnt about the importance of netiquette and informal rules that govern online behaviour. These are generally rules for polite engagement in the social media apps that you might encounter as part of your studies. However, most universities now have a social media policy; these documents tend to describe top-level guidance for university use, as well as rules/regulations for individual departments or areas (Stoller, 2017).

Here Mel Green talks about how she has used formal social media policies to create community guidelines.

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Transcript: Video 4 Social media policy

Mel Green

I've used the Open University social media policy to create a kind of guideline for, or a set of guidelines for our Discord community. I also ask the students to contribute any guidelines or any kind of, I don't want to say rules but boundaries, parameters that they felt more comfortable with including within our, what I called our community guidelines.

And that was a really nice way of kind of setting up a space that students felt safe in and also felt that they were able to refer back to. And I think that's perhaps why I've never misuse of the communities I've created on social media. The only thing I think I've had to remind students about is perhaps oversharing.

Students have felt really comfortable within the spaces that we've created but I do remind them that especially with Discord, it's a third party organisation, it's not maintained by The Open University and so they might want to be cautious about how the level of personal details they share on social media.

End transcript: Video 4 Social media policy

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Video 4 Social media policy

Note that community guidelines tend to be less formal. By contrast, social media policies are the formal rules that your institution uses to govern social media use by students. In this section you will learn how to find and interpret the social media policy of the institution that you are studying at.