RYA Social Media Policy

The RYA is committed to creating safe, supportive and welcoming environments for our boating community both on and off the water.

Our social media channels are a place for our community to come together to engage with us and each other in a positive way.

It is important that we keep these channels as friendly as possible – for both you and our team. People should feel safe in our comments sections.

Commenting on RYA posts

When commenting on our social media posts, please follow these guidelines:

• Be respectful of others, their opinions and identities.
• Debate ideas, kindly, but don’t attack the individual.
• Do not post content that is discriminatory, obscene, inflammatory, harassing, hateful, threatening, profane or personally abusive.
• Do not post anything that could be libellous or defamatory. If an accusation is made against a named person, for example a member of staff, we will hide it.
• Don’t post adverts for commercial products or services.
• Do not post repeatedly about issues that are off-topic i.e. spam.

Even if a comment is not intended to be any of these things, if someone takes offence, their feelings are valid. We will decide whether a comment falls into any of these categories and based on the context our decision on whether to hide it or not is final.

Deleting and hiding comments

To keep the comments section safe, we sometimes hide or delete comments that break any of the rules above. We do our best to hide harmful comments as quickly as possible, but we review hundreds of comments a week, and sometimes it may take us a few hours to moderate a comment.

Blocking people

We may block users from our pages. Before we do this, we may give you a warning and explain why we’re considering blocking you. If your comments don’t change after this warning, we may block you.