Harmful Communications Policy

This policy was published August 2021

As a public organisation, Diabetes NZ welcomes robust feedback and seeks to have ongoing conversations with our community. 

But Diabetes NZ will not tolerate harmful communications - for example, abusive posts on social media, offensive comments and  harassment via email or text.

No one at Diabetes NZ has to put up with abuse as part of their work, nor do other members of our community.

One of the first steps will be to add formal and visible warnings on all our platforms so the public is aware of what will happen when boundaries are crossed.

On social media, we will proactively turn comments off on posts that may attract abusive comments. See below for the full social media comments policy. Comments may be deleted, and accounts blocked or referred under the Harmful Digital Communications legislation.

For emails, messages and other communications, people may receive a warning, be blocked, or referred to Netsafe or the police.

Our comments policy:

Diabetes NZ (referred to in these rules as "we" or "us") wants to encourage free and frank discussion. We also want this site and our social media channels to be a safe place for people to share their stories.

To achieve these objectives, we have developed these rules that apply to anything you post. By posting you agree to abide by these rules.

Comments are post-moderated. This means they are not checked or edited by us before they appear on our channels, and consequently places the onus on you to be mature, considered, caring and reasonable in what you write.

We will delete posts which are abusive or harmful, and may disable comments on posts which attract abusive or harmful comments, or when resources are required elsewhere.

Think before you post

We want people to feel safe and respected on our site and social media channels.

Think about your post before hitting the publish button. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.

Ask yourself: would this offend someone? Is it defamatory? How would you react if someone else wrote the same thing?

Treat this forum like a shared community resource – a place to spread skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

We will remove anything that is obviously illegal, defamatory, ‘fake news’, or trolling the page or other commenters.

Reflect our charter

The comments in our community should reflect the Diabetes NZ Deed of Charitable Trust, in particular:

Diabetes NZ’s purpose is to:

  1. support and assist people affected by diabetes to better manage diabetes and to promote this as a complementary activity to clinical care;

  2. ensure that people affected by diabetes have the understanding to best manage diabetes;

  3. raise the awareness of diabetes and its complications and to increase the early diagnosis of all types of diabetes;

  4. reduce the incidence and impact of diabetes by working as part of a holistic public health approach towards prevention of diabetes and all its complications;

  5. be recognised by all stakeholders and act as the advocacy body for all people affected by, or at risk of being affected by, diabetes;

  6. promote and support research for a cure for all types of diabetes; and

  7. further such other related purposes, which are charitable according to the law of New Zealand, as the Trustees in their discretion think fit.

Focus on the issue

No personal attacks, name calling, or hate speech. This applies to Diabetes NZ posters and branches, people featured in stories and other commenters. Stick to the issues in the post and discuss those.

The topics discussed here matter to us and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.

Keep it polite

Anything that could be taken as threatening, harassing, bullying, obscene, offensive, pornographic, sexist, racist, homophobic (or any other ~ist) is unacceptable and will be removed.

Keep within the law

Anything that is defamatory, in breach of copyright, or in contempt of court will be removed. You will be held accountable not just by us but also the courts for violating the aforementioned.

Stay on topic

Conversations ramble, but try not to wedge your personal interests into every discussion. By the same token, don’t “feed the trolls”. If you believe someone is being deliberately offensive or off-topic, flag the comment to the moderators and report it to Facebook. Do not engage in online argument as this can create further harm.

Don’t sell something

Any comments that are obviously commercial will be deleted, likewise anything that is advertising, lobbying for, or trying to convert someone to, a particular political view, religion, product or service.

Alert us to poor behaviour

With your help, moderators can be community facilitators.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and block any user for any reason at any time.

If you have ideas, criticism, complaints about the site or the story being discussed, or you want to report a glaring typo, message us directly or email admin@diabetes.org.nz.

Our right to remove posts

We still reserve the right to remove any comments either seen by us or flagged by the community which break these rules.