General Guidelines

Alberta Health Services (AHS) is responsible for delivering health services to more than 4.5 million people living in Alberta. We are also responsible for sharing educational, innovative, inspirational, and pertinent health-related stories, information, and alerts to Albertans through many tools, including social media.

Alberta Health Services welcomes all users to our social media pages. We encourage appropriate and respectful engagement with our social media channels so we can maintain a positive and valuable online environment for all Albertans. To help us achieve this safe online community, we ask social media users please:

• Be courteous.
• Respect that other people have had different life experiences and may have a different perspective to yours. Disagreements may occur, but they are not an excuse to be disrespectful.
• Listen to what others have to say and expect others to do the same for you.
• Keep your comments relevant to the topic being discussed.
• We cannot be present for all online interactions, so please let us know if you think someone’s comments are hateful, inflammatory, or meet our criteria for offensive behaviour, please email us: smconcerns@albertahealthservices.ca

Consider Your Words

Users who submit content (text, photos, video, etc. in comments or direct messages) to Alberta Health Services social media accounts are responsible for the content they submit. Alberta Health Services does not endorse any non-AHS posts, commentary, links, videos, and/or images.

Opinions expressed by individuals, formal or informal groups, public or private organizations, and/or media outlets, as comments on AHS social media are not the opinions of Alberta Health Services.

Content posted on AHS social media platforms are public records and are subject to all applicable provincial and federal laws and regulations.

Content that violates copyright and/or trademark law may be removed without notice.

Responses

AHS’s social media team reviews content posted on AHS social media platforms or sent to us as private messages during normal business hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.). We are unable to reply to all posts or questions.

Alberta Health Services reserves the right to hide, remove and/or delete posts, videos and/or images if they:

• Include any abusive, harassing, threatening, violent, vulgar, obscene, slanderous, defamatory or insulting language and/or images;
• Contain hate speech, including, but not limited to, any negative racial, ethnic, mental health, or sexual orientation references;
• Are determined to be anonymous or fake accounts meant to harass other users and/or AHS employees or Alberta Precision Labs (APL) employees and other medical professionals;
• Are not relevant to AHS or the subject matter in the AHS post, including Alberta Precision Labs (APL);
• Are perceived as spam or another form of advertising, including repetitive posts copied and pasted or duplicated by single or multiple users;
• Contain inaccurate, misleading or false information;
• Could be harmful to and/or exploit people under the age of 18 and/or vulnerable individuals or groups;
• Harass or advocate harassment of an identifiable individual and/or group or groups;
• Are meant to deliberately provoke by making inflammatory or offensive statements targeted at an individual, group or groups;
• Are meant to provoke a violent response from an individual, group or groups;
• Are in clear violation of civic, provincial or federal laws, bylaws and regulations;
• Contain threats as defined under the Criminal Code of Canada;
• Provide comments or instructional information about illegal activities including the making of or selling of weapons, violating someone's privacy, or providing or creating computer viruses;
• Link to inappropriate, offensive or obscene content or websites;
• Contain third-party information and/or identifiers, including information about individual AHS employees, Alberta Precision Labs (APL) employees, partner agencies, other medical professionals and/or community stakeholders, including but not limited to:
  • Private healthcare information
  • Names, phone numbers and home addresses of staff or other individuals
  • Education, financial or employment history and information.
• Contain proprietary information, intellectual property, and/or copyrighted or trademarked images or graphics that are posted without the approval of the owner;
• Solicitations, advertisements, or endorsements of any financial, commercial, or not-for-profit organizations;
• Comments that are unrelated to the topic of the page or post or are incomprehensible;
• Any post deemed inappropriate at the sole discretion of AHS.

AHS will block or ban with or without warning individuals, groups, or organizations from further activity on our social media platforms if they are found to be in violation of these guidelines.

Thank you for following us on social media and engaging with us. We appreciate every like, comment, share, and follow as we continue to tell stories that matter and impact the health and wellness of all Albertans.