Fédération Equestre Internationale

The FEI Social Media Code of Conduct

Introduction

The FEI provides all of its social media channels as a mechanism through which we and you - fans of all equestrian disciplines around the world - can share our love and experiences of the sport we all enjoy so much. We want as many of you as possible to be part of this family, and actively encourage your involvement, dialogue and input into this community in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We do of course have a strict set of values which we expect those engaging with us to uphold and respect.

In exchange for you honouring these guidelines we promise to be:

• Respectful of you, the users of our social channels and your opinions
• Objective, and encourage everyone to participate with applicable content including objective criticism
• Accessible, and will endeavour to respond quickly and appropriately to questions and suggestions
• Credible and consistent, and will be fair and transparent in all our communications and strive to keep the discussions within our channels on-topic
• Honest, and will correct errors openly in a transparent manner
• Protective and conscious of any personally identifiable information that we collect or which is distributed on our social channels


Our social media values and expectations
When using any of our social channels such as The FEI Facebook pages, Twitter streams or other similar localised online platforms, the FEI requests that you refrain from:

Posting any content which may be considered defamatory
Please consider your message doesn’t contain anything which could be regarded as libellous, in as such that it would undermine or damage the reputation of either The FEI, its partners, other third party organisations, any individual athlete or member of the public. It is acceptable for people to criticise The FEI in general but content will be removed if it is offensive or if it names people individually.
Publishing comments which are threatening, contain hatred or offensive language
Our social channels are not a forum for the use of content which in any way contains language which could be considered racist or offensive to any individual (or group of people) based on appearance, race, religious or political beliefs or sexuality.


Share or distribute indecent or obscene content
Before publishing any comment on an FEI social channel please ensure that it in no way contains any – language or pictures– which are inappropriate, profane, tasteless, sexually explicit or indecent in nature. This also includes content which may be published on external third party websites to which you share a link.

Direct promotion of commercial products
Unless there is otherwise express prior permission, please refrain from posting messaging which is commercial in nature and directly promotes the services or products of yourself or any other third party you may represent.

Spamming or disruptive behaviour
We would encourage users not to post repetitive posting of the same message across multiple FEI channels or discussion threads. Please consider the other users of our pages who will not want to see the same message repeatedly or where it interrupts a discussion with off topic content. Let’s try and stick to the subject that is being discussed



Consequences
To protect the experience of the valued users of FEI social platforms, should any posting made to an FEI social channel be considered to directly contravene any of the above expectations we the FEI do reserve the right to remove the posting permanently from our pages. In very extreme circumstances, should there be a pattern of repetitive abuse or a user blatantly disrespects the guidelines and ethos of Facebook; the FEI reserves the right to remove a user’s access to the page(s) completely.
We thank you for you for your continued interest and involvement in our growing social platforms and value you being part of this community. We are determined to develop these platforms and are invested in providing these platforms to share content and healthy discussions on the sport. Thank you for your understanding and hope you enjoy our social media services. Most importantly we want to hear from you and if you have any suggestions please reach out to us.

FEI Corporate Communications
July 2013