PIO ToolkitLighthouse for Public Safety
Intermediate
4 hours

Building a Strong Social Media Policy

Building a Strong Social Media Policy
$69USD

One-time payment • Lifetime access

One-time purchase · lifetime access · free account created at checkout

or get everything with membership

$259/year · cancel anytime · instant access to this course + everything on PIO Toolkit

About this course

A practical, self-paced course on writing or rewriting your organization's social media policy so it stands up legally, works on a busy afternoon, and actually gets used.

Most government social media policies were written for a version of Facebook that no longer exists. They cite a court case about the president's account that the Supreme Court vacated in 2021. They say nothing about accessibility, even though the ADA Title II web rule now covers new social media posts. They tell staff to "use good judgment" when removing comments, and they don't say who holds the passwords when someone leaves. Communicators find the gaps at the worst possible moment: when a resident says they've been blocked, a reporter calls, or nobody can log in during an emergency.

This course walks through every part of a modern policy in the order you'd build it. It covers who and what the policy should include; the legal obligations you can't negotiate, including public records, accessibility and the First Amendment test set by Lindke v. Freed in 2024; internal rules on voice, tone, approvals and staff's personal accounts; and the public side of the work, from comment policies and moderation logs to misinformation and elected officials who want critics deleted.

It finishes where most policies fail: getting the policy approved, launched, trained and kept current. Drawing on Christine Townsend's experience in UK policing and government communications, including managing dozens of accounts before there was a policy to govern them, each lesson includes real cases, a practical exercise and linked sources. The course comes with a fill-in model policy and a step-by-step implementation checklist. The full live training recording is included as a bonus lesson.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Government communicators responsible for official social media accounts
  • Communications leads asked to update an old policy or write the first one
  • Solo communicators who are, in practice, their organization's social media policy
  • HR, legal and IT colleagues who share responsibility for how the organization behaves online

Read a sample from this course

The policy nobody has opened since it was signed

Prefer to watch? The full live training recording is available as a bonus lesson at the end of this course. The written lessons go further than the session did, with the cases, sources and templates you'll need to write or rewrite your own policy.

Picture a Monday morning. A council member's aide calls. A resident says the city blocked them on Facebook over the weekend, they've posted screenshots, and a local reporter is asking whether it's legal. You open the social media policy to check what it says about blocking. It was signed eight years ago. It mentions Google+. It says staff "should use good judgment" when removing comments, and it doesn't say who is allowed to decide, how the decision gets recorded, or what the resident can do about it.

That's the position a lot of government communicators are in. Most public sector social media policies were written years ago, for a version of Facebook that no longer exists, and the gap between what they say and what actually happens on your accounts every day has become a risk in its own right. They didn't anticipate how fast information now moves, the shift to short-form video, AI-generated images turning up in your comments during an emergency, or the way the law around officials' accounts has settled since.

This course is about closing that gap. By the end of it you'll have worked through every part of a modern policy: who it covers, what the law requires of you, how your team sounds and who signs off, how you moderate public comments without breaking the Constitution, and how you get the thing approved and actually used. The course comes with a fill-in model policy and a rollout checklist so you're not starting from a blank page.

First, though, it's worth being clear about what a policy is for, because that decides everything about how you write it.

Keep reading — this course continues with 7 more lessons and 55 more sections.

What you'll learn

Audit your current social media policy and accounts to find the gaps that matter most, including outdated legal references and orphaned accounts.
Define a scope that covers everyone who speaks for your organization online, from staff and officials to volunteers, contractors and third-party tools.
Set up an account register and credential rules so every official account has a named owner, two administrators and organization-controlled logins.
Explain the legal obligations that apply to official accounts: public records, the ADA Title II web accessibility rule and its current deadlines, and the First Amendment after Lindke v. Freed.
Write voice and tone guidance, content boundaries and an approval matrix that staff can follow under pressure, including an urgent route.
Set fair expectations for employees' personal use of social media that respect their speech rights and address perceived affiliation.
8 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.The policy nobody has opened since it was signed
  2. 2.A shield and a compass
  3. 3.The law has moved, and many policies haven't
  4. 4.Platforms, tools and accessibility have changed too
  5. 5.Why trust is the real reason to get this right
  6. 6.Try this: a fifteen-minute health check on your current policy
  7. 7.What this course will and won't do
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
HomeArticlesCoursesAccount