Public servants on the Isle of Man have been urged to be clear over whether their social media accounts are personal or affiliated to the government. The island's information commissioner Stuart Haynes issued the advice after a review of a Freedom of Information request.
The FOI asked for the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to hand over copies of posts on X by minister Lawrie Hooper in response to those by an island-based journalist. In his ruling, Mr Haynes said the account was considered to be the possession of the minister, but said public servants should make it clear in what capacity they were posting.
The original posts from Mr Hooper, which have since been deleted, led to FOI request being submitted to the DHSC. That request asked for copies of all tweets as well as posts on other social media pages by Mr Hooper relating to the journalist since 19 July.
The DHSC rejected the requests saying that the information was “accessible to the applicant by other means” and that it did not hold the information.
‘Unambiguous'
Appealing the decision, the application rejected that and argued Mr Hooper had been acting in his role as minister when he made the posts.
When this too was rejected, a further appeal to the information commissioner, arguing that under the Government Departments Act the “minister is the department” and therefore the DHSC could not refuse the request.
However, while agreeing that under the Act the minister is the department, the commissioner “considers the Twitter account of the Minister to be personal” as there was no evidence the department or its staff were involved in the posts.
In doing so, Mr Haynes noted the differences between a politician's personal account and a social media page run by civil servants that would be “managed by many different officers or teams”.
The commissioner said that all public servants should “make clear that your personal social media accounts are not affiliated with, endorsed or managed by a public authority”.
He added: “This should be unambiguous, incapable of being misconstrued and perspicuous.” As part of this, he advised that no public authority logos or insignia should be used on the account and that government email addresses should not be used when creating personal social media pages.
