St. John’s College Annapolis Instagram Policies

Online Mission

The Communications Office of St. John’s College in Annapolis engages with a wide audience online, especially current and prospective students of the college, their families, alumni, and donors, by maintaining active social media profiles on Instagram and other platforms, with an aim to inform, educate, inspire, and share insights and learnings from the college’s unique Program of study. We encourage community engagement in accordance with the principles of common sense and our values as articulated in the Statement of the Program, the Student Handbook, college-wide social media guidelines, and in this Instagram social media policy. In addition, the Instagram account is managed collaboratively by students and staff in the Communications Office; it functions as both a professional social media account and a professional development project intended to benefit the professional growth of Student Media Team members at the college.

Social Media Community Policies

The Communications Team includes college staff as well as student workers who collectively manage and administer the account under the guidance of the Vice President of Communications. We welcome engagement in the form of comments, story replies, direct messages, or by tagging @sjcannapolis in comments, posts, or stories. We at the Communications Office strive to maintain our online platforms as meaningful and safe spaces free of spam, disrespectful comments or attacks, and misinformation. We strive to create a social media environment that lives up to the values and aspirations of the St. John’s community; one in which people generously exchange and vigorously argue for their ideas and ideals while refraining from attacks against individuals or groups. We expect all users who engage with our accounts to do so with respect and in good faith. In the event that they should fail to do so, we reserve the following rights:

1. To address factual errors
2. To restrict accounts and/or delete disrespectful comments which contain:
   • Personal information such as names, personal tagged accounts, email addresses, physical addresses, or phone numbers that do not belong to the writer of the post;
   • Spam or comments that are abusive, profane, defamatory, harassing, or hateful.
3. While we support lively and open discussion in the spirit of the St. John’s classroom as well as constructive criticism, we reserve the right to delete comments at our discretion or to block offending users who violate this policy, the college’s civility policy, or the college’s community standards, which are outlined in the Student Handbook.
4. Among other things, the community standards policy calls on all Johnnies to:
   • Treat all students, faculty, staff, and community members with respect.
   • Take responsibility when exercising freedom of expression in a manner that also considers the standards of civility, consideration, and tolerance that should shape the actions of members of the community with one another.
   • Refrain from “abusive behavior, which is any act that endangers the health or safety of any person or persons… Demeaning, disrespectful, or vulgar behavior also violates these standards.”
5. Alleged violations by current students of our community standards may be passed on to the Assistant Dean’s Office for review and process.

Additionally, though we regularly monitor our accounts, we remind our users to report all comments that violate Instagram’s Community Guidelines directly to the platform using the in-app reporting tool.

Features, Collaborations, and Endorsements

Several of our social media accounts follow a wide variety of users including students, staff, alumni, community organizations, and others, which is one of the ways that we engage with our digital audience. Following a profile or liking a post does not imply an endorsement of that individual or entity or content on their profile. If you notice that we follow a problematic account, send us a message so that we can review and consider whether that account’s content is at odds with our own community values.

Periodically we feature content or other accounts on our page. We try to feature individuals, projects, or accounts that are particularly relevant to our values and passions at St. John’s College, to our mission at the Communications Office, to our community values and relations in the Annapolis, Maryland region, and which are not predominantly self-serving or profit-driven in nature. All content should be suitable to be viewed and read by our wide-ranging digital audience.

Other

Formal requests, inquiries, or comments can be directed to the appropriate department on our contact page at sjc.edu/about/contact. If your request or comment is directly related to our Instagram content, send us a direct message.

Updated: October 2020