Pan Macmillan Social Media Community Guidelines

Pan Macmillan Social Media Community Guidelines

We publish a broad and vibrant range of books for audiences of all ages. To ensure our social media communities remain a positive and welcoming space for everyone, we've compiled some guidelines below. Please keep these in mind when you're interacting with us and other people in our communities.

We hope you'll:

  • Share your thoughts and reviews: We're all ears! Whether you loved a book, had a few thoughts on a character, or even if it just wasn’t for you, we want to hear it.
  • Ask us questions: Got a burning question about an author, a new release, or how the publishing process works? Ask away! We'll do our best to answer.
  • Connect with fellow readers: This is a great place to find your next favourite book, discover a new genre, and have lively and respectful conversations about the stories you love.
  • Celebrate authors and illustrators: Let's show appreciation for the talented people who create these books and stories for us.

To keep our community safe and respectful, please avoid:

  • Being disrespectful or abusive: We have a zero-tolerance policy for personal attacks, harassment, bullying, threats, violent or offensive language and hate speech. That includes, but is not limited to, anything racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, discriminatory, or defamatory toward our authors, illustrators, employees, or other community members.
  • Posting advertising, off-topic or irrelevant content: Please don't use our channels to promote your own business or products. We may  remove any comments brought to our attention that are off-topic, repetitive, or irrelevant.
  • Posting inappropriate content: Let’s keep the conversation clean and suitable for everyone, as we are proud to publish for everyone. This includes families, young people, and children.
  • Violating privacy or copyright: Don’t share private personal information about yourself or others. Do not post links to illegal downloads of our books or share content that infringes copyright or any other third party intellectual property rights.
  • Spam and fraud: Any comment that attempts to defraud, scam, or is otherwise considered to be spam may be removed. 
  • Ignoring platform rules: Always make sure your posts follow the terms of service of the social media platform you're on.
  • Spoiler Warning: Be a good sport and help us protect the reading experience of others in our community. If you're about to post a major plot detail, please start your comment with a clear "SPOILER ALERT!" If we see unmarked spoilers, we may hide the comment.

Our Monitoring and Moderation Policy

To help ensure that our social communities remain positive and welcoming for everyone, we use a combination of automated tools and human review to monitor and moderate comments. We'll hide or remove content that breaks these rules, and we may block users who repeatedly don't follow them.

Our automated moderation helps to evaluate whether content is violating these guidelines. If a post requires a more nuanced decision, it is flagged to our team, who are available during standard UK business hours to review it, handle appeals, and engage with you all. To query any action, please use the form located on https://www.panmacmillan.com/contact-us and select ‘Other’, where one of our team will review your message and be in touch. 

Our team reserves the right to refer any content or user to law enforcement authorities for investigation, if they deem it necessary or are required to by law.

We also use the same automated tools to help us identify members of our community who frequently post positive comments and show strong support for our authors and books. This helps us to better understand and appreciate our most enthusiastic followers. We may use this information to contact these individuals with exclusive content or to discuss potential collaboration opportunities.