Your official page can be a council record.

Conversations you have on social media in your official capacity as a councillor can be council records, subject to the same recordkeeping and freedom of information laws as the other records you create in the role. That can include the public feed and, where enabled, private or direct messages. The specific Acts vary by state, but typically include public records legislation, FOI (GIPA in NSW, RTI in Queensland and Tasmania), privacy principles, local government legislation and electoral advertising guidelines. Note that if council has to release records from your archive in response to an access request, those records go to the applicant and anyone they share them with. General information, not legal advice.

Your profile is your personal account, the one you log in with and use with friends. A page is a separate public presence you create from your profile, for your role as a councillor or for a business. People can follow and interact with a page without being your friend. You can give other people admin or editor roles on the page; they log in with their own profiles, cannot see your personal conversations, and you can remove their access at any time. Keeping your official activity on a page keeps it apart from your personal life, and it is the page that council archives.

Connecting a Facebook page, X account, business Instagram account or other channel gives Brolly permission to capture the posts and comments on that page or account. If private or direct messages are enabled, those conversations are captured too. To respect Australian privacy principles, messages are stored in a separate part of Brolly and exported separately from the public feed, never mixed together.

Because you are the authorised user of the page. Facebook only lets an authorised user connect a page to a third-party tool, so it asks you to confirm you have the right to access it. Brolly captures the page you connect, not your personal profile.

Brolly archives the accounts connected to your Brolly group. If you post or comment on any of those, it is captured in your archive. Council will usually have connected its own pages too, such as the main council page, the library or the pool, so anything you post there lands in council’s archive. Comments you make on pages that are not connected to Brolly are not captured in your archive. Take care on accounts run by other government organisations: your interactions there may be captured in their archive under their obligations.

Only if the group was created by council and connected to Brolly. Interactions in community groups that council does not own are not archived. Facebook’s rules, your code of conduct and council’s social media policy still apply there.

No. Council sets up Brolly using groups, so your archive is visible only to you and the council staff who need access, such as the records team. That protects your privacy and the privacy of the residents you talk to.

No. Council only needs to archive social media records created in relation to council business. When you connect accounts you choose which pages to include, so connect only the ones you use in your role as an elected member.

No. When you connect, you set a start date for your archive. Council will confirm the date, usually the day you were elected or your onboarding date.

Capture stops at the end of your term. The records created during your term stay in Brolly under council’s retention and disposal authority, and nothing further is captured from your accounts.

Your data is stored on AWS cloud servers located in Australia. Brolly Australasia Pty Ltd is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified and CSA STAR registered, and records carry digital checksums and audit trails. Whatever a platform does with your page, including closing it, your archive stays.

Very little. Once your accounts are connected, Brolly runs in the background. You only need to log in if an account has to be reconnected, which happens occasionally when a platform changes its policies or its API. Brolly emails you if that is needed.