New Zealander of the Year Awards
Community Guidelines – Social Media
Last updated: 11 December 2025

Connect with Us

You’ll find the Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year Awards across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, YouTube and TikTok.

Community Guidelines

Our social media channels celebrate remarkable New Zealanders. To keep our community safe, respectful, and uplifting, please follow these guidelines when engaging with us:

Celebrate with Respect

We showcase incredible people and their stories. Please keep comments kind, constructive, and respectful.
We won’t tolerate:

• Abusive or offensive comments
• Harassment, profanity, hate speech, or racism
• Defamatory or misleading statements about nominees, finalists, winners, judges, or the Awards
• Spam, trolling, or repeated comments intended to disrupt discussion

We determine what meets the above criteria and may moderate or delete content that goes against these expectations.

Please see below for what to do if you have any concerns regarding a nominee, finalist, winner, judge of the Awards.

Protect People’s Privacy

Our channels are public. Please don’t share personal, confidential, or sensitive information about yourself or anyone else – including nominees, finalists, or award participants.
This includes contact details, private correspondence, or information not already publicly available.
You can view our Privacy Policy here.

Follow the Law

Please ensure your contributions comply with New Zealand law and the rules of the platform you’re using.
We’ll remove posts that:

• Encourage or depict illegal activity
• Infringe copyright or intellectual property rights
• Make unverified allegations about individuals or organisations

Moderation & Safety

We reserve the right to moderate, hide, or delete any comments or content at our discretion, including contributions that are:

• Part of legal or regulatory proceedings
• From fake or impersonation accounts
• A breach of confidentiality, safety, or privacy
• Causing distress to our team, nominees, or community
• Not aligned with the spirit of these guidelines

Repeated breaches may result in you being blocked or reported to the relevant platform or authorities.

Raising a Concern

If you have a concern about someone involved in the New Zealander of the Year Awards Programme (a nominee, finalist, winner, judge of the Awards) please email office@nzawards.org.nz.

The Awards Office takes any concerns raised seriously. We are, however, not an investigative body (such as the Police) and are limited in the actions we can take without publicly available information or verified evidence supporting the concerns.

To enable us to formally review someone involved in the programme, please provide:

• Material evidence that substantiates the concerns – official documents, links to online activity, etc.
• A formal complaint made directly by the person/people directly affected, so we can understand the situation firsthand and ensure their voice is represented appropriately.

A review process will then be initiated in accordance with the Awards Review & Recession Policy.