Supreme Court will decide if officials can be sued for blocking social media critics
Kaelan Deese
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The Supreme Court took up two new cases on whether public officials on their personal social media accounts can block users when they use such accounts in a professional context.
The pair of cases will be heard by the nine justices sometime in the fall 2023 term and come two years after the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit over former President Donald Trump blocking users on his Twitter account. Both cases will explore whether the First Amendment prevents government officials from blocking their critics on mainstream social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook.
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The high court will hear a similar issue surrounding a lawsuit filed against school board members in Southern California and another case against the city manager of Port Huron, Michigan.
The justices confronted a similar issue in 2021 involving a legal dispute between Trump over his effort to block critics from his Twitter account. The justices ultimately found that the case was moot due to the case rising to the high court after he had left office and tossed out a lower court decision that said Trump had violated constitutional free speech rights.
The California dispute involves elected members of the Poway Unified School District, Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and T.J. Zane. The pair blocked Christopher and Kimberly Garnier, the parents of three students at district schools after the couple made hundreds of critical posts on matters such as race and the handling of school finances.
Officials from the California school were sued in federal court, arguing their free speech rights were violated.
Both of the officials had public Facebook pages displaying themselves as government officials, according to Garnier’s court filings.
A federal judge in California sided with the parents in 2021. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit agreed in July, finding that the school board members displayed their accounts as “channels of communication with the public” about school board business, according to court filings.
The Michigan case surrounds Kevin Lindke, who was blocked from City Manager James Freed’s public Facebook page after posting criticism related to COVID-19.
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A federal judge ruled in favor of Freed in 2021, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit agreed, finding that Freed was not acting in his official capacity when he blocked Lindke from interacting with his account.
Petitioners in both disputes told the Supreme Court that the disagreeing rulings in the cases present a split distinct enough to warrant review from the high court.