Posted on 03/16/2024 4:45:59 PM PDT by Libloather
A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Friday that public officials can sometimes be sued for blocking their critics on social media, an issue that first arose for the high court in a case involving then-President Donald Trump.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court, said that officials who use personal accounts to make official statements may not be free to delete comments about those statements or block critics altogether.
On the other hand, Barrett wrote, "State officials have private lives and their own constitutional rights."
The court ruled in two cases involving lawsuits filed by people who were blocked after leaving critical comments on social media accounts belonging to school board members in Southern California and a city manager in Port Huron, Michigan, northeast of Detroit. They are similar to a case involving Trump and his decision to block critics from his personal account on Twitter, now known as X. The justices dismissed the case after Trump left office in January 2021.
The cases forced the court to deal with the competing free speech rights of public officials and their constituents, all in a rapidly evolving virtual world. They are among five social media cases on the court's docket this term.
Appeals courts in San Francisco and Cincinnati had reached conflicting decisions about when personal accounts become official, and the high court did not embrace either ruling, returning the cases to the appeals courts to apply the standard the justices laid out Friday.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
bttt
A lot of FBI officials are going to jail, then (yeah, sure).
But they can still lie their ass off !
So this decision is limited to public officials who block comments on their own social media that they also use to make official statements. It is in no way related to social media companies pulling comments that they just don’t like. Nor does it relate to the government pushing social media to pull posts -suspend or block users.
Oh goody! Now I can sue Governor Creosote here in Illinois.
L
Ping
Does this include the White House that keeps the comments turned off?
Hey Liz Cheney, are you reading this?
Makes sense. It’s like a town forum. AOC can’t tell her constituents to shut up.
the decision itself:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-611_ap6c.pdf
Start suing, then. Donald Trump should be first in line, seeing as he’s lawyered up as it is, anyway.
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