Ngl, I don’t like this justice but I like the hypothetical legal test of whether posting cat photos is state action:
Suppose, to paraphrase a hypothetical offered by Justice Neil Gorsuch, that an official uses their Facebook account both to post cat pictures and to discuss official business. Now suppose that one of that official’s constituents hates cats, and posts so many nasty responses to the cat-related posts that the official eventually blocks the constituent. Because blocking this constituent will also exclude them from the official’s government-related content, did the government official violate the First Amendment here?
I could go on at some length listing the many difficult questions that various justices raised over the course of the arguments. But the important overarching point here is that these cases are very difficult. And it’s not clear that it is possible to come up with a clear-cut legal test that will easily allow judges to distinguish between state and private action online.
Regarding the second paragraph, are there really no government policies in the U.S. regarding operating separate personal/work accounts if one is going to be communicating work-related info to the public on social media? It seems like that alone would have sufficed to mitigate the headaches of these cases.
To me the answer to this hypothetical is still Yes
It should be required by law that an offical not bar anyone from their offical account and also be required that they only use that account for offical communication. If they wish to have private communication as a private citizen then they need a private account. Simple as that
Even if there are policies it doesn’t really matter. If someone uses a personal account to distribute official information it’s now functionally the official account. A one off mistake probably doesn’t matter, but a repeated pattern would definitely be a problem.
We are just waiting on their corporate sponsors to tell them what to do and how to think.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A pair of Supreme Court cases asking what limits the First Amendment places on government officials who use social media seemed to perplex the justices on Tuesday.
The arguments in O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier and Lindke v. Freed featured a cacophony of questions about cat pictures, spontaneous grocery store conversations, and a simply dizzying array of proposed legal rules — none of which seemed likely to fully inform public officials what they may and may not do online.
As the Court said in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison (1974) — a case decided long before anyone had even uttered the word “Twitter” — “the question whether particular conduct is ‘private,’ on the one hand, or ‘state action,’ on the other, frequently admits of no easy answer.”
As the Justice Department argued in its brief, when past cases have asked whether someone may be excluded “from a forum … the existence of state action generally depends on whether the government itself owns or controls the property to which access has been denied.”
As Chief Justice John Roberts quipped, there is no physical component to a Facebook page — it’s just a “gathering of protons” — so it seems quite odd to apply traditional concepts of property to virtual space.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which heard the O’Connor-Ratcliff case, preferred a more flexible test that, among other things, asks whether a government official appeared to be acting within the scope of their job when they posted online.
The original article contains 1,401 words, the summary contains 249 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Could have sworn there was a Trump case for this that effectively said muting was okay but blocking was not.
https://www.scotusblog.com/2021/04/justices-throw-out-trump-twitter-case/
oh nevermind they just delayed the debate.
