Are public officials who block individuals on social media engaging in state action subject to the First Amendment?
U.S. Supreme Court justices Tuesday heard oral arguments in the O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier and Lindke v. Freed cases, both covering this question.
Specifically, the O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier case centers on public officials with personal social-media accounts they use to “feature their job and communicate about job-related matters with the public, but does not do so pursuant to any governmental authority or duty.”
According to Oyez, the case originates in the San Diego, Calif., area, where Christopher and Kimberly Garnier frequently posted critical comments on the social media pages of Poway Unified School District, including Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff and T.J. Zane. Their children were students in the district.
“For their school-board campaigns, O’Connor-Ratcliff and Zane created personal Facebook and Twitter pages, which they updated with their official titles once elected and continued to use to post about school-district business and news,” said Oyez. “The Trustees began to hide or delete the critical and often repetitive comments by the Garniers, and then around October 2017, they blocked the Garniers from their social media pages.”
In response, the Garniers sued these trustees. They argued, by blocking them, the trustees violated their First Amendment rights. While a district court granted declaratory and injunctive relief to the Garniers, it also found the trustees had qualified immunity from the damages claims and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
During the petitioners’ oral argument, the justices and representatives for the case discussed the differences between social media pages and official websites. They also discussed when a public official can be considered on and off the clock on their job and used a lot of hypothetical situations related to cat photos and dog photos.
“They push back against the test on which the Ninth Circuit relied, arguing instead that the central question in a case like this is whether a government official acted in her official or personal capacity, said SCOTUSBlog of the petitioners. “And in this case, they maintain, they operated their social-media accounts in their personal, rather than official, capacity: They had created the accounts on their own, and no one would have believed that the pages were government pages, even if they didn’t include disclaimers to make clear that the pages were personal ones.”
A representative of the defendants argued that the petitioners’ view of what constitutes as being on the job for public officials is “overbroad.”
As for the Lindke v. Freed case, Oyez said it is centered on the Facebook page for James Freed who was appointed as city manager of Port Huron, Mich. Before he was appointed, Freed created a private Facebook profile that “grew too popular for Facebook's 5,000-friend limit on profiles,” so he converted it to a public figure “page,” which has unlimited followers.
When he was appointed, he updated this page to reflect his title. He also shared both personal and professional updates.
“Kevin Lindke came across Freed’s page and did not approve of how Freed was handling the pandemic. He posted criticism of Freed in response to Freed’s Facebook page, and Freed deleted the comments and ultimately ‘blocked’ Lindke,” said Oyez. Lindke then sued Freed for allegedly violating his First Amendment rights. A district court granted summary judgment to Freed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed.
SCOTUSBlog said these two cases are just two of several social-media related cases this term, SCOTUSBlog said.