the US Supreme Court You will hear two First Amendment rights Cases this fall after San Diego board members banned parents for raising concerns about them Social media accounts. A second case has been filed against the city manager in Port Huron, Michigan, for banning a resident who raised Covid-19 concerns about him. Facebook page. In both cases, the courts sided with the plaintiffs, but the defendants appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed on Monday to hear the cases.
In O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliffe and TJ Zinn said two of their elected board members, Christopher Garnier and Kimberly Garnier, banned their social media accounts after raising concerns about race relations at the local level. school. Board members have alleged that the parents posted the same comment 42 times, which amounts to spam, but O’Connor-Ratcliff and Zane say their ban violates their right to free speech.
The courts decided that while the use of social media was not a requirement for the directors’ positions, they converted their accounts to public forums, asserting that they had “pooled” their accounts into the “traps” of the position held. the Msalve says They posted information about the area including events and issues they might discuss just because of their positions. “For similar reasons, the Court has held that it is a matter of law that the petitioners’ social media accounts have become public forums under the First Amendment.”salve says.
However, board members appealed the decision, saying that if the courts ruled in Garnier’s favour, it would have “the unintended consequence of creating less word of mouth if public servants’ social media pages were subjected to harassment, trolling and hate speech, which officials would be powerless to filter.” “.
Separately, in Lindke v. In the Freed case, City Manager James Freed banned Kevin Lindke from his Facebook account after criticizing him covid-19 restrictions on the Freed page. A Michigan court ruled in favor of the city official, causing confusion over what falls under First Amendment rights.
Both cases will now go to the Supreme Court as questions persist about whether government officials and the public can ban social media accounts simply because they don’t like what people say. This comes after SCOTOS reviewed a similar case against the former president Donald Trump in 2021, but was dismissed because by the time the lawsuit was filed, Trump had left office. The lack of governance leaves the burgeoning question of whether public official accounts can ban or block other users.
With the two new cases headed to the Supreme Court, social media platforms and users may get the answers they’ve been looking for. said Katie Vallow, an attorney at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute who was involved in Trump’s case. NBC News, “As many courts have held, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the president or the local city manager, government officials can’t ban people from these forums just because they don’t like what they say.” “The Supreme Court must reaffirm the basic First Amendment principle,” she added.