Supreme Court: Will Blocking on the SocialWeb Remain Legal for All in the USA? | Hacker News Reader

Supreme Court: Will Blocking on the SocialWeb Remain Legal for All in the USA?

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42 pointsrapnie68 comments

> FYI: Will Blocking remain legal for all in the USA? Supreme Court to rule on issue.

It's not currently legal for all. At the present moment whether blocking a constituent is legal depends on which circuit you live in.

> While these cases address only issues related to an individual's explicit blocking of other individuals, I can't help wondering if a future case might limit an individual's freedom to choose which instance to use. If SCOTUS rules against blocking, might individuals with government roles be barred from using instances that provide instance-level blocking or either individuals or other instances?

In a certain sense anything can happen. But there's no reason to think this is more likely than outlawing apple pie. The current case is about whether elected officials can click the block button when logged into official accounts for certain reasons.

Note that platforms are still allowed to block for any reason regardless of the outcome in this case. Note also this case leaves open the possibility it might be permissible for an official to block constituents who broke neutral rules. There is nothing here to suggest any platform changes would be needed.

What are "official accounts", may still be up for some debate? Both Trump and AOC were sued for blocking people on Twitter. I understand that if you manage the Twitter account of the Department of Blank, that you may be prevented from blocking citizens, but for Trump and AOC, were the accounts in question not as much a personal account as anything else?

Obviously @realDonaldTrump is a personal account and @POTUS is the account representing the office of President. But as far as I know, Trump never touched the official White House account, and mistrusted the press, and used his personal account as a primary source of communication, which is why the courts ruled as they did in his case. Being denied access to Trump's personal account became a Constitutional issue because of the way Trump was using it. If you do business on a personal account, at some point that's now a business account.

I don't know about AOC but I assume the same situation applies.

The obvious fix to that would be to introduce a law mandating that communication with the general public by a government official has to be made on government-provided/managed social media and email accounts.

Using "private" accounts to bypass legal requirements (archival, monitoring, insider trading, or blocking political opponents/critical citizens) should result in getting immediately booted from office. Even if it's the President.

Yeah, it's like running an email server in your basement, or bringing your laptop in for repair.

agree for the first (Clinton got out easy imho, but as i understand, Republicans were afraid of setting a precedent), hard disagree on the second.

Unless you think you can use politician children against them.

It's become an autonomic response on HN at this point, if one mentions Trump in any capacity other than ebullient praise, the Trumpists show up to spread insinuations about the Bidens and Hillary Clinton. I guess in their heads somehow that "wins" the argument every time.

I don't think anyone wins in that argument.

realistically, if they manage to derail the thread, they win.

I’m hesitant to comment on this because we are so far off topic.

But I’m not sure this is the take I would have on Hunter Biden.

> Unless you think you can use politician children against them.

As a senator, Joseph Biden went through tough on crime phases and his hands are not clean in the war on drugs.

There are a lot of single family houses in the U.S. whose children grew up talking to dad through a plexiglass window, all over hookers and powder.

These policies have ruined families, ruined childhoods, and destroyed communities. And Senator Joseph Biden was, and continues to be, a part of that damage by shaping the policies that sent dads to jail.

Then hookers and powder show up on his back porch. Now it’s a different story. His grandchildren don’t have to talk to dad through a plexiglass window. His grandchildren don’t have to grow up in a single parent household.

I’m not saying we should do that to his grandchildren, that would be awful. I’m saying send those dads you locked up for hookers and powder home to their families.

I did not comment on that, nor on Biden's hypocrisy. The comment i was responding to was a comment on how top-level government employees should be barred from using their own stuff to bypass federal obligations. Gp talked about media platform, and my parent said basically : "hosting your own mail server and bringing your laptop to a repair shop should be forbidden to".

I wholly agree for the first, and hard disagree on the second, because i do not think the children of politicians should be impaired or targeted because of the job of their parents. At most by the IRS and FTC, by a transpartisan audit unit specialized in dealing with politicians (Hi Pelosi!), and even then, only if their parent's stuff look weird.

For what it's worth, compliance with basic ethics of governance should not be a partisan topic. Clinton, Biden and Trump all fucked up massively (and Trump, most obviously, the hardest).

Neither of the three should be in any position of power any more, alone because of the precedent that Biden and Trump's laissez-faire attitude towards top secret documents set for the lower rungs - after all, why not take top secret documents home and share them with others when Trump (most likely) did the same?

Furthermore, for Trump, literally every American was his constituent. Blocking any of them is clearly a violation.

For AOC, her constituents are New York State's 14th district residents. Anyone beyond that is not someone she's actively representing.

Now, does the law make a distinction here? (I'm genuinely asking; I'm unfamiliar with the specific statute.) If it does, then unless AOC was actually blocking a resident of her district, the situations are clearly different.

I don't think it's a question of "official" vs. "personal" accounts. It's like if you use a personal email at work, you're still subject to regulatory information withholding guidelines. Using a personal account to conduct official business doesn't magically absolve you of your responsibilities under the law. If you use your personal Twitter account to talk with friends and personal interests, then go ahead and block whomever. But if you use your personal account for official business, e.g. to discuss your administration's policies and priorities, then you're acting in an official capacity and should not be allowed to block citizens.

Elected representatives should not be able to block real citizens [1].

However, not everyone posting on social is a citizen, or even human, and they should be able to block non-citizens.

This has been the single consistent problem with social media.

[1] However, citizens harassing them in real life can be handled by the police, what is the social media equivalent that doesn't block them outright?

Maybe disallow anonymous or only allow pseudo anonymous interaction?

That's one possibility, but pseudonmyous is the default on Twitter now unless you pay for the privilege. It's a tricky problem. We want some degree of anonymity but that also invites abuse. We need something like a zero-knowledge proof of citizenry, at the very least.

This gets murky. How is a pseudonymous account, where I schedule posts, different from a bot account, legally? Should I lose rights to information just because my “main” account doesn’t have my full name and face?

Well, I mean, how else can we prove that a slimeball politician is blocking his constituents unless we can identify the constituents blocked. A politician in Wisconsin shouldn't be able to block Wisconsinites in his constituency, but I can see where it'd be legal for him to block Nebraskans. Fundamental to attribution here is determining the one from the other. Courts of law are generally sticklers about that sort of thing.

I am not blocking a person, I am blocking a random handle on the Internet.

> I am not blocking a person, I am blocking a random handle on the Internet.

I am not blocking a person, I am blocking a random telephone number that's calling my office.

I am not blocking a person, I am throwing out all mail from a random mailing address in my district.

You get one mailing address that is verifiably yours.

You get one phone number that is verifiably yours.

I can whip out my phone right now and create 1000 of fake me.

I know what you did there, but - no joy.

You can have multiple mailing addresses and phone numbers. It's not even uncommon. Plenty of people still have a home phone number and a cell phone.

As for fake profiles, see my original post re: the "single consistent problem with social media".

Applying the heuristics of physical interaction to online interaction is usually fraught with issues. But if we are taking the physical analogy, as a model for online interaction then I would point out that people have a range of options before calling the cops and getting a restraining order. For starters, they can simply walk away. You can definitely ignore someone in physical space: we don't expect congress people to listen to everyone heckling them in a restaurant.

> But if we are taking the physical analogy, as a model for online interaction then I would point out that people have a range of options before calling the cops and getting a restraining order. For starters, they can simply walk away.

What I said was in the context of someone visiting the representative's office. You can make all sorts of comparable analogies, like calling them on the phone, or mailing them a letter. Can't "walk away" from your own office, so the police would be involved in extreme cases of threats or abuse.

Besides the online anonymity others have noted...

Define harassment.

Unfortunately you cannot use established legal or historical dictionary definition.

As anecdotal examples why not, someone smashed their neighbor's car windows because they were "harassed" by parking on the street front of their house; harassed because lawn was cut on Friday afternoon, when they had kid's birthday party; harassed because couple laid out in their own back yard in their bathing suits.

I was told I am harassing someone because the material I was reading on my laptop for work, in-flight. Flight attendant was called, and told that I am violent and harassing the person next to me. That they are afraid for their life. (It was a delightful experience; I got moved to first class.)

I'm not sure why the existence of people who attempt to redefine "harassment" as "upsetting or inconveniencing me in any way" means one cannot use the established legal or dictionary definitions of it when attempting to draw guidelines and laws for conduct in online spaces...?

Like, I'm sure that there are loopholes and gray areas in the dictionary and legal definitions; the English language is woefully inadequate to fully convey the breadth of human experience. But nothing you've described falls into that category.

Actually we can use the legal definition. In fact, we do. (To be sure, we must).

Right. I can understand making it illegal to delete your posts as a public servant. That applies to YOU, but I don't see how not being able to block a troll in Portugal posing as someone else is helpful.

There is no standard for verification in social media.

>>> Elected representatives should not be able to block real citizens [1].

I think both the question within the context of current law, and the wider question of "what should be true, beyond current law" is a very interesting one that deserves more thought than a simple "it should not be possible"

On the face of it, it sounds like a noble principle. But even if we sidestep the issue of harassing, it raises the question why it should be so.

If it is about the citizen being heard by the representative? That's not happening anyways. For a reasonably powerful representative, a social media coordinator will likely pre-filter what they see (and should - I'd like my representatives to work, not read their twitter feed all day)

If it is about having a public voice, you can reasonably argue that being blocked by an individual doesn't deprive you of your public voice, even if you can't talk to a single specific person via a single specific medium.

If it is about having the platform granted by being in front of the wider audience the representative has, I'm not sure that currently is a guaranteed right, and I'm not sure it needs to or should.

The one point I find most naturally resonating is the idea that public representatives should be afforded limited to no ability speaking to a semi-public audience without a recording of what they said. This would suggest shadow-banning instead of blocking as the most useful tool.

You can of course argue that it's the state censoring a private citizen, but I'm not sure that holds in current circumstances. The state is allowed to censor in many well-circumscribed circumstances based on harm vs benefit.

And even if we accept that this is censorship, we still have the second important question, does a representative speaking on social media function as an individual, or as a representative of the state. (And I'd expect that if we pick door number two here, we'll sooner or later get to interesting questions like "can you commingle private and public function", and more specifically "can you commingle governmental and campaign function")

There's a lot of (important) nuance that gets lost when we phrase this in terms of absolutes.

> If it is about the citizen being heard by the representative? That's not happening anyways. For a reasonably powerful representative, a social media coordinator will likely pre-filter what they see (and should - I'd like my representatives to work, not read their twitter feed all day)

Your representative should not be permitted to block your phone number, or forbid you from visiting their office, or forbid you from visiting a town hall they're hosting, or any other venue or activity open to the public, without some court order due to a history of abuse or harassment. Their social media account is a comparable medium of communication open to the public.

What's the effective difference between blocking somebody's phone number and telling your staffer "if Steve calls, flip it to voicemail"? (Or "if Anne mails, circular file")

And is that a legal difference? I get the intention behind your "should", but I'm curious if we have legal distinctions, and if what we have is meaningful in the face of reality. I think that's a question we _should_ be asking.

Right, but not every "should" needs a law behind it. One must be mindful of how a law would be enforced, before creating it.. and if it makes sense in the context of consistency with existing law.

If blocking a constituent on Twitter is illegal, can they mute them? Must they leave their Twitter & IG DMs open? What about the absence of an account on a social media platform, is that allowed?

Are thy allowed to have a spam filter on their email inbox? Can they ignore "Spam Likely" flagged calls on their iPhone? Does someone in their office have to go to through the spam flagged items in iMessage & WhatsApp?

How many communication methods are they legally mandated to have openly available to constituents? Does each need to be enumerated in law?

> How many communication methods are they legally mandated to have openly available to constituents?

I'm going off of a hazy memory here, but if some means of communication or some venue hosting a representative is open to the public, it must be open to all, modulo restraining orders and the like.

>Note that platforms are still allowed to block for any reason regardless of the outcome in this case.

What's to prevent the politician from just using social media run by a company who is friendly to him and will block people with opposing viewpoints even without him telling them to?

(Aside from the fact that social media companies like some politicians more than others, which just makes the problem worse.)

Not much. In theory if a company acts under the direction of a govt official a court could find that it acted as part of the state. But that takes a very high degree of entanglement. If the company is simply persuaded the official has a good argument that isn't enough. You can see the miserable track record of Trump supporters sueing over govt programs to report "disinformation" to social media companies for examples of what isn't sufficient.

There are two types of blocking. Blocking someone from appearing for you, and blocking someone from seeing what you post.

IMO, the former should be legal in all cases, but the latter, CAN be problematic if it's an official. Tbh, I am not much of a fan of the latter one in any case.

Exactly this.

Government employees should have some official channel that any constituent can use to communicate with them, but it doesn’t have to be every (or any) social media network.

The ability to reply on social media networks is largely an amplification mechanism, not a meaningful avenue for redress of grievances.

When I “block” you it variously means that (1) I don’t see your messages/replies and sometimes also (2) you don’t see my messages.

I think that #2 is problematic for government accounts but #1 is reasonable.

When you block people they can't reply to your tweets. Completely legitimate IMO, but different from just ignoring people's emails, or sending them to the spam folder, which is something you could do privately, and which AFAIK wouldn't be a constitutional issue in any case.

I think you might find the appeals court decision interesting. They look at other impacts of blocking.

One thing they consider is that the blocked constituents can view public pages on Facebook, but not public profiles on Twitter.

But they consider that blocked constituents can't reply.

It seems like platforms could solve this by making it possible for users to see the content of accounts run by government officials even when blocked, but merely prevent them from otherwise interacting with them.

For Twitter, a simpler solution would be to just disable the block button for govt accounts. They can use the mute function to ignore trolls.

I would say a mute is as good as a block.

When you mute people, they can still reply to your tweets and other people can still see those replies.

that is the idea, yes

the official can decide to cover their eyes, but not everyone else's eyes

Not sure I agree. Citizens have a right to see the public information posted by their elected officials. But that doesn't mean the elected officials have to provide a billboard for all of their constituents.

Let's say an elected official hung constituent letters outside their office. Would they be obligated to hang every letter received, or could they curate the letters in some way?

What you're suggesting is that the govt should be allowed to only let sycophants post praise, while blocking any criticism or unwelcome comment. Ridiculous.

Every announcement is made in a public square, and once said, every citizen has the right to also shout in that square. The government official is free to cover his ears.

it's not their billboard, they're posting on someone else's billboard

it's not their office, they're posting on someone else's office

the town square, if there is to be an electronic analogy, doesn't belong to them, and if there isn't, belongs to the website

Worth pointing out that elected officials have always been able to block incoming (paper) messages by noting the address and throwing them in the trash unread.

Someone pointed out that "blocking" tends to also imply preventing the blockee from seeing the blocker. Having this as the only option seems like a mistake in the design of a social media site.

I think the title is click bait. They will of course not outlaw blocking in general. Instead the case is about the legality of social media blocking by individuals who are also government officials.

Personally I think this can be solved in a way that both takes care of the duty of the office, while also protecting the rights of individual officials. It should remain a right for individuals to block people from their private accounts. Meanwhile, the right to block should be limited on official accounts that act on behalf of the office they represent.

By limited I mean that they should of course be allowed to block obvious bots or spam. The end result will be a new job opening for most public offices, which is that of the public relations officer in charge of public social media accounts.

Are politicians required to accept all messages from all people regardless of content?

If a person sends a package of, say, explicit images, is the politician required to accept and review them? Or any letter they receive? Obviously not. They can take your letter and throw it right in the trash.

How is blocking any different? What if it was "quiet blocking", so the sender never knows their message wasn't read or received by the recipient?

What if the politician or government doesn't have an account at all on a given site? Doesn't that mean they aren't accepting messages from anyone? Do they have to create an account on any site where any of their constituents may be?

You have a right to freedom of speech in the US. As far as I can tell, you do not have a right to have others listen to everything you say, even elected government officials.

If a public official posts a comment on HN, then is it protected from being flagged, downvoted, killed or its author being shadowbanned.

What the heck is social media. How large does a website and its audience have to be before we call it "social media". Sorry, I was born before the internet. To me, it's still a WIP (work in progress).

The title is clickbait. The cases only apply to public officials blocking people. Not private citizens.

Over-regulating and distracting from the truth that social media is an irredeemable cancer. Let’s not waste our time polishing a turd.

Would it be worth pointing out that you used social media to share this view?

There’s probably more nuance to this discussion.

Where else would you hear their point of view?

Jesus himself walked into the temple and turned over the tables of the money changers.

Nah, HN is just another social cesspool, albeit with a different flavor.

I mean on the one hand, there's a pretty famous meme about "so you participate in society? Curious!" that is relevant to your comment.

On the other hand, I do think your comment is more fair than most cases where that is deployed. The person you're responding to has commented on HN six times in the last few hours. They're not a casual user, the account is newer than mine but has much more karma. And the comparison elsewhere to Jesus in the temple...haha, no, this is just more vitriol on the pile.

> there's a pretty famous meme about "so you participate in society? Curious!" that is relevant to your comment.

In that meme, the know-it-all says this in response to the other person saying (something like) "we should improve society somewhat", not "society is an irredeemable cancer".

That does change the context a bit.

That’s a new neologism to me, SocialWeb. I don’t care for it.

I have two problems with comparing Social Media accounts to the "Public Square".

In a public square, I know who you are. You are right there in front of me. I can see you face and I can even follow you home.

Now look on Twitter and Mastodon and even hacker news and see how many people even use their real name?

Thesis a case where I would call for a publicly owned social media platform that adheres strictly to the first amendment but that needs I.D verification and you must use your real name. No blocking allowed at all and zero ranking, upvotes, or likes.

And let twitter and facebook and mastodon be the places where people can live in their own verification bias.

This makes me think as well, is the anonymity of social media discouraging the courage needed to state you feelings in public and to protect? Is the "safe space" of social media actually inhibiting public protest that could actually change things?

You're not really supposed to follow people home, and in cities public squares are (were? in the time when all these constitutional issues where hammered out?) quite anonymous. People don't know each other.

But they also couldn't harass each other without consequences. The genuine anonymity of the Internet is a novel thing without easy analogies to the past.

countless people are constantly harassed without consequences as a result of their names being known and participating in civics

that seems like a worse alternative, especially considering it's hard to change your entire identity offline, and the harassment includes actual physical violence

> People don't know each other.

I am sitting in a coffee shop I frequent every morning. Through the years I have been coming here I have made a lot of friendships. I know here these popped live, what they do for a living and many of their political and social views. We discuss a range of topics and we are rarely all in agreement, but it never turns into anything like on the Internet.

I know people. You may not, and that is sad, but I know people.

Whether some people know each other is besides the point. In a public square, anyone can walk in and speak, without anyone knowing them or following them home.

But how would people respond to that? Did you ever see that happening in a public space? No, because being there is person holds you accountable.

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