SCOTUS to decide if public officials can block critics online | Hacker News Reader

SCOTUS to decide if public officials can block critics online

thefire.org

81 pointsfortran77120 comments

The bigger problem here is that public officials are increasingly using privately-owned social media channels to conduct day to day business. If my local politician or police department is posting photos of their kids I don't really care if they block me. If their Twitter account is the only place I can hear about active shooter threats in my area or submit feedback on an upcoming piece of legislation, then yeah, they have an obligation to allow public access even if I say something that offends them.

It is not that different from using television or radio or private phone lines to conduct business in the past. I would not ask public officials to communicate in silly suboptimal ways out of an imagined principle that it's important that their communication only be on public channels.

It's very different than using (broadcast) TV or radio or phone lines. All of those are still strictly regulated, and you can't be arbitrarily barred access. Your only obligation as a citizen is to own a receiver. This does not apply to random websites on the internet.

They don't really "use" television and radio though, do they?

They hold a press conference and television and radio stations show up and broadcast them. The stations aren't under any obligation to show up and if they declined to do so the officials would get no airtime without using the emergency broadcast option.

At least in the more distant past in the time of the fairness act the broadcast stations had somewhat of an obligation if they were showing news/politics they had to have a somewhat 'balanced' showing.

Believe me they use those mediums plenty. They even pay for ads during election season.

The government is and always has been tightly involved in television, radio, and phone services. The first two were traditionally broadcast through the airwaves for anyone to pick up and listen to, and the latter is a tightly regulated public utility that unfortunately functions as a government-ordained monopoly. All three are widely regarded as part of the commons.

Twitter never has been treated that way, and is rapidly becoming more and more private and less and less a communal resource that is equally accessible to all.

Cable and satellite radio do not have much government involvement. Terrestrial broadcasts in the US are really the only place your argument has any standing and almost no one uses those these days in comparison.

You're completely ignoring the context of my comment:

> It is not that different from using television or radio or private phone lines to conduct business in the past

Terrestrial broadcasts in the US in the past are the subject of this comparison. Whether my description of said historical broadcasts is applicable to modern cable and satellite radio is immaterial, because we're not talking about modern cable and radio usage. Yes those are different, but they're also not used as official channels for government communication any more the way that broadcast TV and radio used to be. They've been transferred

Television and radio were literally unencrypted public channels, I don't think that person would object to a public broadcast of that nature.

Which of these is silly and suboptimal?

1. Communication on a novelty social media platform that limits the amount of I formation you can relay at any one point, by design and that [probably] less than 25% of Americans use.

2. Communication over a set of public frequencies that nearly every American can access free of charge from their home.

3. Communication over a regulated public utility that every American with a home can access?

In what country do you need to register and give up personal identifying information in order to read a newspaper or listen to the radio?

If the idea to centrally register every reader before they were allowed to read news articles had been raised in the 50s or 60s, it would have rightly been regarded as undemocratic. In our age it passes without discussion, and any suggestion it may be problematic is regarded as useless nostalgia.

Would you rather they call you on the privately owned telephone network, or print a story in the privately owned newspaper? There are functionally ZERO non-private methods of communication from the govt to citizens in the US.

It transmits over privately owned networks, but isn’t this what’s the FCC’s Emergency Alert System is for?

https://www.fcc.gov/emergency-alert-system

> If their Twitter account is the only place I can hear about active shooter threats in my area

??? Do you actually use your local politicians Twitter to see if there's an active shooter?

This is a less extreme example, but my town uses its Facebook page as the primary means of reporting concerns (e.g. potholes and other road maintenance issues, parking exceptions).

Many local governments post things to social media sites instead of on their own infrastructure, so blocking access to these sites prevents people from these important communications.

I've been beating this drum for a few years now, and the key point that upsets me is precisely that they already have their own infrastructure, like you said, but they have practically abandoned those official .gov, .mil, .org websites (leaving behind stale information and dead links) to use Facebook and Twitter instead.

I think this is mostly a problem among small towns, counties, etc. so residents of big cities may not notice it as much (like the death of real local journalism). I think it usually boils down to the fact that it's easier for a lay person to update a Facebook or Twitter page than it is to maintain their own website, and IT people are expensive.

I'm in the US Army, and "Big Army" at the top level does OK with its websites (e.g. army.mil), but it also consists of many geographically distributed, semi-independent, sub-organizations (units) that each have a handful of people doing public affairs work. The official websites at those lower levels have been rotting for years, and public affairs folks have freely admitted to me that they don't know how to update their official websites besides changing the photo and biography of the new commander once every two years.

This may be easier to relate to:

During the pandemic, my state governor had an official Q&A regarding the state's policies, on Facebook.

I couldn't participate without accepting Facebook's T&Cs.

I'm not sure if that was illegal, but I'd like it to be.

What's the alternative though? Can we expect local governments to develop and run qa websites and apps? The only realistic option is to have them rely on a 3rd party service and and service is going to have some kind of sign up agreement you need to accept before using.

Can we expect local governments to develop and run

Why not just have a template app that's open source and publicly financed, and the only local part is configuration data like name of the mayor, specific phone #s etc. US local government is already massively duplicative and wasteful.

One possible alternative would be a moderated, call-in group phone call, like companies sometimes have for quarterly investor / analyst calls.

Open governance sometimes requires considerations, e.g. public access, that aren't always crucial for private commerce.

> Can we expect local governments to develop and run qa websites and apps?

Actually, yes, we should expect this.

There would still have to be terms of service to accept or decline, and if those terms included prohibitions like "you are not allowed to hack our servers or spam them to a crawl" then it still makes sense for a decline to result in an inability to use the service

Your hypothetical terms of service are laws.

A working website that every citizen can use would be the least of my expectations in a democratic society.

Is there not precedent for this in the offline world? Government officials hold Q&A meetings and informational sessions in private establishments frequently, and these establishments may have their own rules as to who can and can't attend.

Official events open to the public are held in public buildings mostly in my experience.

I think it's less about the practical use case and more about if there is an official government agency whose responsibility it is to make the public aware of dangerous events, that agency should not have the right to selectively choose who may or may not be able to access that information, based on the sole discretion of the police department's social media manager.

Well The local governor of Hawaii used twitter to cancel a missile alert - so it isn't that wild an idea

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/23/16923080/hawaii-governor-...

It’s definitely the first place I turn to for real time updates about stuff like this.

When there was murderer on the loose recently where I live we definitely watched Twitter more than anything else for updates. The traditional media was incredibly delayed and their reporting was awful and inconsistent.

When our home was in trouble due to major wildfire, local journalists and citizen journalists on YouTube and Twitter was the most reliable place for updates.

Where else would you recommend besides Twitter/X and official channels?

I don’t see why government officials who are performing paid work as public government officials should be allowed to hide or delete access to their work in any capacity.

If they don’t want to expose themselves to the public then don’t use the channel to communicate in the first place.

You don’t have to use social media for official communications.

I feel like you're identifying two distinct issues here - preventing you from commenting on posts, and preventing you from seeing them at all. It depends on the platform whether you can actually separate the two though (regardless of whether either should be legal).

Not sure why there should be a legal distinction between the two. There are many possible ways to interact with stuff online (view it, "like" it, comment on it, save it, share it etc.), and if it is government-sponsored content then no one should be barred from doing any of this.

I would somewhat disagree with this and say that if someone is to be barred from doing any of this, there needs to be some semblance of due process in the form of clearly defined circumstances when that can happen, for how long, etc.

And a private entity should have zero say or lever over this.

Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc. should have no right to censor public discourse.

Well let’s say someone just spams a prominent account with bot accounts, such that any and all discussion beneath their posts is ruined. Or fills the mentions with slander, hateful comments etc.

twitter is the Wild West right now, full of bots and comments that violate rules but take a while to get enforced.

Blocks solve that. But also deprive people of being able to hear announcements.

Splitting the ability to listen to a broadcast and the ability to broadcast on a broadcast seems sensible. You could, after all, be removed from a courtroom or government press conference for being disruptive.

They can't just block speech using bots as the excuse. It's up to the government officials to provide a channel that allows free speech as the law defines.

I imagine this will more likely raise issue with the use of private social platforms for public statements rather than whether they can block comments.

It's perfectly legal for the government or government officials to post on government sites without comment sections. I'm happy of they disable replies altogether. I'm fine if they only show moderated replies.

The problem is that Twitter won't even let you link to a tweet by a user you've been blocked by. That's definitely not okay.

> I'm fine if they only show moderated replies.

Politicians are going to start creating their own Safe Spaces so they don’t have to read any discontent or criticism. Maybe we can get Butters to do the moderation?

They already do, most politicians refuse to be seen outside of rallies. It is not necessary to mock them to their face to mock them. And mock them you should.

y'guys need Natuonal Twitteritics and Spaces Administration. Or strict openness requirements for social media like telcos. Twitter as for-profit infinigrowth company don't make a huge sense just like wholly private buses and water supply don't work.

> I feel like you're identifying two distinct issues here - preventing you from commenting on posts, and preventing you from seeing them at all.

The second issue you mentioned is part of a broader legal issue about the degree to which the government burdens access to the government's speech. The question is not just "can you still access the speech through legal means?" but also "how difficult did the government make it for you to access the speech?"

If you get blocked then you don't see the posts unless you're logged out. This is due to the platform's implementation of blocking, but there it doesn't eliminate the First Amendment question about whether you can see the post. In order to know that a government official made a particular post you would have to periodically visit the government official's account page while logged out. If you weren't blocked you could have gotten notifications sent to wherever, or you could've watched your own feed at your leisure without having to check the official's account page like a hawk. By blocking you under these conditions, the government official would place a significant burden on your access to the speech (a First Amendment violation), even if the prohibition on access is not a complete block.

I agree, public officials should not be using private accounts - email social, etc. - for public/government work. It seems a lot of politicians are doing this, and quite possibly to avoid public records requests and scrutiny

The newspapers where they write op-eds, or the radio and TV channels where they give speeches are private too. I don't see a difference

NY Times can't block you from buying their newspaper, and public broadcast television can't block you from getting their reception. One wrongthink on twitter can get you banned from there, and if your local government uses twitter to 'do whatever', you're effectively banned from that.

> NY Times can't block you from buying their newspaper

This is not true, beyond discrimination against protected classes. The New York Times is a non-governmental business. The First Amendment freedom of association is freedom to do business with anyone, or refuse business to anyone. A newspaper company can ban whoever and refuse to sell to whoever, so long as no government or government official coerces the company to do so.

> One wrongthink on twitter can get you banned from there

As a non-governmental company, Twitter has a First Amendment freedom of association. Twitter can legally ban you (not saying should ban you) from viewing a government's posts so long as no government or government official coerces Twitter to do so.

The government official should mirror the contents of their social media posts on a freely accessible government website. I would favor a new law requiring mirroring and archival in this vein.

You're not buying NY times from NY times directy, but from one of the thousands/millions of newspaper sales points, and getting fully banned (no where to buy it within reason) is for most people unimaginable.

On the other hand, everyone knows someone who got banned from one platfor or another, and if not in person, there have been many articles of people getting banned from random platforms for random stupid reasons, even just saying a foreign word ( https://news.yahoo.com/japanese-apex-legends-players-being-2... )

I live in a non-english speaking country, and a word exchange of "Is Marko there?" - "He's not" would here be: "Je marko tam?" - "Ni ga" ... guess how the last sentance is pronounced, and how that could get misinterpreted if used in a video uploaded to eg. twitter/facebook/whatever.

So the headline here is kind of wrong. The question isn't whether or not a government account can block people on social media--it's pretty well conceded that's a First Amendment violation, although there's no direct SCOTUS precedent on the matter. The actual question is when is an account a government account.

Note the specific questions in the cases at issue: https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/oconnor-ratcliff...

> Whether a public official engages in state action subject to the First Amendment by blocking an individual from the official’s personal social media account, when the official uses the account 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.

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/lindke-v-freed/

> Whether a public official’s social media activity can constitute state action only if the official used the account to perform a governmental duty or under the authority of his or her office.

(While SCOTUSblog color-codes all of the filings depending on if they're for the respondents or for the petitioners, it's a little messed up here since some organizations filed one amicus brief for both cases, and the nature of petitioner and respondent are different in the two cases).

It'll be interesting to see what test SCOTUS comes up with in this oral argument; it's not an easy as you might think to draw a clear line between personal account of an elected official and an account with official government imprimatur.

I agree this is all very muddy.

Not far from me local officials during riots were giving out warnings (some hilariously wrong) about places to avoid and etc. Very much in the realm of public safety warnings, sometimes they retweeted them, sometimes copied and pasted, and sometimes it wasn't clear if they were "official" or "personal experiences" or just a bizarre rumor they heard (that was the case).

It certainly seems like some healthy "personal" and "work" account usage would make life a lit easier to deal with all this.

The details of the actual cases.

> The first case, O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, involves school board trustees who used their personal Facebook and Twitter accounts to solicit feedback from constituents, invite the public to board meetings, and answer questions. But when the trustees got tired of two concerned parents’ probing commentary, the trustees blocked the parents.

> In an attempt to justify their censorship, the trustees argued they were acting as private citizens, not as government officials. These were just personal accounts, they claimed. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, like most courts judging similar cases, didn’t buy this argument. Instead, it correctly examined the content and appearance of their pages and determined the trustees had “clothed their pages in the authority of their offices and used their pages to communicate their official duties.”

> The second case, Lindke v. Freed, diverged from that commonsense rule. There, a city manager used his Facebook page to conduct official business but blocked a critic whose comments he disliked. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit departed from other courts that have considered similar cases, holding that the city manager’s censorship did not violate the First Amendment. It’s his personal page, the court said, and “presenting himself as city manager” and “talking about his job” isn’t enough “to transform a personal page into an official one.”

So my layman opinion is then that the question is when does a social media account become an official account?

I can't even have a strong opinion on this one, it seems like one of the central wedge issues of the internet age. I just hope the Supreme Court wrestles with this responsibly and looks past whatever automatic biases they have, because this one is hard. Trolling and harrassment is weaponized and automated in a way that was never possible before, and it still seems just about impossible to reliably define what is critique vs what is abuse. I suppose the only path is the one that looks at it in terms of behavior rather than content.

> I suppose the only path is the one that looks at it in terms of behavior rather than content.

This is a key point that I hope they recognize and carefully consider. The difference between speech and behavior. In meatspace, these are different things, so the government can punish someone for their behavior but cannot punish someone for their speech. Online, speech and behavior are the same thing. So when someone gets blocked for, say, spamming the n-word over and over, are you blocking them for their speech or for their behavior? The blocker will claim it's for their behavior, and the blockee will claim he was censored because of his speech. Who's right?

It's clearly speech. Were the content of their speech different, there would be no ban. Or is there some means of behaving where they could relay that message to their governmental twitter account without a block?

At the extreme end of the spectrum, if every hour I repeatedly posted to Barack Obama's twitter: "NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R NI---R" over and over, would that be speech or misbehavior? At some point, online conduct crosses the line from criticism (speech) to disruption/DOS (behavior).

> At some point, online conduct crosses the line from criticism (speech) to disruption/DOS (behavior).

Then it's up to the social media company to decide what to do about it. Twitter has a First Amendment of association. Twitter can ban the comments, or leave them up, or do anything in between. If Barack Obama were currently a government official, Obama would have latitude to ask Twitter to restrict N-word comments on his posts, but the First Amendment would prohibit him from coercing Twitter to restrict N-word comments, and would also prohibit him from blocking the commenters.

Note: Twitter has a First Amendment right to ban speech, not only conduct. "Has a right" doesn't mean "should", but in the first place the featured article is about a legal issue, not an ethical issue.

To argue against how I actually feel for the purpose of discussion: If public officials are required to allow the public to piggyback off of their pulpit, does this extend to in-person interactions? Should removing people who interrupt a political speech be banned? If a public official can't block someone, can they block their ability to see the comments? If not, and they are required to clockwork orange the feedback, should they be required to have social media accounts?

Eh. Hard to be annoyed about this. It would be quite another thing if they can deplatform critics entirely, but just blocking them? Who cares?

Even the policies at city-council meetings feel silly. Free speech to me means that you can say whatever you want in the press and in public in general. It doesn't need to guarantee your right to be annoying at a particular venue. When good principles like free speech are distorted into unreasonable and bizarre policies it undermines the principles themselves. It also just undermines the basic idea of government: it's hard to want to support a system that does obviously-silly things all the time because it's too zealous about its own rules.

Indeed, often people who want less government make a point of enforcing rules to the point of absurdity so that people are disenchanted with the rules themselves: obviously if a system seems to work in stupid ways people are more likely to oppose it, yet the actual solution is for it to not work in stupid ways, not to get rid of it.

> It doesn't need to guarantee your right to be annoying at a particular venue. When good principles like free speech are distorted into unreasonable and bizarre policies it undermines the principles themselves.

Some might say that banning speech that is "annoying at a particular venue" is a unreasonable and bizarre policy.

Mouth off in court and see how the judge explains it to you.

Honestly, there's probably court transcripts of judges explaining in clear, reasonable terms exactly why they're silencing somebody. That's the job they supposed to do, after all.

Now all you need to do to bring the argument home is to show us why Twitter is the same as a courtroom in session.

insofar as official business is being conducted there, the analogy would hold.

there's absolutely no reason that official business should be conducted on twitter; but good luck (a) getting officials to admit error and (b) getting government IT to stand up a comment board and keep it alive under fierce debate.

If you're disruptive enough in court it's one of the few reasons you can be tried in absentia in the US.

The lack of civil discourse grinds my gears. I've seen people phoning into town hall meetings only to launch racial slurs and profanity at a rapid rate and then people cry about freedom of speech. Or when a reporter asks a question and they're told to shut up.

People often advocate for freedom of speech yet ignore the ethical responsibility of civil discourse.

> but just blocking them? Who cares?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_petition

The government cannot listen to some citizens and not others. It's one of the enumerated rights in the First Amendment.

Yes, my complaint is over how "petition" is translated into a modern setting.

It's translated liberally, just as "freedom of the press" means more than freedom to print on sheets of paper.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

If you can't take criticism that alone, should, disqualify you from public office.

I sure as hell wish this were the case, excluding abuse like actual death threats, of course.

I would argue that a death threat, is not a "criticism", but something well beyond that.

There's "criticism" and there's "abuse", and copy/pasting the same message to hundreds on Twitter posts is "abuse".

This kind of attitude is why politicians seem to slowly skew more towards over-confident aggressive brash loudmouths who are very good at shouting and dealing with an endless stream of abuse, rather than the actual business of running things.

The social media company can decide whether and how to handle it. The government official can ask but not coerce the social media company to ban abusive comments.

And as I wrote [1] in reply to arp242's sibling comment:

> The politician should mirror the post on a website the politician controls with no comments allowed or simply post on such a website in the first place. The politician can then post a link to the relevant page of the politician's website to the politician's social media accounts and proceed to ignore the comments on the social media site. If the politician is a government official, this is still perfectly compatible with the First Amendment, because the official has the First Amendment freedom of association and therefore can refuse to host comments on the politician's announcements on the politician's own websites.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38092066

It basically means politicians can't have any genuine conversation with constituents on social media because it'll be drowning in trolls. Which I guess is fine, but it seems less than the ideal outcome.

An uncensored media feed for any politician with any power at all is just going to be an uninterrupted stream of vitriol.

> genuine

"People I like."

> trolls

"People I don't like."

Either of whom may or may not be constituents. In fact the people most motivated to 'troll' (give voice to dissent) will be the people who have a stake in the matter; constituents.

Trolls drown out even people motivated to give voice to dissent.

You could have a handful of people convinced that some politician is a satanic pedophile and will write hundreds of comments about it, while someone who just would like the pothole in their street fixed, or who disagrees with their vote on a zoning issue never gets a word in.

You've missed the point, there is no objective measure of a troll. If you strongly believe A and think nobody could believe B in good faith, and I strongly believe B and think nobody could believe A in good faith, then you are a troll to me and I am a troll to you.

Go on a forum with lots of republicans and argue standard democratic talking points; they'll call you a troll. Do the inverse and they'll call you a troll. People use the label of "troll" against people who are being earnest when they say something the listener strongly disagrees with. It's little more than a generic insult for people you disagree with, like "idiot".

In the example you give, the people calling politicians satanic probably earnestly believe that in many if not most cases. You might think that nobody could have that point of view in good faith, but this is a country with many millions of Christians who earnestly believe all kinds of wacky nonsense. I know Christians who think Halloween is a satanic holiday. They're not trolling, they really do believe that. You say that people who accuse politicians of satanism are trolls because you strongly disagree with what they're saying and you think they don't have a rational reason to believe what they say (which is probably true) but you don't have any evidence that they're misrepresenting their true beliefs to get a rise out of you (which would be "true trolling".) If they really do believe what they say, then they're not trolls. Even if what they believe is totally irrational, that's the way some people are.

If the problem is a small number of people dominating the conversation by leaving 100x more comments than anybody else, then solve that problem by requiring commenters to identify themselves and rate limiting people. This doesn't require you to read their minds to determine their true intent.

All of that might be true, but the end result is that the social media feed for all politicians will be dominated by crazy people yelling at each other, and the politician won't participate and nobody normal will read it. Basically the same as comments on newspaper articles, really. Any unmoderated forum is going to be worthless as a forum.

That might be the constitutionally mandated outcome, but it's probably preferable to just not allow comments at all.

That would be an acceptable outcome. There's no need for politicians to have genuine discussions with constituents on private social media platforms. They should use more inclusive channels and public forums.

> It basically means politicians can't have any genuine conversation with constituents on social media because it'll be drowning in trolls. Which I guess is fine, but it seems less than the ideal outcome.

The politician should mirror the post on a website the politician controls with no comments allowed or simply post on such a website in the first place. The politician can then post a link to the relevant page of the politician's website to the politician's social media accounts and proceed to ignore the comments on the social media site. If the politician is a government official, this is still perfectly compatible with the First Amendment, because the official has the First Amendment freedom of association and therefore can refuse to host comments on the politician's announcements on the politician's own websites.

Big thanks to FIRE for picking up the torch dropped by the ACLU. The ACLU, in their stampede to rebrand themselves as a racial justice org, like everyone else did a couple of years ago, has completely lost their way. I cringe everytime they show up as a free speech org in NYT crossword puzzles.

Whenever this comes up, one of the justifications is "death threats". Any anonymous account or bot can make a "death threat" ... but its being often used in political theater and discourse to sow division, real or not.

I know that constitutional law is complex and most certainly above my pay grade, but from a fundamental human perspective, that this is even a question in a modern liberal society sends shivers up my spine.

Actually, nevermind. I should have read the article first. This is concerning feedback to social media accounts owned and managed by a public official. I thought this was about (federal) government actors pressuring platforms to censor users across the board.

If I were a person of any kind of importance there's no way I would be running my own social media accounts. If I did, I would do my best to segregate those onto specific devices which I only used for making posts, but not replying to them. If community engagement was important, I'd hire someone else to respond to comments for me.

If a senator blocks you on Twitter, there's very little chance that they were going to ever see your comments in the first place

>If a senator blocks you on Twitter, there's very little chance that they were going to ever see your comments in the first place

You over-estimate the narcissism and under estimate the opsec of most senators and in turn, most juris doctorates (from whose ranks many so called public servants are pulled)... it was not long ago it was a common mini-scandal for someone, usually on the right, to accidentally heart some porn on their "work" device[1].

I wish I'd known when younger I could simply refuse to be imparted esoteric knowledge and live a life of error. If they're not on their phone, they're on their office computer name searching constantly when they're not editing their own Wikipedias.

This case will be decided long after folks who, if it is decided such silencing is undemocratic, have been driven to post in ways that have them booted off whole networks.

*The decision to become a public figure, like to become a dissident, is a forever decision*, and when folks try to "curate their timeline" like a teenager, they are no longer members of civil society and lose the protections granted to such persons.

TL;DR: They see these comments, and that is why they block.

[1] Married Texas senator, who once defended a ban on sex toys, asked to explain how his account came to like the graphic post https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/12/ted-cruz-twi...

Counterpoint: https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley

So if I mail my senator a list of complaints every week, and the government bans any letters from my address reaching the senator, do you think my best course of action would be to simply throw my hands up in the air and say, "Well, it was unlikely he was going to read those letters anyway!" ?

Would you be equally unhappy about the letters if you knew that they were skimmed over by an intern and replied to with a form response?

No, even though the effect is largely the same, because the issue isn’t that the Senator isn’t reading the letters; I’d imagine that would be the case (that’s why you send it weekly, Shawshank Redemption-style. It’s about sending a message… Literally… lol)

But in all seriousness, the issue to me is the ban on what communications may pass through to an elected official. If communications don’t reach them, that’s one thing (can’t expect every Tweet, letter, or phone call to be personally replied to, of course), but I don’t think politicians, police departments, or other places should be able to block U.S. citizens from viewing their own official communications through public channels, or attempting to contact their elected officials through those same public channels. I feel like that sets a bad precedent that I’d worry could be exploited by potential bad actors.

Pass a federal law that no elected official, state or federal is allowed to use social media while in office, at all. See how many politicians are in it for the clout or in it for the civics. Politicians can communicate using existing resources like the state websites set up for their office.

i wish it would also set a precedent for further so-called democratic countries, instead of having the french center-right ruling party block everyone on twitter

I'm always surprised that government officials and official whitehouse memos n such keep comments enabled. It's not like the president (besides Trump maybe lol) is gonna read the comments and respond, plus the value of those first replies is so ridiculously high, why on earth would you risk it. The point of twitter and facebook for political officials is get the message across, not create engaging content. It would also be nice if all 'fact checkers' from facebook, to twitters community notes would get permanently disabled for elected officials. Absolutely bonkers we let tech companies decide that stuff for us IMO.

I don't think most people posting on social media actually expect the politician/official to respond to a message - its more that it adds color, or perhaps another view, to the official message that is posted, so that others reading the original message can (perhaps) get another side - of course it can be - and certainly is - abused, but not sure blocking people is the right solution here - anymore than it would be to allow a government official to post an op-ed piece in a newspaper, and the forbid anyone who had a different opinion from responding either in another op-ed, or in a letter-to-the-editor.

When a politician speaks in public the public can immediately respond to lies and falsehoods. Why should politicians be protected from feedback online?

But I do agree that anonymous posts to politicians should eligible for blocking.

They effectively already do, indirectly:

* Through legislation

* Through impugning them as foreign agents

* Through various political policing bodies (in the US - FBI, CISA, maybe others)

* Through media pressure on online platforms

It is not allowed in real life? We've certainly seen Trump block people at his rallies.

Don't get me wrong--I don't think he should block anyone, but saying he can't block anyone on a non-government service seems like a risk in a number of ways, not the least of which is a legal definition of "block" and a list of objective reasons when a block would be allowed.

A campaign rally is not official business of his office.

Nor is Twitter, though.

Apparently it might be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Tru...

there should be an official mastodon instance for public servants

A lot of people only seem to be considering this in the context of individual bans. The real concern is the possibility of blanket bans on everyone discussing a specific topic or view. Right now, the words "ceasefire" and "genocide" come to mind.

Where does "criticism" stop and "heckling" begin?

The article says that "politicians cannot use their social media account as a public forum and then block their critics from that forum. That’s not how it works in real life" but ... it kind of does? If you have nothing to offer other than a stream of abuse then you can expected to be shown the door.

Real-life interactions are "rate limited" both artificially (n minutes of speaking time) and more naturally (you can't follow politician everywhere to criticise them). A small group of online critics/hecklers can completely dominate the conversation because there is no rate limit. This includes posting about your pet peeve on every unrelated thread.

Have you seen the accounts of most politicians, even fairly moderate and uncontroversial ones? It's such a shitstorm that I wonder why they even have these accounts. As Peter Mannion MP already discovered many years ago: "this is the problem with the public, they're fucking horrible".

The article mentions O'Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, and "when the trustees got tired of two concerned parents’ probing commentary, the trustees blocked the parents." Sounds kinda bad and childish from the trustees, but then you read the details[1] and that tells a somewhat different story: "Garnier had once left near-identical comments on 42 separate posts on O'Connor-Ratcliff's Facebook page. He had also left 226 identical replies over the span of 10 minutes to each tweet O'Connor-Ratcliff had ever posted on her public Twitter account." Describing that as merely "commentary" they "got tired" of is so woefully incomplete that it's hard to take this in good faith.

The second case is also rather more nuanced than presented; Freed was a civil servant and used his Facebook page mainly for personal matters, and occasionally also occasionally "posted administrative directives and press releases he issued as the City Manager that had already been released to the public elsewhere prior to being posted on his personal Facebook page." When COVID started this took up a lot of Freed's attention on Facebook, like for all of us, and "Lindke made Facebook posts on other accounts personally attacking Freed". I can't really find an account of what exactly was posted though, but this also sounds a bit more than "criticism".

And there is a legitimate discussion to be had where "personal space" begins, and "city manager used his Facebook page to conduct official business", as the article describes it, seems excessively simplistic.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Connor-Ratcliff_v._Garnier

[2]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-611/256157/2023...

It's important to understand that the Supreme Court has never been some impartial body that operates above politics. Even the "originalist" or "textualist" movement embodied by the Federalist Society was simply invented in the 1980s. Some examples:

1. (1A) The Supreme Court has refused to strike down anti-BDS laws that exist in ~37 states. For example, to be a teacher in Texas public schools, you have to sign a contract saying you won't support or engage in anti-BDS activities [1];

2. (2A) An individual "right" to own firearms was only created in 2008 [2], over 200 years after it was enacted, ignoring all history and interpretation of 2A;

3. (4A) Civil asset forfeiture should be unconstitutional under 4A. It is not;

4. (1A) In the Redeemer era, the Supreme Court vacated hate crimes convictions for the Califax massacre that involved a very restrictive reading of 1A [3];

5. In the Filburn decision in 1942, The Supreme Court ruled that growing wheat for personal use counted as interstate commerce because growing such wheat meant you didn't participate in interstate wheat markets when you otherwise would [4]; and

6. Citizens United decided that money was protected political speech [5].

I could go on. The point is though that all of this is completely made up and it's done so to protect government and capital owner interests almost all of the time.

Some of the more controversial decisions of the last few years have relied upon the "major questions doctrine" [6]. What is that? It's a principle of statutory interpretation that simply says that if an issue is big enough, the court gets to overrule the executive and legislative decisions if the court decides the language wasn't sufficiently clear (for the court). Where did this principle come from? They just made it up.

So, the decision regarding officials blocking critics will be a political one. Personally I don't think a government employee blocking someone on Twitter is a 1S issue. I guess we'll see.

[1]: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181218-texas-teacher-fir...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller

[3]: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/united-states-v-crui...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn

[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine

>An individual "right" to own firearms was only created in 2008

You are conflating a SCOTUS ruling with a "right". The right was always there since the constitution was adopted.

It just wasn't a right that was challenged all the way up to the SCOTUS until 2008. That doesn't mean the right didn't exist before hand. It only means the SCOTUS confirmed a right that has existed all along.

And if they did not confirm it, then the right would not have had existed the entire time...

It's a Schrödinger Right: The right is a superposition of "exists" and "doesn't exist" until ruled on by the court.

While some people seemingly didn't like your post, yes, that's how rights/laws commonly work.

Blocking people who are harassing you seems like a reasonable balance to free speech.

Just because you are saying things doesn’t mean another citizen has to listen to them.

Someone being blocked doesn't mean harassment occurred. That will sometimes be the case and sometimes not, depending on the blocker.

Does it matter? It's freedom of association. Ignore enough of the people you presumably represent, and that gets shown through elections.

As for unelected officials, anything that would affect government duties should be going through official channels.

> It's freedom of association

This is a right of the people, not of the government.

> Ignore enough of the people you presumably represent, and that gets shown through elections.

I mean until the moment you're a minority which is something elected officials have continually had issues with, especially in the south, here in the US.

If an elected official is using a private channel as a means of 'public' information dissemination things get messy.

> If an elected official is using a private channel as a means of 'public' information dissemination things get messy.

That sounds more like an problem of issuing public information only through private channels.

Who’s to keep them from blocking actual critics? They serve the public, so isn’t a harsh or critical opinion about them still valid?

Just because it’s written, doesn’t mean you have to read it.

> Just because it’s written, doesn’t mean you have to read it.

Sure but you have to read it to know if it goes too far no? If these people use the accounts for official business they might want to read the comments to know what their constituents say. If every time you ask a question you have one person constantly berating you and insulting you in bad faith, i could understand wanting to block him. Constantly reading these messages can take a huge toll on people.

Especially because these people do not see one or two messages. They have thousands of followers. The amount of hate message these people get dwarfs anything a normal person sees.

If the SCOTUS rules that they cannot block people then they will need to employee somebody to filter the messages. Otherwise you will destroy your mental just reading the toxic messages.

I think all public figures have this issue if they're on social media. The trick is to not read it, I think.

ok - now define 'harass', and also tell me who gets to decide what is 'harassment' is and isn't - that is the crux of the problem.

Disagreeing with a stated position of a government official - loudly and strongly - is not harassment.

OK, but suppose you're a public official and I just keep leaving slurs on your timeline, perhaps even by automated means.

I don't disagree, but I don't see any solution that can fairly define what is harassment and what isn't - it is clearly in the eye of the beholder - and without a doubt, if a govt official can simply declare something harassment in order to censor it, you can be 100% sure, all of a sudden every criticism will be labeled harassment.

> Blocking people who are harassing you seems like a reasonable balance to free speech.

We're not talking about private people or private enterprise. We're talking about appointed, elected and employed government officials acting in their capacity as a government official. Far too often, public officials believe anything negative is abuse, and I for one want them to hear the wingnut who is angry because their kid was beat up by the cops or the kook who is still mad because they lost his paperwork.

We certainly want to hear reasoned opposition, but I think a lot of people in this thread are ducking the elephant in the room, which is unreasoned spam. I don't think that 1000x posts of 'fuck joe biden' or 'dump= cheeto hitler' advance public deabte. Never mind whether the politicians feel offended by such remarks; consider the position of the people who want to engage with politicians in good faith (regardless of whether it's for support or opposition) but are drowned by the endless tide of low-IQ/bot spam from both supporters and opponents.

There was a whole bunch of mass shooting last weekend, as you probably know. But policy discourse is almost impossible on social media, because one side just endlessly spams 'it's the guns' and the other side endlessly spams 'shall not be infringed'. The people attempting to address the issue substantively can't make headway because the zone is continually flooded with shit.

I grumbled long ago that the very short-format of services like Twitter was going to end up making discourse dumber because it favored slogans and bumper-sticker cliches, and sadly that level of stupid has become the norm now.

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