Federal Court Rules that City Social Media Comment Policy Violates First Amendment
A federal court in Georgia issued a summary judgment ruling in a challenge to a city's actions in deleting comments and blocking users from the official city Facebook page.
A user posted frequently on the city's Facebook page, and some of those posts were critical of the city, its departments, and city employees and officials. Shortly after posting certain criticism, he found he was no longer able to access the city Facebook page from his personal Facebook account, and when he searched for the page, the search returned the message "This Content Isn't Available." He was, however, able to access the page from his business Facebook account. He also discovered that another of his comments were "hidden" from public view. After being blocked from the city's page, he filed FOIA requests with the city seeking records regarding the city's blocking of him from the page. The city did not provide any responsive records. In response to questions about the city's actions to block him from the page, the city responded that no city employee blocked him, a "blocked user list" did not show his name, and that the city did not violate the First Amendment.
The user filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging that the city and certain city employees and officials violated his First amendment rights by blocking him from the page and hiding his comments and that the city should be sanctioned for its failure to preserve evidence of its blocked user list.
First, the district court found that the city had a duty to preserve records pertaining to its blocking of users from its Facebook page, i.e., the blocked user list. As a remedy, the court prohibited the city from making any argument at trial that its blocked users list did not contain the user's name.
Second, the court determined that the city's social media comment policy was unconstitutional because it banned comments that could constitute protected speech. For example, the court determined that the comment policy's ban on "personal attacks," "harassment," as well as "abusive," "racist," and "hateful" speech constituted impermissible viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. The court also found that the policy provided too much discretion to administrators to apply these restrictions in a manner that would ban protected speech.
The court also struck down the comment policy's restrictions on "defamatory" comments, "unsupported accusations," and "off-topic comments," finding that the administrators had received no guidance or training on how to apply those terms and that the city employees had testified they thought "defamatory" meant that a user was bringing up past issues or "talking smack" about another person.
The court allowed some of the remaining claims to continue to trial.
You can read the court's ruling here.
