The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday that public officials can face legal action for blocking social media users on their pages, a decision partially stemming from a case in which two Poway Unified School Board trustees blocked a pair of parents over frequent, critical social media comments.
The court ruled in two cases, one of which concerned parents Christopher and Kimberly Garnier, who sued after they were blocked from the social media pages of PUSD trustees Michelle O' Connor-Ratcliff and T. J. Zane. A federal judge previously ruled in favor of the Garniers and an appellate court panel affirmed that ruling.
The other case at issue involved the city of manager of Port Huron, Michigan, who similarly blocked a user who posted criticisms on the city manager's Facebook page regarding the city's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court in Friday's decision that the issue rides on whether a public official's social media use constitutes "state action" or simple personal use of the platform as a private citizen.
If an official is found to engage in state action while using their social media page, blocking a user entirely could open them up to liability, she wrote.
But Barrett wrote that courts must closely examine an official's social media use to find whether it constitutes state action, as many social media pages feature a blend of official and personal use.
David Loy with the First Amendment Coalition said officials should have separate personal and public social media accounts.
“The court also said that the more that the official mixes private and personal with public and official, the more risk the official takes," he said. "And so a best practice would be to clearly distinguish this is personal, this is official.”
In the Poway case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the PUSD trustees were acting as state officials in their social media use and violated the Garniers' First Amendment rights by blocking them.
The Supreme Court sent the Poway case back to the 9th Circuit to re-examine the case through a new standard set by the justices on Friday, which lays out that officials must have state authority and "also purport to use it" to constitute state action.
