1xbet What Matters Most in the Supreme Court’s Upcoming Social Media Cases
Americans spend a lot of time on social media, and this term the Supreme Court will do the same. Over the next few months — beginning Tuesday — the court will hear a series of cases requiring it to resolve First Amendment questions arising out of the role that major social media platforms play in hosting, shaping and setting the limits of public discourse online.
One striking feature of these cases is that they involve conflicts internal to free speech — not conflicts between free speech and other values, like equality or national security, but conflicts between the competing free speech claims of government, platforms and ordinary citizens. In resolving these conflicts, the court should remember that the First Amendment’s highest purpose — its “central meaning,” as Justice William Brennan put it nearly 60 years ago — is to protect the speech that’s necessary to democracy.
The two cases the court will hear on Tuesday pose the question of when a public official’s social media account is subject to First Amendment constraints. One case was brought by parents in Southern California who were blocked from school board members’ Facebook pages after they posted hundreds of comments about racism at local schools. The other case was filed by a Michigan resident who was blocked from the Port Huron city manager’s Facebook page after he criticized the city’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The plaintiffs in both cases argue their First Amendment rights were violated when public officials blocked them based on their viewpoints, but the public officials invoke the First Amendment, too. They argue that they have a constitutional right to use social media — and to block other users from their accounts — just like everyone else.
These cases may seem trivial, but they’re not. Some officials’ social media accounts have become vital forums for speech relating to those officials’ exercise of government power, and for speech about public policy more broadly. We need the First Amendment to protect ordinary citizens from government censorship in these forums to ensure that public officials don’t suppress dissent, insulate themselves from criticism and transform these democratically important spaces into echo chambers.
A few years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute, which I direct, filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump on behalf of users he had blocked from his Twitter account after they had criticized him. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with us, but after Mr. Trump lost the election, the Supreme Court declared the case to be moot and vacated the appeals court’s ruling. The two cases the court is hearing Tuesday morning provide it with an opportunity to recognize, as the appeals court did, that public officials who use their social media accounts as extensions of their offices are not protected by the First Amendment but constrained by it.
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