7 ms·

SCOTUS to decide if public officials can block critics online

81 points by fortran77 3y ago

DaniloDias 3y ago
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.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Someone being blocked doesn't mean harassment occurred. That will sometimes be the case and sometimes not, depending on the blocker.
  - xboxnolifes 3y ago
    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.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > It's freedom of association This is a right of the people, not of the government.
    - pixl97 3y ago
      > 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.
      - xboxnolifes 3y ago
        > 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.
- ryaneager 3y ago
  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.
  - almatabata 3y ago
    > 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.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I think all public figures have this issue if they're on social media. The trick is to not read it, I think.
- ejb999 3y ago
  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.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    OK, but suppose you're a public official and I just keep leaving slurs on your timeline, perhaps even by automated means.
    - ejb999 3y ago
      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.
- indymike 3y ago
  > 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.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    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.
einpoklum 3y ago
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
shortrounddev2 3y ago
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
- COOL_DUDE_2112 3y ago
  >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-twitter-account-likes-pornographic-tweet https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/12/ted-cruz-twi...
- burkaman 3y ago
  Counterpoint: https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley
- cooper_ganglia 3y ago
  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!" ?
paxys 3y ago
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.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  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.
  - paxys 3y ago
    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.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    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.
    - macinjosh 3y ago
      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.
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
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.
- ejb999 3y ago
  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.
- wombatpm 3y ago
  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.
tunesmith 3y ago
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.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  > 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?
  - paul_funyun 3y ago
    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?
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      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).
      - 3y ago
ajkjk 3y ago
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.
- psychlops 3y ago
  > 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.
  - h2odragon 3y ago
    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.
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      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.
      - 3y ago
hitpointdrew 3y ago
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.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  I sure as hell wish this were the case, excluding abuse like actual death threats, of course.
  - hitpointdrew 3y ago
    I would argue that a death threat, is not a "criticism", but something well beyond that.
- arp242 3y ago
  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.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38092066
Eumenes 3y ago
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.
jcranmer 3y ago
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-v-garnier/ 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/ 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.
- duxup 3y ago
  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.
jmyeet 3y ago
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-fired-for-refusing-to-sign-anti-bds-oath/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181218-texas-teacher-fir... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller [3]: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/united-states-v-cruikshank-1876/ https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/united-states-v-crui... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine
- 3y ago
gustavus 3y ago
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?
34679 3y ago
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.
arp242 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Connor-Ratcliff_v._Garnier [2]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-611/256157/20230303135823259_22-611%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-611/256157/2023...
mbostleman 3y ago
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.
- mbostleman 3y ago
  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.
croisillon 3y ago
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
ericfrazier 3y ago
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.
batch12 3y ago
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?
mainpassathome 3y ago
there should be an official mastodon instance for public servants
beej71 3y ago
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.
- amanaplanacanal 3y ago
  A campaign rally is not official business of his office.
  - beej71 3y ago
    Nor is Twitter, though.
    - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
      Apparently it might be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Trump#Tweets_as_official_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Tru...
jiscariot 3y ago
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.
Elena120 3y ago
[flagged]

81 points by fortran77 3y ago

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.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Someone being blocked doesn't mean harassment occurred. That will sometimes be the case and sometimes not, depending on the blocker.
- xboxnolifes 3y ago
  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.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > It's freedom of association This is a right of the people, not of the government.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    > 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.
    - xboxnolifes 3y ago
      > 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.
ryaneager 3y ago
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.
- almatabata 3y ago
  > 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.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I think all public figures have this issue if they're on social media. The trick is to not read it, I think.
ejb999 3y ago
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.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  OK, but suppose you're a public official and I just keep leaving slurs on your timeline, perhaps even by automated means.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    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.
indymike 3y ago
> 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.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  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.

einpoklum 3y ago

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

shortrounddev2 3y ago

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

COOL_DUDE_2112 3y ago
>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-twitter-account-likes-pornographic-tweet https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/12/ted-cruz-twi...
burkaman 3y ago
Counterpoint: https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley https://twitter.com/ChuckGrassley
cooper_ganglia 3y ago
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!" ?

paxys 3y ago

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.

ajkjk 3y ago
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.
- paxys 3y ago
  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.
- lolinder 3y ago
  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.
  - macinjosh 3y ago
    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.

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

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.

ejb999 3y ago
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.
wombatpm 3y ago
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.

tunesmith 3y ago

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.

ryandrake 3y ago
> 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?
- paul_funyun 3y ago
  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?
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    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).
    - 3y ago

ajkjk 3y ago

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.

psychlops 3y ago
> 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.
- h2odragon 3y ago
  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.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    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.
    - 3y ago

hitpointdrew 3y ago

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.

plagiarist 3y ago
I sure as hell wish this were the case, excluding abuse like actual death threats, of course.
- hitpointdrew 3y ago
  I would argue that a death threat, is not a "criticism", but something well beyond that.
arp242 3y ago
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.
- hn_acker 3y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38092066

Eumenes 3y ago

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.

jcranmer 3y ago

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-v-garnier/ 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/ 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.

duxup 3y ago
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.

jmyeet 3y ago

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-fired-for-refusing-to-sign-anti-bds-oath/ https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20181218-texas-teacher-fir... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller [3]: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/united-states-v-cruikshank-1876/ https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/united-states-v-crui... [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_questions_doctrine

3y ago

gustavus 3y ago

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?

34679 3y ago

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.

arp242 3y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Connor-Ratcliff_v._Garnier [2]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-611/256157/20230303135823259_22-611%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22-611/256157/2023...

mbostleman 3y ago

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.

mbostleman 3y ago
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.

croisillon 3y ago

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

ericfrazier 3y ago

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.

batch12 3y ago

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?

mainpassathome 3y ago

there should be an official mastodon instance for public servants

beej71 3y ago

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.

amanaplanacanal 3y ago
A campaign rally is not official business of his office.
- beej71 3y ago
  Nor is Twitter, though.
  - amanaplanacanal 3y ago
    Apparently it might be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Trump#Tweets_as_official_statements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_use_by_Donald_Tru...

jiscariot 3y ago

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.

Elena120 3y ago

[flagged]