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 ac

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?