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 the

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...