US Supreme Court to decide legality of govt officials blocking critics on Twitter, Facebook

Washington: The US Supreme Court is mulling introducing a bill that will give people the right to sue public officials who block them on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

A bench of Supreme Court justices will decide whether the Constitution’s First Amendment Act bars government officials from blocking their critics on social media. The case involves the question of free speech, the Supreme Court thinks.

The case reached the apex court after a Michigan man appealed to overturn a lower court’s ruling against him after he sued a government official in Port Huron who blocked him on Facebook following critical posts made by the plaintiff about the local government’s COVID-19 response.

The most recent case brings back memories of former President Donald Trump’s now-restored Twitter account. Seven people won a legal battle against the former president and blocked them for posting critical tweets against him. A lower court, in this case, held that blocking an individual based on their viewpoints violates the First Amendment and strips them of the right to speech.

In all these cases, the legal question has remained the same: “Can blocking someone on social media give rise to a free speech violation under the Constitution’s First Amendment?”

Details of the most recent case

The US Supreme Court has taken up appeals by two separate plaintiffs.

While the first case involves the previously mentioned Michigan man, the justices also took up an appeal by two members of a public school board from the city of Poway in Southern California of a lower court’s ruling in favour of school parents who sued after being blocked from Facebook pages and a Twitter account maintained by the officials.

The case in California involves elected members of the Poway Unified School District, Michelle O’Connor-Ratcliff, and TJ Zane. Following critical posts made by a couple — Christopher and Kimberly Garnier — on issues such as race and the handling of school finances, the public officers blocked the parents of three students at the school.

The Garniers lodged a case against O’Connor and Zane, saying that their free speech rights under the First Amendment were violated.

The couple won the case in a lower court in 2021.

Meanwhile, the Michigan case involves Kevin Lindke whose account was blocked by City Manager James Freed. Lindke sued Freed in federal court, also claiming his First Amendment rights were violated.

What happened in Trump’s Twitter case?

After the seven men involved in Donald Trump’s Twitter lawsuit won in a lower court, the Supreme tossed the judgment, after the Justice Department held that the end of Trump’s presidency made the case a “dead letter.”

However, Katie Fallow, a lawyer at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was involved in the lawsuit against Trump, said, “As many courts have held, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the president or a local city manager, government officials can’t block people from these forums simply because they don’t like what they’re saying.”

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