One of the downsides of the legal system is that the final say on how laws apply to new technologies tend to fall on a group of older lawyers.  In other words, most of the votes are in the hands of people who are not on the cutting edge of technology.  This year, there will be several cases before the Supreme Court involving social media.  To put things in perspective, the four youngest justices essentially went to law school either while I was going to law school or right after I went to law school.  At the time that I was in law school, most students did not have e-mail accounts, and we were using very early versions of Word and WordPerfect as our software for writing papers and exams.  Needless to say, sites like Facebook and X were not part of our law school and college experiences.

This past week, we got the first of the social media cases for the year — actually two separate cases raising the same issue — whether a public official can block individuals from commenting on the official’s social media webpages.  When faced with novel issues, judges tend to try to fall back on existing legal doctrines even if that means forcing round pegs into square holes.  And to a some extent that is what we got in the lead case — Lindke vs. Freed in an actual unanimous opinoin written by Justice Barrett.

The basic facts of this case is that the webpage in question was the personal account of the public official.  The official had this account before running for and winning his current position.  However, he does not his public position on the account similar to how many people not their employment.  And he does use his webpage to mention what is going on with that position.  The people on the other side of this case took advantage of the comment feature of the webpage to critique what the city government was doing.  The public official deleted some comments that he thought were inappropriate or inaccurate before eventually blocking these individuals from commenting.  The people who were blocked brought a case claiming that, by blocking them, this official was violating their First Amendment rights. Continue Reading...