Supreme Court debates on First Amendment Violations
2434 sats \ 6 comments \ @provolone 28 Mar mostly_harmless freebie
Two stories:
  1. From CNN Supreme Court to debate whether White House crosses First Amendment line on social media disinformation March 17
From the article (emphasis mine)
“Government officials do not violate the First Amendment when they speak in public or in private to inform, to persuade, or to criticize speech by others,” the US government wrote in a brief.
  1. From firstamendment.news Supreme Court issues unanimous ruling: American public can (sometimes) sue government officials who block them on social media March 20
From the article
The Supreme Court said that in order for a government official to be deemed as acting within his or her office as opposed to behaving online as a private individual, he or she must have “actual authority to speak on behalf of the state on a particular matter.” In such cases, government actors are “purporting to exercise that authority in the relevant posts,” and are thus not allowed to block dissenters.
SCOTUS source (firstamendment links to a third party copy of this PDF)
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-611_ap6c.pdf
(forgive the sloppy formatting, I did my best)
Thoughts?
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22 sats \ 0 replies \ @Cje95 28 Mar
I just want to point out that the territory you chose was mostly harmless but this is a Constitutional issue lol
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22 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 28 Mar
God, the intersection of what it means to be a member of some Official Public Machinery vs building your Twitter brand of hot takes is such a quagmire. I do not envy anyone trying to untangle this.
Normally I would say: this is one of those things where all the work is done by norms and other social machinery, not by laws, there is no way to legislate all the edge cases.
But then we have the Trump presidency, which, whatever else you say about it, could be viewed as one large exploit of that idea. If it is not strictly illegal, there is no countervailing force for that guy. Presumably other politicians behave in similar ways, just less egregiously.
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11 sats \ 2 replies \ @Coinsreporter 28 Mar
I think government officials shoud have seperate accounts, one for official statements and other for their private talks.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Cje95 28 Mar
The issue that we have seen previously, Trump naturally is a shining light here, is that he used his personal Twitter/X account during his Presidency instead of the typical President account... I agree for the most part they should be separate but the issue of when officials blur the lines is the biggest issue
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 29 Mar
Agree.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @provolone OP 28 Mar
SCOTUS link for second story https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-611_ap6c.pdf
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