US Supreme Court Weighs Whether Public Officials Can Block Critics on Social Media

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday grappled with a pair of cases from California and Michigan involving public officials blocking critics on social media, with the justices struggling to define when such conduct runs into constitutional limits on the government’s ability to restrict speech.

Lower courts reached different conclusions in the two cases, reflecting the legal uncertainty over whether such social media activity is bound by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech. Blocking users is a function often employed on social media to stifle critics.

The justices, hearing about three hours of arguments, focused on spelling out the circumstances for deciding whether public officials were acting in their personal capacity when blocking critics or engaged in a “state action.” The First Amendment constrains government actors but not private individuals.

The first case involves two public school board trustees from Poway, California, who appealed a lower court’s ruling in favor of parents who sued them after being blocked from the personal accounts of the officials on X, called Twitter at the time, and Facebook. The second case involves a Michigan man’s appeal after a lower court rejected his lawsuit against a Port Huron city official who blocked him on Facebook.

Justice Samuel Alito cited a hypothetical town manager who puts a municipal seal on his own social media page and tells citizens to express their views. Alito told Hashim Mooppan, a lawyer for the school board officials, that his argument could let this town manager “block anybody who expresses criticism of what the town manager is doing, and thereby create the impression that everybody in town thinks the town manager is doing the right thing.”