Key Points
WASHINGTON, Oct 31 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday waded into the issue of free speech rights in the digital age during arguments in cases from California and Michigan involving whether public officials may legally block others on social media, a function often used on these platforms to stifle critics...
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 limits on the government's ability to restrict speech..
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, which is owned by Meta Platforms (META.O)...
A federal judge in California sided with the parents and the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that Zane and O'Connor-Ratcliff had presented their social media accounts as "channels of communication with the public" about school board business...
In the Michigan case, Port Huron resident Kevin Lindke sued after City Manager James Freed blocked him from his public Facebook page following critical posts related to the COVID-19 pandemic..
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