
Politicians cannot block social media foes: U.S. appeals court - tareqak
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-virginia-facebook-decision/politicians-cannot-block-social-media-foes-u-s-appeals-court-idUSKCN1P11SC
======
sverige
So they're public fora when someone wants to criticize a politician, but
private companies with no duty to allow people to say unpopular things when
the company wants to kick them off the platform. Got it.

Also, does this mean all politicians ought to be obliged to have social media
pages?

~~~
josefresco
Politician running for public office blocking voters vs Facebook enforcing
it's terms of service. Pretty big difference actually.

~~~
tptacek
It's not enough to be running for office; you have to be in office. It's the
use of a private service as part of your official role that creates this
situation, not some special duty "politicians" have.

(This is obvious but also clear within the first few paragraphs of the ruling,
which point out that the Facebook page in question used the Facebook "Pages"
functionality, which is used for "businesses organizations and brands", and
which the defendant referred to as her " _County_ Facebook Page". The legal
good stuff is on pages 18-19.)

We should be careful to use the term "official" or "government official"
rather than "politician". There are politicians for whom this ruling does not
apply (anyone not in office), and non-politicians for which it does (any civil
servant).

~~~
clubm8
>It's not enough to be running for office; you have to be in office. It's the
use of a private service as part of your official role that creates this
situation, not some special duty "politicians" have.

My worry is that it means someone can attempt to separate their personal and
public lives, then because they RTed the campaign account too many time or
some BS, their "personal" account gets rebranded.

Or what if it moves from elected official to public figure? Having seen this
Comet Ping Pong nonsense spread across the web, what happens if I someday am
victim of or witness to a crime? Will by rights to claim harassment or block
be eroded?

I agree that say, the official TSA twitter should not be able to block
complainers, but even I think that someone who is _harassing_ a government
account should be able to be blocked.

~~~
tptacek
This controversy isn't so much a "worry" as a "certainty". For instance, the
ruling explicitly leaves open the possibility that if we were talking about
the County Supervisor's personal Facebook Profile, rather than a "Page" she
set up for her office, that she'd have been free to moderate it as she saw
fit. There will almost certainly be a back and forth on this.

You don't have to be an elected official for this ruling to hit you; just a
government official of any sort acting under color of law (ie: under the
authority of your job).

Being a public figure has nothing to do with it (on the Internet, "public
figure" comes up in legal discussions because of its impact on defamation
cases, and IANAL so maybe it comes up elsewhere too, but it's not a part of
this case).

The ruling isn't that you _can 't_ block people, it's that your actions in
moderating your page must comply with the First Amendment. You can be kicked
out of a government building for being too disruptive; you just can't be
kicked out because of a particular viewpoint you're espousing.

~~~
clubm8
> _This controversy isn 't so much a "worry" as a "certainty". For instance,
> the ruling explicitly leaves open the possibility that if we were talking
> about the County Supervisor's personal Facebook Profile, rather than a
> "Page" she set up for her office, that she'd have been free to moderate it
> as she saw fit. There will almost certainly be a back and forth on this._

I take issue with this type of ruling.

It's one thing to say you can't block a constituent from replying to you, but
a comments page is different.

HN respects free speech, but there are some modes of speech they would remove
from the comments.

Likewise I'm not sure I agree the FB page of a govt official needs to be a
free for all.

~~~
tptacek
Are you taking issue with my description of the ruling or with what the ruling
says?

~~~
clubm8
>Are you taking issue with my description of the ruling or with what the
ruling says?

Which do you think? Were you legitimately confused or are you trying to be
snarky?

~~~
tptacek
I "legitimately" don't know which of those you're asking.

------
riffic
Government organizations should be required to adopt open social media
networking protocols such as ActivityPub, a W3C recommendation:

[https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/)

What I envision is instead of having various elected officials and executive
agencies all managing social media accounts of various centralized third-party
platforms, these organizations would self-manage their own social media
infrastructure (much in the same way these entities already self-manage their
own DNS, web presence, and email infrastructure today.)

~~~
ucaetano
> these organizations would self-manage their own social media infrastructure

What could possibly go wrong...

~~~
asdff
What could that wouldn't with a private platform? A hypothetical public forum
would be excellent! It would be a place where people could feel comfortable to
disseminate knowledge without worrying about their information and
psychological profile being bought, sold, and manipulated because it wouldn't
be financially supported by those practices. If it's kept far away from Ajit
Pai types, maybe bad actors could be forced out (SSN or other official
verification, maybe?)

Take a look at a well-run government resource like PubMed. Sure it looks
awkward at first, but its extensively documented, and as you learn more and
more about it you begin to appreciate how robust it is being isolated from
metrics like time on platform or ad engagement. You have powerful search
operators, and extensive public databases of primary literature and entire
seminal textbooks. Functionality is only added, never removed. Everything we
know about biology is indexed on this website and available at your fingertips
(ignoring Elsevier for a moment). You don't even have to visit it unless you
need to; it's trivial to set up email notifications or an RSS feed for an
active search.

Social media is broken. The playbook used by the Russians only worked because
it benefitted from these same algorithms designed to keep peoples eyes fixed
on these platforms and no other. Who would have known that designing a
platform to maximize viral advertising could be used as is to maximize viral
propaganda? Certainly not Zuckerberg, as he claims.

The original premise of Facebook, an online extension to strictly local
connections, seems so idyllic and utopian now.

~~~
ucaetano
> What could that wouldn't with a private platform?

Well, with a private company you don't have the one who makes and enforces the
rules also running your social network.

And that's a very, very bad scenario. We'll be going back to the Pravda.

~~~
riffic
With the ActivityPub "Fediverse" each publisher only controls the instance
they publish to, not the entire network at large. Anyone can run an instance
of a server implementing the protocol and anyone can subscribe to messages
published by a microblogger.

What experience do you have here, and have you read the protocols yet? Here's
a reference implementation:

[https://github.com/dariusk/express-
activitypub](https://github.com/dariusk/express-activitypub)

My larger statement here is that organizations that the public give tax
dollars into should be running open infrastructure that they self-manage and
would then provision accounts for their users (users in this case being the
agencies that utilize and publish to social media feeds and the offices of
elected officials that do the same), and not be subscribers to centralized
social media services (that is, twitter, facebook, instagram, et cetera et
cetera. If you haven't been living under a rock you know these services have
_issues_ and are being gamed.)

------
ceejayoz
I agree that a politician's Facebook Page should be treated as a public
forum... but disruptive folks are kicked out of in-person public forums on a
regular basis. Seems odd that you wouldn't be able to do the same on the
Internet.

~~~
josefresco
How would one differentiate between say an accusation of corruption (valid or
not) and someone just being "disruptive"? Someone commenting "You suck
lalalalalalala" is clearly disruptive but another claiming "This politician is
corrupt!" may not be.

~~~
LeftTurnSignal
Judging from how a few more meetings than I'd like went, there's no
difference. If the chairmen wants you out, you're out. Does not matter what
proof you bring, they still boot you out.

/that is around small town USA, so hopefully won't apply to this

~~~
dragonwriter
This was also a small town USA case, and basically the same as you describe.
The difference is the offended party challenged the action in federal court.

Anything is, in effect at least, legal if you choose to accept it and not
challenge it.

------
pjc50
Well, that's declared open season for abuse.

~~~
icebraining
Usually actual abuse can be moderated. The problem is the "viewpoint
discrimination". As long as abusive users of any political side get the same
treatment, it's usually OK.

~~~
mlindner
The problem is you can game the comments. It's relatively easy to bot farm
likes to keep your responses at the top of every single post. (Trump's posts
had this problem extensively.) This is used to silence any other opinions
whether positive or negative by burying them below the heavily automatically
liked comments.

~~~
icebraining
Well, if there's an objective way to identify such comments, then I think it
can be argued that blocking them isn't viewpoint discrimination.

------
nathan_long
Is the issue is whether the official _reads_ someone's messages, or whether
their critic's messages show up for others to see?

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Almost certainly the latter. That's why people sued over getting blocked by
Trump - it prevents folks from making themselves more famous via posting sick
burns in the replies to Trump tweets. I'd be surprised if Trump reads any
replies to his tweets whatsoever.

~~~
nathan_long
> it prevents folks from making themselves more famous via posting sick burns
> in the replies to Trump tweets

That's a rather cynical take. Imagine a politician you disagree with - be they
a fascist, communist, libertarian, or whatever - tweeting something blatantly
false. And imagine that they block replies by everyone who contradicts them,
making their replies a chorus of agreement. Wouldn't that seem to be an
impediment to civil discourse?

~~~
ThrustVectoring
Yeah, it would. And it'd be a great case for a non-profit centered around
issues like that. It's just honestly difficult to justify spending tens of
thousands of dollars of your own money on that lawsuit without getting some
kind of angle out of it.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Yeah, it would. And it'd be a great case for a non-profit centered around
> issues like that.

Indeed.

[https://knightcolumbia.org/content/knight-institute-v-
trump-...](https://knightcolumbia.org/content/knight-institute-v-trump-
lawsuit-challenging-president-trumps-blocking-critics-twitter)

------
onetimemanytime
I get their argument, but what I say "X race deserves to die" and that
politician should draft a law to support it? And I say it time and time and
time again. Every other comment is mine, because I really believe that.

------
buboard
I wonder if this could be expanded to the case of private companies and the
people who run them, in cases of consumer protection or consumer rights
issues.

------
Fnoord
If the politician did the block silently via client-side (drop instead of
reject) we would probably never have heard of this story.

------
justboxing
Excellent.

Does this means that Trump has to unblock @BitchesTheCat [1] on Twitter [2] or
does it only apply to "human" accounts?

EDIT: The cat is now trolling Jr to ask Sr to unblock it.
[https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat/status/1082343558961655808](https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat/status/1082343558961655808)

[1] [https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat](https://twitter.com/BitchestheCat)

[2] Donald Trump Has Blocked A Cat On Twitter =>
[https://www.inquisitr.com/5036727/donald-trump-cat-
twitter/](https://www.inquisitr.com/5036727/donald-trump-cat-twitter/)

~~~
buboard
Does anyone think that trump reads the replies himself, or that the upcoming
flood of trolls won't make his account even more active?

------
blancheneige
so nothing can be done about bots posting near instant and often off-topic
responses to every single one of Trump's tweet? not that it bothers me the
slightest, but I find it to be a concerning case of double standard given all
the allegations of Russian interference on social media.

~~~
tptacek
You're comparing unrelated "standards". The case isn't about the health and
well-being of social networks, but rather about whether the actions of
government officials on those networks qualify as "state actions", which are
required to comply with the Constitution, or private actions, which aren't.

~~~
blancheneige
> You're comparing unrelated "standards". The case isn't about the health and
> well-being of social networks (...)

That's a little too convenient. Neither cases are about "well-being" of social
networks -- both are about who gets to control public discourse.

------
gnicholas
> _temporarily blocking a critic from her Facebook page, a decision that could
> affect President Donald Trump’s appeal from a similar ruling in New York._

I would expect Trump's lawyers to point out that blocking on Twitter does not
block access to information, as blocking on Facebook does. On Twitter, you can
see every public tweet if you aren't logged in. On Facebook, many/most posts
are not marked Public and so you have to be logged in (and sufficiently linked
to the poster) to view them.

Of course, there's still the issue of the inability to reply to the comment
and engage with the poster on Twitter, but IMO (as a former lawyer) the bigger
issue is access to information, which is less restricted via Twitter blocks
than FB blocks.

~~~
throwaway2048
It does, if you are blocked on twitter (and logged in) you can not read a
person's tweets.

~~~
weberc2
Which is to say, it doesn’t.

------
itry2develop
But tech companies can ban and deplatform them completely for you....

~~~
ceejayoz
Yes, until the First Amendment is modified to read "Congress and Facebook
shall make no law..."

~~~
somebodynew
It's worth noting though that despite the clear "Congress shall make no law"
introduction, the first amendment is already applied to virtually every aspect
of government because beyond the restrictions on Congress it explicitly
enumerates rights that belong to the people (and are then protected by the
fourteenth amendment).

~~~
dragonwriter
It's applied to states (including subdivisions) because of incorporation of
various rights, including those of the First Amendment, under the Fourteenth
Amendment Due Process Cause not because the First Amendment, on its own, is
viewed as declaring rights enforceable against the States, much less held by
individuals and enforceable against other private parties.

