With very few exceptions, the First Amendment prohibits politicians from blocking people with their official social media accounts and deleting comments.
Extreme right Eagle River Republican Sen. Lora Reinbold apparently didn’t get the memo, though, despite spending most of the pandemic railing against government infringements on civil liberties and questioning officials on whether they understood and followed the “Supreme Law of the Land” (which would be the U.S. Constitution and presumably the First Amendment).
In a decision released by the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics on Christmas Eve, the group found Reinbold had, in fact, “blocked comments from a member of the public on a social media site due only to a disagreement with the Senator’s position on particular issues.” The decision orders Reinbold to “refrain from blocking members of the public from commenting on her legislative social media site(s) solely for expressing opinions in disagreement with her own.”
[More: Final decision on Reinbold from the Senate Subcommittee on legislative ethics]
The decision doesn’t call for any further sanctions against Reinbold.
Though constitutional issues surrounding government officials’ use of social media haven’t been set in stone, the prevailing trend is that blocking and deleting comments “due only to a disagreement” from an official page is a violation of the Supreme Law of the Land. That’s because the courts have typically treated official social media pages as...
A newly unsealed whistleblower lawsuit accuses Novartis and Genentech of being at the center of a decades-long kickback scheme to promote their immunology med Xolair across dozens of states. Whist...