(Washington) Under what conditions can a public official block citizens on their personal social networks, at the risk of depriving them of information of general interest? The US Supreme Court turned the question on its head on Tuesday.
These debates echo those provoked during the presidency of Donald Trump by the blocking of his critics on his Twitter account. Despite several court decisions against him, the proceedings ended with his departure from the White House in 2021.
But the basic question arises again for much more obscure officials.
In this case, the nine judges of the Supreme Court successively examined the case of two members of a local school authority in California (west) who had blocked a couple of parents from their account and that of a municipal official in Michigan (north) who had done the same for one of his constituents.
“The difficulty of these cases is that there are issues linked to the First Amendment on both sides,” summarized Justice Elena Kagan, referring to the amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing freedom of speech. expression.
“The First Amendment protects the private expression of public officials, but also the access of citizens to important elements of their government,” she stressed.
“The 21 million public servants in this country must have the right to speak publicly about their profession on their personal social networks just like their counterparts in the private sector,” argued the lawyer for the head of the municipality of Port Huron, Michigan , Victoria Ferres.
“Governance instrument”
For the representative of the members of the education authority in California, Hashim Mooppan, “the only practicable criterion” to determine what falls within the private sphere of the public sphere is to “ask whether they have fulfilled the duties or exercised the powers of their function”.
To this end, one must “establish whether they are using government resources, whether the government can control their actions, or whether they are doing something that only the government can do.” Nothing like that exists in this case,” Mr. Mooppan added.
But Justice Kagan objected that this reasoning could lead to the conclusion that “President Trump’s Twitter account was also personal.”
However, this account, on which he regularly announced political decisions, constituted “an important part of the way in which he exercised his authority. “To deny access to a citizen would be to deny them access to part of the functioning of the government,” she said.
The parents’ lawyer, Pamela Karlan, insisted on the official appearance and the predominance of messages linked to the school authority on the pages from which they were blocked, leading the lower court to consider them as “an instrument of governance”.
A member of this authority systematically begins her sentences with “‘we’ and not ‘I'”, she noted, quoting the writer Mark Twain for whom “the only people who should use the ‘we’ of majesty are royalty and tapeworm carriers.”
These are the first two cases concerning social networks on the agenda of the current session of the Supreme Court, which opened on October 2.
The Court will examine in the coming months, in the middle of an election year, the constitutionality of laws prohibiting social networks from blocking users, adopted by Texas and Florida, two southern states led by Republicans.
These laws adopted in 2021 aim to curb the “censorship” of conservative opinions of which Republican elected officials regularly accuse the internet giants.