A_Dust

C'mon, does the Supreme Court ACTUALLY have to get involved in this? The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution says:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

This is NOT brain surgery. With the exception of EXTREMELY limited circumstances which amount to yelling “FIRE” in a crowded theater (with consequent PHYSICAL DEATH AND INJURY as a result of reliance on false emergency information, not just pissing someone off till they riot), free speech is an absolute and unfettered right.

And by “right”, I mean the GOVERNMENT can't interfere with it. The fact that your local paper or Earline's Homemaking Blog won't post your goofy shit is NOT the government doing anything, and is therefore not covered. In short, concurrent with your right to say stuff is everyone else's right to utterly ignore it or delete it from their lives (a much underused principle, by the way).

On the other hand, when you're operating or speaking for a branch of the government, you cannot prohibit free speech when the speaker is criticizing the government. See “redress of grievances” above. But your local restaurant can take down your one-star rating, no matter how richly deserved, because it's THEIR site and the government doesn't have a dog in that fight. You don't have a “First Amendment Right” to be heard in that, or any other non-government-controlled forum.

But government cannot remove or (more to the point) restrict you from bitching about them to their face, as now that's the GOVERNMENT restricting speech.

So, where's the issue? Two cases O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier (California) and Lindke v. Freed (Michigan) involve people who have personal social media sites on which people are posting bad vibes by virtue of the social media owners' positions as local government officials.

Not an issue. The 1st Amendment doesn't care where you're employed, even as government officials. You still control your own site/property and the comments on it, right? Exactly true, except...

In both cases, the social media owners were using the web pages to UPDATE MEMBERS OF THE COMMUNITY ON THEIR GOVERNMENT JOBS, said updates coming in the form of posts and pictures scattered in amongst the grandkid and kitty pictures, reposted memes, and grammy's old cinnamon-bread recipe.

Guess what, bubba? You just turned it into a “Government” website, and can no longer simply remove people calling you a dumbshit for your government activities or for much of any other reason, for that matter.

This is the roughly the same reason that local governments routinely caution their employees that if they even incidentally identify themselves as government employees on their social media that they are subject to discipline up to and including termination for posting stupid shit.

Said employees routinely bitch that they don't forfeit their 1st Amendment rights just because they work for Miami or wherever. This is true — but them posting selfies all over the place in their “City of Miami” shirt and then spouting some dumbassery means that the public can reasonably infer that they're opining for the city or in some official capacity.

This WILL get the employee's pee-pee whacked by the city and no 1st Amendment principles are involved, even though they're a government.

There's a reason even small towns, officials, candidates, and whatnot have SEPARATE websites for their government-related information, campaign, press releases, or whatever that are utterly unrelated and unlinked to any private social media, and ideally never the twain shall meet.

Now how the Federal circuit courts managed to arrive at a split decision on this can only be explained by the brain-damaged jurisdictions involved (the Left-Coast/Fruit-n-Nutland's 9th Circuit and Frozen-Somalia/Michiganistan's 6th Circuit.)

Frankly, the big surprise here is that one of them managed to NOT fuck up the ruling (i.e., the 9th Circuit Court in a surprising and rare moment of clarity) after a long history of being routinely overruled by every Supreme Court since the late 50's for widespread failures to grasp even the most primitive Constitutional principles.

In any event, we are now presented with the fact that the Supreme Court has to take time away from anything useful to spend a few months pretending they're considering this “conflict” in an obvious-as-sunrise principle before bitch-slapping one or the other and establishing the Constitutional “precedent” to follow nationwide from now on out.

Jaysus. No wonder we can't get anything done.