Lawmakers should keep social media open
A brief trip through U.S. Rep. Jim Sensebrenner’s social media feeds provides a discomfiting peek into the political id.
“I highly doubt the old, fat (expletive) tends to his own twitter, so please pass on the following message to @JimPressOffice: Die already,” wrote one Twitter commenter in June.
“@JimPressOffice do the world a favor and kill urself already u (expletive) inbred ...” added another Twitter user in April.
This is the type of vile trolling elected officials put up with regularly in the era of social media, which is exacerbated by the anonymity of users. But the extent to which public officials manage their social media accounts has recently found its way into the courts, most recently in Wisconsin.
Several weeks ago, the liberal advocacy group One Wisconsin Now filed a lawsuit against Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and two other state representatives claiming the group’s First Amendment rights were violated when the lawmakers blocked the group on Twitter. While blocked, One Wisconsin Now was barred from seeing these lawmakers’ tweets, and if group members tried to engage with the lawmakers either through “replies” or “mentions,” their tweets were excluded from the lawmakers’ timelines. (Vos’ office would not comment on their social media policy, citing the pending litigation.)
To be sure, One Wisconsin Now and its executive director, Scot Ross, can be crass and obnoxious. But as the group argues in its lawsuit, they are being excluded from political discussions that are held publicly by elected officials whose salaries are paid for with tax dollars. As University of Wisconsin journalism Professor Mike Wagner put it to me, “Blocking prevents citizens from being able to hear what their representatives are up to and from communicating fully with their representatives.”
In July, a federal court ruled that the First Amendment prohibits public officeholders from blocking social media users on the basis of their political views. A Loudoun County, Va., supervisor had blocked a Facebook commenter who alleged corruption by the county school board; the court ruled the supervisor had engaged in “viewpoint discrimination” and ordered the user reinstated.
Certainly, there is an interest in keeping social media forums decent, but if a Twitter feed or Facebook page is run by a public official and used for public business, it must be open to members of the public, even if the comments run from the boorish to the untrue. (Full disclosure: I block One Wisconsin Now because I can only roll my eyes a fixed number of times per day.)
If a public official is offended by a particularly aggressive troll, Twitter allows the option to simply “mute” them so they don’t show up in the official’s timeline.
“Blocking the blocking,” however, may have an unintended downside. If certain politicians feel under siege, they may either post very little or scuttle social media altogether. In that case, they would be shutting down the very conversations that groups such as One Wisconsin Now are so desperate to have.
Ultimately, Twitter and Facebook are Town Halls, where the public has to be let in. If people prove to be vulgar or threatening, they can be removed. Until then, as Wagner told me, “citizens’ rights are first.”
Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger.