Kim catching flak after posts vanish on her Facebook page
When a Facebook live video surfaced Thursday of San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim criticizing a housing density bill by her political rival, state Sen. Scott Wiener, dozens of commenters rushed to weigh in.
But within two hours, both the video and the commentary had disappeared from Kim’s public Facebook page. Their abrupt removal angered some of the people who had opined on her speech — including SoMa resident Rebecca Peacock, who is one of Kim’s district constituents.
Peacock and others later vented their frustrations on the social media website Nextdoor.com. Some accused Kim, who is running for mayor in June, of suppressing negative comments.
“Hi neighbors — just wanted you to be aware of what one of the mayoral candidates (our supervisor) is doing,” Peacock wrote on Nextdoor.com.
The Facebook live video, which showed Kim speaking at a rally in West Portal to oppose Wiener’s bill, reportedly had drawn at least 33 comments — roughly half positive and half negative —
by the time it was deleted at 2 p.m. Thursday.
Now questions are building about the ethics of an elected official removing commentary from a Facebook page.
The central issue is whether a city official’s social media pages should be held to the same standards as a Board of Supervisors hearing in City Hall, where people are allowed to blast government leaders, their policies and their decisions.
That theory is being tested in court cases throughout the country, including a New York lawsuit against President Trump, for blocking his critics on Twitter.
“I think there’s a very good argument that an elected leader’s Facebook page is a public forum,” said free speech attorney David Snyder, who heads the nonprofit First Amendment Coalition.
And if the rules of a public forum apply to elected officials’ Facebook pages, then “it would be impermissible for a government leader to silence or censor” people, Snyder said.
But Kim isn’t the only San Francisco official to be accused of censorship on social media. In the past year, the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force twice ruled that Supervisor London Breed — Kim’s rival in the mayor’s race — had violated city and state public records laws when she refused to produce lists of the people she’s blocked on Twitter. The task force will hold a hearing Tuesday on one of the complaints.
Kim deflected questions Monday about the removal of the video.
She said her responsibility “is to be as clear as possible” about her stance on Wiener’s housing bill, and to listen to feedback from the public.
“And I’ve done that,” she said. — Rachel Swan Money for guns: San Francisco’s Adult Probation Department is to receive an $800,000 budget increase to help the city keep up with a voterapproved gun confiscation program intended to take firearms away from people convicted of felonies or violent misdemeanors.
Mayor Mark Farrell announced the budget boost Tuesday. The money would allow the department to permanently hire five new probation officers charged with enforcing Proposition 63, a ballot initiative passed by voters in 2016 meant to tighten California’s already strict gun-control laws. The law also mandates that people obtain permits before buying ammunition.
“When we keep weapons out of the hands of felons, we make our communities safer for all San Franciscans,” Farrell said in a statement. “Gun violence is a tragic epidemic in our city, state and country, but we are taking meaningful steps in San Francisco to remove firearms from the most dangerous individuals in our society.”
Under Prop. 63’s man- dates, anyone convicted of a felony or violent misdemeanor beginning Jan. 1, 2018, will be notified by the courts that they must must relinquish their weapons, either by turning them over to law enforcement, selling them to a licensed dealer or giving them to a dealer for storage. It’s the job of the Adult Probation Department to investigate whether those people are complying with the law.
Chief Adult Probation Officer Karen Fletcher said her department is receiving as many as 50 referrals a week related to Prop. 63 — more than 60 percent above the city’s original projections. She was unsure what was causing the uptick in Prop. 63 referrals.
Fletcher said that her department had already been authorized to hire additional staff, but the extra $800,000 annually would be used to keep them on permanently.
— Dominic Fracassa