ADF To Supreme Court: Social Media Isn’t A Free Pass To Suppress Speech

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a friend-of-the-court brief Tuesday with the U.S. Supreme Court in O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, a lawsuit involving government censorship on social media. ADF attorneys filed the brief as co-counsel with Brown Fox PLLC on behalf of the Manhattan Institute, a nonprofit public-policy research foundation with the mission to dev­elop and disseminate new ideas that foster economic choice and individual responsibility.

The case involves two southern California school board members who used Facebook and Twitter to communicate government information to the public, and two parents who were censored and ultimately blocked by the school officials after criticizing the officials on those accounts. The parents sued over the violation of their First Amendment rights, and a lower court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit both agreed that the parents’ speech had been suppressed by government action.