Whether a public official’s deletion of comments or blocking of users from a social-media page is state action subject to §1983 and the First Amendment.
Holding
Only when the official both has actual authority to speak for the State on the relevant subject and purports to exercise that authority in the social-media posts at issue.
Reasoning
Section 1983 reaches deprivations committed under color of state law, and the First Amendment likewise restricts governmental—not private—abridgment of speech. A person’s public employment alone does not make all of that person’s conduct state action. Public officials retain private lives and their own First Amendment interests, including the right to control speech on personal platforms.
The Court rooted its test in the requirement that the challenged conduct be fairly attributable to the State. State action exists when the defendant exercises power derived from state authority and purports to act under that authority. Thus, the relevant inquiry is not merely whether a social-media account looks official or discusses governmental subjects, but whether the State actually entrusted the official with authority that bears on the conduct challenged.
The first requirement is actual authority to speak on the government’s behalf about the matter involved. That authority must arise from a statute, ordinance, regulation, or a sufficiently settled governmental custom or usage. It is not enough that official announcements might broadly fit within an employee’s job description; making such announcements must actually be a responsibility the government assigned to the official.
The authority must also relate to the specific alleged deprivation. An official’s general ability to communicate with the public does not make every post or every moderation decision governmental. The plaintiff must connect the official’s state-granted authority to the subject of the post from which a comment was deleted or on which the plaintiff sought to comment.
The second requirement is that the official purport to exercise the actual authority when speaking. An official speaks privately when not using speech to carry out official responsibilities, even if the topic concerns public affairs or information learned through government employment. The same substantive announcement can therefore be official in an official setting and private when shared socially in a personal setting.
Account designations can supply important context. A page expressly labeled personal or containing a personal-use disclaimer receives a strong, though rebuttable, presumption that its posts are private. Conversely, an account clearly belonging to a city or passed from one officeholder to the next ordinarily presents itself as governmental. Freed’s page was neither clearly personal nor clearly official, so the relevant posts require a fact-specific assessment of their content and function.
On an ambiguous, mixed-use page, a post expressly invoking legal authority to issue an exclusive and immediately operative governmental directive is likely official. A post merely repeating or linking to information already released through official channels is less likely to be an exercise of official authority. Courts must assess the particular posts connected to the claimed censorship rather than treating all job-related speech by an official as state action. Government staff involvement may also show that a post was governmental.
The platform’s design matters. Deleting a comment must be evaluated against the particular post on which it appeared. Facebook blocking, however, operates page-wide; accordingly, a court must determine whether Freed engaged in state action as to any post on which Lindke wished to comment. A public official who combines personal and official uses on one account may therefore face greater risk that page-wide blocking will restrict speech on official posts as well as personal ones.