Supreme Court to Rule on Officials Blocking Social Media Critics.

The US Supreme Court will decide whether elected officials violate the First Amendment when they block people from their social media accounts. The question has divided the lower courts and had seemed headed to the Supreme Court after the federal appeals court in New York ruled in 2019 that President Donald J. Trump’s Twitter account was a public forum from which he was powerless to exclude people based on their viewpoints. The justices granted review in a pair of cases involving local officials, focusing on whether their use of private social media accounts to discuss public issues amounted to “state action,” which is governed by the First Amendment, or private activity, which is not.