SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION III. Cases against public officials and institutions As shown above, social media platforms in the US are protected by Section 230 from any kind of claim based on the publisher’s traditional editorial functions, such as deciding whether to publish, withdraw, postpone or alter content. However, deciding on such claims becomes substantively more complex when the opponents are not social media platforms, but state authorities operating a social media page in their official capacity. In Davison v. Rose (2017), the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed a plaintiff’s claims for violations of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights against the defendants, who were members of a local school board. They banned the plaintiff from posting on their official Facebook pages, and even deleted comments that were overly critical of the defendants. The Court reasoned that the defendants were entitled to sovereign immunity in their official capacity and qualified immunity in their individual capacity. Since the law as to whether a Facebook page is a public forum is not yet clear, the defendants’ actions did not meet the threshold required for violating a “clearly established” right of the claimant, which would be necessary for claims against them in their individual capacities. The District Court, however, found in Davison v. Randall (2017) that the Loudoun County School Board (LCSB) Chair’s Phyllis Randall’s Facebook page was a public forum and that she was not allowed to remove the claimant’s comments and block him on her page. The decision was later confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (2019). The school board’s chair had argued that she was free in her decision to ban others “based on their views without triggering the First Amendment”. However, the Court found there was sufficient evidence that the page was being used for official purposes, since it mentioned her position in the page’s title, it had contact information relating to the county office and its official email address, and there was an explicit statement that the page’s purpose was to be in touch with Loudon citizens. The Court held that the school board’s chair exercised substantial control over the Facebook page —so that property questions didn’t matter—, that the page “[bore] the hallmarks of a public forum”; and that it did not only contain “government speech”. Thus, the interactive columns for public posts were a public forum. Hence, the moderation enacted by the chair, banning the claimant’s allegations of corruption, amounted to prohibited “black-letter viewpoint discrimination.” A high-profile case concerning the same legal question can be found in Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, decided by the US Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit in July 2019. The Court found that the then-President’s Twitter account was used for official purposes and that blocking critics was a government restriction, rejecting Trump’s claim that his Twitter account was personal. The Court considered Twitter’s interactive functions, such as replying, retweeting, and liking, to be forms of expressive conduct allowing individuals to communicate not only with the President but with thousands of others. It further established that the Twitter account was a public forum on the grounds that it was controlled by the government, and Twitter’s interactive features made it “accessible to the public without limitation”. Just like in Davison v. Randall (see above), the Court rejected the government’s argument that the activity on the account was government speech, holding that Trump’s individual tweets were, but the messages posted by users were private speech. Therefore, the Court concluded that then-President Trump violated the First Amendment when he blocked citizens for posting messages critical of him and his policies. Later, in March 2020, the Court denied a rehearing of the ruling. However, the line between personal and official accounts is difficult to draw. In Campbell v. Reisch (2020), the US Court of Appeal for the Eighth Circuit decided that the mere election of a person does not “magically alter” the function of a social media account. Thus, Cheri Reisch, a Missouri State Representative, had not violated the claimant’s First Amendment rights when she blocked the plaintiff from her Twitter account. The Court explicitly referred to the Trump judgment (see above) and pointed out that “not every social media account operated by a public official is a government account”. Also, the reflection of the office a candidate is pursuing in the account name, or photos of them at work, do not suffice to turn an account into a governmental one. The Court distinguished the character of Reisch’s account from the offi19