The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia Court dismissed the Plaintiff's claims for violations of his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights against the Defendant school board members who had banned the Plaintiff from posting on its official Facebook pages and even went to far as to delete 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 because whether or not Facebook constituted a public forum was not a clearly established right they could have reasonably known about. Whether Facebook, or other social media pages, can be considered a public forum for purposes of the First Amendment is a rapidly emerging area of the law that is currently unsettled. The outcome of these legal issues will be especially important for the newly filed lawsuit against President Donald Trump for blocking Twitter users. This is an issue that has yet to be addressed by most jurisdictions and Virginia breaks new ground with this decision and its contradictory finding in Davison v Loudon County Board of Supervisors. Some jurisdictions have discussed the issue of whether the city's official website can be considered a public forum an have found that it is not. See Putnam Pit, Inc. v. City of Cookeville, Tenn., 221 F.3d 834, 841 (6th Cir.2000). However, a Facebook or Twitter page presents an entirely different issue when these pages are generally created for the purpose of permitting public discourse and the public has the ability to post comments and discussions directly on the page.
Historically, a public forum is a place that the government has expressly left open for public discourse. However, it is important to note, “[t]he government does not create a public forum by inaction or by permitting limited discourse, but only by intentionally opening a nontraditional forum for public discourse." Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Def. & Educ. Fund, 473 U.S. 788, 802 (1984). The government can create two main types of public forums: traditional public forums and limited public forums. A traditional public forum encompasses parks, sidewalks, and streets – property owned by the government that has been held out by the government as a public forum. A limited public forum is a forum that the government provides but limits to specific groups, provided the limitation is both viewpoint neutral and reasonable. An example would be a school room open to only school groups for meetings. The definition of a public forum is malleable, and something that changes as society evolves. This presents increasingly difficult issues with the public forum in internet cases. Does the government create a public forum when it creates a webpage? What requirements have to be met in order for the webpage to be considered a public forum or a limited public forum?