Blocking Users or Comments on School Social Media Accounts
Districts and schools can face harsh criticism from parents, students and community members. Often times such comments can go viral causing conflict within the school or the community. As a result, officials often make the mistake of selectively deleting comments or blocking users from their official sites.
In most cases a districts or schools official accounts qualify as a public forum. As such, the district or school cannot engage in view point discrimination. That is, they cannot allow some comments and not allow other comments simply because of the content of the speech.
However, a district or school may remove speech if it would qualify as non-protected speech. Such speech would be included violent or threatening speech, obscene or vulgar speech or “fighting words”. Determining if any given speech meets those criteria is fact intensive and administrators should contact their school attorney before removing a comment. Finally, completely blocking a member of the public from an official page would not be wise.
Blocking All Comments
More recently, districts and schools have begun to block all comments in an effort to limit persons from disseminating incorrect information to their subscribers. If your district or school is considering this approach, you will want to make sure that such restrictions apply to all post. The application of this principle is similar to any such limitations placed on the use of other school resources (buildings, rooms, gyms, athletic fields, etc.).
Two final points:
Deleting Doesn’t Remove the Problem
1. Failure of the speaker to keep a hard copy of the post would not prevent an action from proceeding. Rather, the speaker just needs to be able to describe the nature and content of the comments that were posted. That is just because you delete the comment that doesn’t prevent the speaker from proceeding with a claim.
Personal Accounts for School Use
2. The use of personal social media accounts for district or school business may open it up as a public forum. So, if your superintendent or principal uses his or her personal social media account for posting information about the school, they have likely created a public forum and may be liable for deleting comments on those pages or accounts as well. Knight First Amend. Inst. at Columbia Univ. v. Trump (2018)