The June 14, 2018 post “The President May Not Block Twitter Followers Because They Disagree With Him Politically” reported how the District Court in Knight First Amendment Inst. at Columbia University v. Trump, 302 F.Supp.3d 541 (S.D.N.Y. 2018) found that then-President Donald Trump’s decision to block certain social media users from accessing his Twitter account was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Then, the July 11, 2019 post, “Affirmed: President Trump Cannot Block Critics on Twitter”, reported that a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision.
The case was thereafter appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, which failed to address the appeal on its merits. Instead, on April 5, 2021, the Supreme Court, which retitled the case Biden v. Knight First Amendment Inst. at Columbia University (because Donald Trump was no longer President), issued aone paragraph decision (with a concurrence written by Justice Thomas), that simply vacated the lower court judgment and ordered the Second Circuit “to dismiss the case as moot.”
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For any questions relating to this article, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.
On March 4, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed a decision of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania which ruled in Ellis v. Bank of New York Mellon Corp. that an employee could be discharged by her employer based on her social media posts.
In Ellis, the plaintiff, who was a white employee of a bank, sued her employer after it terminated her for violating the ban’s Code of Conduct and Social Media Policy based on a post she made over the weekend on her personal Facebook account. Her post advocated violence toward demonstrators protesting the death of a black man who was killed by police officers in Pittsburgh. Because plaintiff’s Facebook account was set to “public,” the post was visible to anyone on Facebook, even those who were not plaintiff’s friends. As a result of the post, the bank received numerous complaints including several that questioned whether the bank shared its employee’s values and encouraged violence.
Following an internal investigation, which included an interview with plaintiff, who was an at-will employee, the bank notified her that she was terminated immediately. The bank explained that “she violated the Code and Social Media Policy because her post was offensive, demonstrated poor judgment, showed a lack of respect for others, harmed [the bank’s] reputation and encouraged violent behavior.” Plaintiff filed suit against the bank for race discrimination under Title VII, contending that she was fired because of her race.
The district court rejected plaintiff’s argument and granted summary judgment in favor of the bank, concluding that plaintiff failed to make out a prima facie case of discrimination and that she could not rebut the bank’s legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons for terminating her. The Third Circuit affirmed.
Although Ellis, which was deemed “not precedential” by the Third Circuit, was a race discrimination case that was decided by applying “the familiar three-step framework articulated in McDonnell Douglas Corp. v. Green” typically used in private actions challenging employment discrimination, the case does have significant social media implications for employees. Ellis clearly demonstrates that employers can take disciplinary action against employees if their social media posts violate company policy, even when made from their personal social media accounts during non-working hours.
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For any question relating to this article, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.
One of the most popular types of content shared on social media are photographic images. However, posting an image you do not own the rights to can prove costly, as a New York based fashion designer recently learned thanks to a September 2020 decision issued by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
In Iantosca v. Elie Tahari, Ltd., the district court found the defendant fashion designer, Elie Tahari, liable for copyright infringement after it posted a photograph taken by plaintiff, photographer Mark Iantosca, to the fashion designer’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. The subject photograph depicted a digital content creator wearing the designer’s clothes. The designer posted the photograph on its social media sites without a license or permission from the photographer, who filed suit for copyright infringement.
The June 10, 2020 Trending Law Blog post discussed President Donald Trump’s plan to strongly regulate or close down certain social media platforms and the Executive Order he issued on May 28, 2020 to accomplish that goal. Thereafter, on August 6, 2020, President Trump issued two additional Executive Orders – Executive Order 13942 (to address “the threat” posed by the social networking service TikTok) and Executive Order 13943 (to address “the threat” posed by the messaging, social media and mobile payment app WeChat). The legality of both of the Executive Orders were successfully challenged in two district courts with preliminary injunctions being granted by two judges to enjoin the implementation, in part, of the two Executive Orders.
On June 30, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued its opinion in B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, a precedential decision in which the Third Circuit affirmed a district court’s decision holding that a school district had violated a student’s First Amendment rights by suspending her from the school’s junior varsity cheerleading squad as a result of a Snapchat post which the school deemed in violation of school and team rules. The student’s social media post was made off school grounds, after school hours and without school resources.
In reaching its decision, the Third Circuit found that the student’s speech was entitled to First Amendment protection despite a very “narrow exception” which limits students’ free speech rights when the speech “interferes with the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone.” Opinion at 9. The court was persuaded to rule in the student’s favor because her speech took place away from campus (at a local store), over the weekend (on a Saturday), without school resources (she used her cellphone), and was shared “on a social media platform unaffiliated with the school” (Snapchat). Opinion at 15.
The January 16, 2019 and April 8, 2020 Trending Law Blog posts discussed cases in which the central issue was whether private entities (i.e., the operator of a public access television station and YouTube, respectively) could be deemed “state actors” — persons acting on behalf of a governmental body – for purposes of the First Amendment. In both cases, the courts held that the First Amendment does not prohibit the private abridgement of speech. On May 27, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reached a similar decision in Freedom Watch, Inc., et al. v. Google Inc., et al.
In Freedom Watch, the plaintiffs, a conservative political interest group and political activist, alleged, among other things, that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple “conspired to suppress conservative political views and violated the First Amendment.” The court of appeals rejected this claim, finding the plaintiffs did not adequately allege that the defendants could violate the First Amendment. The court stated:
In general, the First Amendment “prohibits only governmental abridgement of speech.” Manhattan Cmty. Access Corp. v. Halleck,139 S.Ct. 1921, 1928 (2019). Freedom Watch contends that, because the [Defendants] provide an important forum for speech, they are engaged in state action. But, under Halleck, “a private entity who provides a forum for speech is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor.” Id. at 1930. Freedom Watch fails to point to additional facts indicating that these [Defendants] are engaged in state action and thus fails to state a viable First Amendment claim.
Although the court of appeals did not elaborate on what additional facts could have been alleged to establish that a private entity can be deemed a state actor for purposes of the First Amendment, the court did implicitly suggest that such facts could be alleged.
It remains to be seen when a court might hold that private entities can be sued for First Amendment violations, but, for now at least, that day has not yet arrived.
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For any question relating to this article, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.
On June 16, 2020, a 4-3 majority of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin ruled that a judge’s decision to become friends on Facebook with a woman whose child custody case the judge was hearing created the appearance of bias. The Wisconsin court found the judge’s conduct violated the other litigant’s right to due process because “the extreme facts of this case rebut the presumption of judicial impartiality.” The court also strongly urged Wisconsin judges to “weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using electronic social media like Facebook.” In contrast, the Supreme Court of Florida (also in a 4-3 decision) held in a 2018 decision that it was all right for judges to be Facebook friends with attorneys who have cases before them. In reaching that decision, the court noted that a Facebook friendship “does not objectively signal the existence of the affection and esteem involved in a traditional ‘friendship’” and that “not every relationship characterized as a friendship provides a basis for disqualification.”
To date, there have been no New Jersey court decisions or ethics opinions written about how judges in New Jersey should use social media. However, two of the seven Canons of the New Jersey Code of Judicial Conduct, which can be found in the Appendix to Part I of the New Jersey Court Rules, seem to suggest that if judges do make use of social media, they should do so very carefully.
On May 31, 2019, the United States Department of State implemented new registration rules which required visa applicants to disclose all of their social media identifiers, including anonymous ones, which they used during the five years prior to their application on twenty social media platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and several foreign social media sites. The requirements also applied to people already living in the United States who applied for new visas.
On December 15, 2019, plaintiffs (the Doc Society, a non-profit organization which supports documentary filmmakers, and the International Documentary Association, a non-profit of association of documentary filmmakers) filed suit against Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad F. Wolf, seeking (1) a declaration that the registration requirements violated the Administrative Procedures Act and the First Amendment, (2) an injunction to prohibit enforcement of the registration requirements, and (3) an order expunging all information collected to date as a result of the registration requirements.
The government filed a motion on April 15, 2020 to dismiss the action for lack of jurisdiction and for failure to state a claim and the plaintiffs opposed the motion on May 27. Several amicus curiae briefs were filed in opposition to the motion on behalf of, among others, Twitter, Reddit, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The government filed its reply papers on June 10, 2020 and a decision on the motion is expected soon.
Regardless though of how the district court rules on the motion, it is highly likely that an appeal will follow in this important challenge which pits the plaintiffs’ civil liberty rights against the government’s social media surveillance practices in the name of national security.
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For any question relating to this article, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.
In its March 31, 2020 Form 10-Q filed with the SEC, Facebook reported that it was involved in multiple class and derivative actions as well as “various other legal proceedings” which include law enforcement and regulatory inquiries, investigations and other claims that arise in the ordinary course of business. Facebook also acknowledged it “may in the future be subject to additional legal proceedings and disputes” and stressed that it would vigorously defend itself as needed. This may be an understatement because a docket search on the U.S. Supreme Court’s website shows that Facebook has been involved in 27 appeals to the Supreme Court as a litigant or an amicus curiae since 2010. Two of those cases came to fruition – one in favor of Facebook and one against – on May 18, 2018.
In the first case, Stuart Force, et al. v. Facebook, Israeli victims of a Hamas terrorist attack in Israel, sued Facebook in the Eastern District of New York on July 10, 2016, alleging that Facebook unlawfully assisted Hamas by allowing it to post content which encouraged terrorist attacks in Israel. The district court dismissed the action based on §230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects internet services, like Facebook, from liability based on words used by third parties who use their platforms. On July 31, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed, and, on May 18 2020, the Supreme Court denied the plaintiffs’ petition for a writ of certiorari.
Facebook was not so fortunate in the second case – Facebook, Inc., et al. v. Superior Court of San Francisco County. There, the Superior Court of California held Facebook and Twitter in contempt and fined them each $1,000 for refusing to disclose their account holders’ electronic communications in response to a subpoena from two criminal defendants. Even though the social media services argued that complying with subpoenas would violate the Stored Communications Act, which relates to the disclosure of stored wire and electronic communications and transactional records held by third-party internet service providers, the court still ordered production of the documents and issued contempt sanctions and fines when the social media sites refused to comply. The California Court of Appeal ultimately vacated the production order, but did not vacate the contempt order. California’s Supreme Court rejected the petition for review so the two social media platforms filed a writ for a petition of certiorari with the U.S. Supreme Court on February 7, 2020, seeking to overturn the contempt findings and $1,000 fines. The Court denied the petition for certiorari on May 18.
These two cases confirm that Facebook, whether as a plaintiff or defendant, takes litigation seriously regardless of the issue or amount in dispute. The cases also demonstrate that litigants who take on the social media giant should be prepared for both a costly legal battle and being in it for “the long haul.”
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For any question relating to this article, please contact Robert B. Nussbaum, Esq. at Saiber LLC.
On May 26, 2020, for the very first time, the social networking service Twitter added a label to two tweets by President Donald Trump which refuted the President’s claims about voter fraud in California. Several days later, Twitter permitted a tweet by the President about protests in Minneapolis to remain accessible with another label stating that the tweet “violated Twitter Rules about glorifying violence.”
The President quickly responded with a series of tweets which claimed that Twitter’s fact-checking of him “was interfering in the 2020 Presidential Election,” that “Twitter is completely stifling FREE SPEECH” and that he, as president, “will not allow it to happen,” and, referring to major social media platforms, stated that “We will strongly regulate, or close them down.”
