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Supreme Court unanimously rules that public officials can be sued for blocking critics on social media

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From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett Justice noted that the personal social media accounts of public officials often present an ‘ambiguous’ status because they mix official announcements with personal content.

The United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Friday that government officials who post about work-related topics on their personal social media accounts can be held liable for violating the First Amendment rights of constituents by blocking their access or deleting their critical comments.  

In a 15-page opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett noted that the personal social media accounts of public officials often present an “ambiguous” status because they mix official announcements with personal content.

The court ruled in two cases where people were blocked after leaving critical comments on social media accounts of public officials.   

The first case involved two elected members of a California school board — the Poway Unified School District Board of Trustees — who blocked concerned parents from their Facebook and Twitter accounts after leaving critical comments.  

The court upheld the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that said the board members had violated the parents’ free speech rights.    

The second case before the court concerned James Freed, Port Huron, Michigan’s city manager who had blocked constituent Kevin Lindke from commenting on his Facebook page after deleting his remarks about the city’s COVID-19 pandemic policies.  

Lindke believed that Freed had violated the First Amendment by doing so and sued Freed.  

Freed maintained that he launched his Facebook page long before becoming a public official, arguing that most of the content on his account concerned family-related matters.  

Justice Barrett explained: 

Like millions of Americans, James Freed maintained a Facebook account on which he posted about a wide range of  topics, including his family and his job. Like most of those Americans, Freed occasionally received unwelcome comments on his posts. In response, Freed took a step familiar to Facebook users: He deleted the comments and blocked those who made them.     

For most people with a Facebook account, that would  have been the end of it. But Kevin Lindke, one of the unwelcome commenters, sued Freed for violating his right to free speech. Because the First Amendment binds only the government, this claim is a nonstarter if Freed posted as a private citizen. Freed, however, is not only a private citizen but also the city manager of Port Huron, Michigan — and while Freed insists that his Facebook account was strictly personal, Lindke argues that Freed acted in his official capacity when he silenced Lindke’s speech.

When a government official posts about job-related topics on social media, it can be difficult to tell whether the speech is official or private. We hold that such speech is attributable to the State only if the official (1) possessed actual authority to speak on the State’s behalf, and (2) purported to exercise that authority when he spoke on social media. 

In the end, the high court sent Lindke’s case back to the Sixth Circuit Federal Appeals Court for a second look.  

Perhaps reflecting continued ambiguity following the court’s ruling, both defendant Freed and plaintiff Lindke declared victory. 

“I am very pleased with the outcome the justices came to,” Freed told ABC News in a statement. “The Court rejected the plaintiff’s appearance test and further refined a test for review by the Sixth Circuit. We are extremely confident we will prevail there once more.”  

Lindke was more effusive and told ABC News that he was “ecstatic” with the court’s decision.   

“A 9-0 decision is very decisive and is a clear indicator that public officials cannot hide behind personal social media accounts when discussing official business,” said Lindke.  

Legal experts called attention to the persistence of gray area in the law regarding social media due to the narrowness of the court’s decision. 

“This case doesn’t tell us much new about how to understand the liability of the 20 million people who work in local, state, administrative or federal government in the U.S. … just that the question is complicated,” Kate Klonick, an expert on online-platform regulation who teaches at St. John’s Law School, told The Washington Post 

Katie Fallow, senior counsel for the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University,  told the Post that the court’s ruling does not sufficiently address public officials’ widespread use of personal “shadow accounts,” which constituents often perceive as official.  

Fallow said the court was “right to hold that public officials can’t immunize themselves from First Amendment liability merely by using their personal accounts to conduct official business.”  

We are disappointed, though, that the Court did not adopt the more practical test used by the majority of the courts of appeals, which appropriately balanced the free speech interests of public officials with those of the people who want to speak to them on their social media accounts. 

According to The Hill, the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of 17 states and National Republican Senatorial Committee sided with officials, arguing in favor of their blocks, while the ACLU backed the cons 

Friday’s ruling is only the first of several this term that deal with the relationship between government and social media.

“On Feb. 26, the justices heard argument[s] in a pair of challenges to controversial laws in Florida and Texas that seek to regulate large social-media companies,” explained Amy Howe on Scotusblog.com.  “And on Monday the justices will hear oral arguments in a dispute alleging that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to remove false or misleading content. Decisions in those cases are expected by summer.” 

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One in five mail-in voters admitted to committing voter fraud during 2020 election: Rasmussen poll

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By Emily Mangiaracina

21% of mail-in voters admitted to illegally filling out a ballot on someone else’s behalf, and 17% admitted to voting from a state where they are not a legal resident.

One-fifth of voters who cast mail-in ballots during the 2020 presidential election admitted to committing at least one kind of voter fraud, according to the results of a recent poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute.

Tucker Carlson posted to X on Friday an excerpt of a discussion with Justin Haskins, director of the Socialism Research Center at the Heartland Institute, in which Haskins explained how a poll conducted together with Rasmussen Reports revealed widespread illegal voter activity among mail-in voters during the 2020 election. The poll was first published in December, 2023.

Respondents who indicated that they voted by mail in the 2020 election were asked a series of questions probing for illegal, fraudulent activity, although the questions did not explicitly label these activities as “fraud.”

“For example, we asked people, ‘Did you vote in a state where you’re no longer a legal resident? If you’re not a permanent resident of a state, you can’t vote there. 17% of people, nearly one in five, said yes,” Haskins told Carlson.

He further shared that 21% of mail-in voters admitted to filling out a ballot on behalf of someone else, another illegal activity, and 17% admitted to forging a signature on someone else’s behalf, “with or without their permission.”

“So all told, it’s at least one in five mail-in ballots involved some kind of fraudulent activity,” said Haskins.

Of all voter respondents — both those who voted by mail and those who voted in person —10% said that “a friend, family member, co-worker, or other acquaintance” admitted to them that they voted by mail in a state other than the one they are registered in as their state of permanent residence.

“The results of this survey are nothing short of stunning,” Haskins remarked following the poll results. “For the past three years, Americans have repeatedly been told that the 2020 election was the most secure in history. But if this poll’s findings are reflective of reality, the exact opposite is true. This conclusion isn’t based on conspiracy theories or suspect evidence, but rather from the responses made directly by the voters themselves.”

Carlson pointed out that claims that the 2020 presidential election results were based on fraudulent votes are considered a “criminal offense” now in the U.S., at least to the extent that “that crime appears to form the basis of one of Trump’s pending indictments.” The indictment in question claims that Trump used “false claims of election fraud to obstruct the federal government function by which those results are collected, counted, and certified.”

Mounds of evidence of fraud in the 2020 general election have emerged, but this has been widely ignored by the mainstream media.

For example, in 2022, a peer-reviewed paper from accomplished economist and former senior researcher for the Department of Justice (DOJ), John Lott, compiled statistical evidence of voter fraud in the 2020 election, specifically, of about “255,000 excess votes (possibly as many as 368,000) for Joe Biden in six swing states where Donald Trump lodged accusations of fraud.”

Batches of votes that were suspiciously tallied overwhelmingly for Biden were reported the night of the election, reversing a former Trump lead in states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And before the election, Project Veritas released a video showing voters being bribed and coaxed to vote for Democrats, including by changing their votes on the ballot.

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UN attacks stay-at-home motherhood as ‘gender inequality’

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By Matt Lamb 

“Care work remains undervalued and underpaid. The monetary value of women’s unpaid care work globally is at least $10.8 trillion annually, three times the size of the world’s tech industry”

Stay-at-home moms, and mothers in general, are victims of “gender inequality” and “gender-based violence” because of their dedication to their children, a far-left United Nations commission claimed.

The 68th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women reportedly focused heavily on “unpaid care work,” according to journalist Kimberly Ells, writing at Mercator.

“I spent a week listening to an endless parade of events focused almost exclusively on ending poverty by eliminating ‘unpaid care work,’” Ells wrote.

“What is ‘unpaid care work,’ you might ask? It is work done in the home without specific monetary payment. Most people would call that kind of work simply being alive,” she wrote. “It could also be called running your own castle.”

The United Nations’ 2023 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals lists “unpaid care work” as something that needs to be addressed.

“But the forces that converged at the United Nations this spring called it an atrocity,” she said. “To be an ‘unpaid care worker’—especially if you’re a woman—was seen as an affront to human decency,” she said. “And because on average women worldwide do more labour in the home than men, people in UN circles call this ‘gender inequality,’ ‘gender injustice,’ and even ‘gender-based violence.’”

Ells reported that the commission members wanted taxpayer-funded daycare, an idea she pointed out has Marxist roots.

While Karl Marx is most famous for being an opponent of capitalism, he was supportive of getting women working and out of the home, as was Friedrich Engels, who continued his advocacy after Marx’s death.

“In The Family, Private Property and State, Engels reiterated Marx’s argument that women could only achieve equality when ‘both possess legally complete equality of rights,’” International Socialism previously wrote.

“‘Then it will be plain that the first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry and that this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society,’” an article at the communist website stated, quoting Engels.

A 2019 United Nation’s Children’s Fund news release has demanded “universal childcare,” stating, “Universal access to affordable, quality childcare from the end of parental leave until a child’s entry into the first grade of school, including before- and after-care for young children and pre-primary programs [should be provided].”

The United Nations’ entities regularly push the idea that women are victims of “unpaid care work,” backing up Ells’ reporting for Mercator.

“On average, women spend around three times more time on unpaid care and domestic work than men,” a March 7 story at UN News stated. “The gendered disparities in unpaid care work are a profound driver of inequality, restricting women’s and girls’ time and opportunities for education, decent paid work, public life, rest and leisure.”

A November 2023 report suggested “climate change” is linked to this problem.

“The gender gap in power and leadership positions remains entrenched, and, at the current rate of progress, the next generation of women will still spend on average 2.3 more hours per day on unpaid care and domestic work than men,” a September 2023 UN report warned.

Women don’t want to be out of the household full-time

However, while the UN sees women at home taking care of their children and domestic duties as a problem – and daycare as a solution – moms do not.

“Only 32% of mothers prefer full-time work,” the Institute for Family Studies wrote in 2020, summarizing other polls.

Massive government subsidies for family leave and daycare do not appear to change the numbers, according to IFS’ report.

In Ireland, for example, 61% of mothers said they prefer part-time work, while another 12% said they prefer to not work at all.

Only 23% said they want to work full-time. Yet Ireland offers 45 hours per week of subsidized childcare.

Children being raised by a stay-at-home mom has also been linked to better school performance and fewer emotional problems.

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