Though it may seem we have been trapped in this digital hellscape for an eternity, Twitter is a mere 13 years old, and it has only served as a major portal of political communication for about a decade. That's not much time by legal standards, which means a lot of what public officials can and cannot do on social media remains ambiguous.
One pertinent question may be settled by a Monday ruling from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that a Virginia public official violated the First Amendment by blocking constituents on a Facebook page explicitly designated for public input. "[W]hy," the opinion asked, "should a municipality be allowed to engage in viewpoint discrimination when holding a virtual public meeting hosted on a private website when such discrimination would be unconstitutional if the meeting was held in a governmental building?"
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