Lindke v. Freed
The Supreme Court unanimously set a new two-part test for when a government official's social media activity crosses from personal expression into official government action that can violate the First Amendment.
The ruling means public officials who block or delete critics on social media can only be sued for violating free speech if they had genuine governmental authority over the topics discussed and were actually exercising that authority in the specific posts at issue — not just because their account looks official.
How it got here: A federal trial court granted summary judgment to Freed; the Sixth Circuit affirmed; Lindke asked the Supreme Court to review and the Court agreed to hear the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
James Freed, city manager of Port Huron, Michigan, ran a public Facebook page he had set up before his government appointment. He used it mostly for personal content — family photos, home-improvement projects, Bible verses — but also occasionally posted job-related updates and answered residents' questions. When Kevin Lindke repeatedly criticized the city's pandemic response in comments on Freed's page, Freed first deleted the comments and then blocked Lindke entirely. Lindke sued, arguing Freed had violated his constitutional right to free speech.
The question before the Court
When a city official deletes a resident's critical comments and blocks him from his personal Facebook page, does that count as a government violation of the resident's free speech rights?
The Court's answer
The Court did not decide whether Freed actually violated Lindke's rights — it sent that question back to the lower courts. Instead, it established the test those courts must use. A public official's social media moderation counts as government action that can violate the First Amendment only if two things are true: first, the official must have had actual authority — from a written law, ordinance, regulation, or long-established government practice — to speak on the government's behalf about the subject matter at issue; and second, the official must have been genuinely exercising that authority in the specific posts involved, not merely posting about work-related topics for personal reasons.
An account that looks official, references a government title, or contains job-related information does not automatically become a government channel. The appearance of authority is not enough — the authority must be real and traceable to the State's grant of power. Lindke's case goes back to the lower courts to be decided under this framework.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
For the roughly 20 million state and local government workers in the U.S. who use social media, this ruling clarifies when their posts and moderation decisions are treated as official government acts. Officials who mix personal and work-related content on the same unlabeled account now face greater legal exposure; maintaining a clearly designated personal account is the safer path.
What changes now
The Sixth Circuit's judgment is wiped out and the case goes back to the lower courts to apply the new two-part test to Freed's specific posts and authority as city manager. Courts across the country hearing similar social media disputes involving government employees will now use this same framework. Because the ruling is unanimous and establishes a single national standard, it resolves the split between the Second, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits that had produced inconsistent outcomes.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Freed actually violated Lindke's rights — that goes back to lower courts. The ruling does not specify which officials have the authority to make government announcements; that is a fact-specific inquiry in each case. It also does not address whether the underlying posts were protected public-forum speech.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Section 1983 — the federal law that lets people sue government officials for violating constitutional rights — only applies to actions 'under color of state law,' meaning the wrongdoing must be traceable to actual governmental authority, not just a private choice. The First Amendment likewise binds only the government, not private individuals.
- State employees do not give up their own constitutional rights when they take government jobs. A public official posting on social media in a personal capacity is exercising their own First Amendment rights — including the right to speak about public affairs and control who can comment on their personal platforms. If Freed was acting privately, he exercised his own rights rather than violating Lindke's.
- The first prong of the new test asks whether the official had actual authority — rooted in a statute, ordinance, regulation, or longstanding custom — to speak officially on behalf of the government about the specific subject matter involved in the alleged censorship. A broadly worded job description that could encompass public communication is not enough; the official must actually be entrusted by the government with that communicative role.
- The second prong asks whether the official was genuinely using that governmental authority in the specific posts at issue. An official who posts job-related content for personal reasons — self-promotion, raising public awareness, or political purposes — is still speaking privately. Clear indicators that a post is official include expressly invoking a law or ordinance, having immediate legal effect, or sharing information not available anywhere else through government channels.
- Because Facebook's blocking feature operates across an entire page rather than post by post, a court evaluating a blocking claim must examine whether the official was acting in a governmental capacity across all the posts the blocked person wanted to comment on — not just the most obviously official-looking ones. This 'bluntness' of the technology means officials with mixed-use accounts face broader liability exposure than those with clearly labeled personal pages.