When the Comment Section Closes: Public Officials, Social Media Controls, and Viewpoint Discrimination After Lindke v. Freed
Joseph Phelan
Global Centre for Advanced Studies, Dublin; F'nAround Media
ORCID: 0009-0008-3135-3083
October 29, 2026
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.26261.08164
Abstract
This article asks a narrow question with a wide consequence. When a public official uses an official social media account to speak to constituents, and then limits who can comment on that post, at what point does a platform setting become a First Amendment problem? The article uses a single Illinois case as its anchor: Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton's official Instagram account, @ltgovstratton, and a screenshot taken in May 2025, showing a post branded with the Office of the Lieutenant Governor and the message, Comments on this post have been limited. It places that observation alongside an earlier F'nAround account, published May 22, 2025, under the title Speech Ain't Free If You Gotta Tiptoe, which reported that Stratton's account deleted and reposted material with comments gone, and that its Instagram settings allowed only approved users to comment. The article does not treat either observation as proof of viewpoint discrimination. It argues that the controlling test after Lindke v. Freed, 601 U.S. 187 (2024), makes viewpoint the decisive question, and that comment controls must be studied as governance choices, not as neutral technology. It then compares Stratton to Trump, Ocasio-Cortez, and officials in Maryland, Kentucky, Maine, Colorado, Indiana, Hawaii, California, Arkansas, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, where the same practice produced unblocking, apologies, policy rewrites, or court holdings, and it argues that Illinois, on the present record, has produced no such public consequence.
Positionality, methods, and evidence limits
The author is the founder of F'nAround, a Chicago investigative media outlet, and a PhD candidate at the Global Centre for Advanced Studies, Dublin. The author was also a participant in the May 2025 social media test described in the F'nAround article. That dual role is disclosed here because it shapes both access and bias. The author had a direct interest in whether comments remained visible, and therefore cannot present the May 2025 account as neutral observation.
This article is a working paper based on three kinds of material, kept separate throughout. First, public doctrine: the Supreme Court's decision in Lindke, and the earlier circuit decisions it superseded or clarified. Second, published F'nAround material: the May 22, 2025 article, and the F'nAround Illinois timeline, which records a May 2025 entry stating that Stratton blocked First Amendment rights. Third, a single new observation: a screenshot taken and held by the author in May 2025, showing the @ltgovstratton account, an Office of the Lieutenant Governor post, an empty comments sheet, and the limited comments message. The screenshot does not show the post caption, the post date, or the account's comment settings. Those limits are stated here because they limit every conclusion that follows.
No claim in this article that Stratton, or any other official named, violated the First Amendment is presented as an adjudicated finding. No court has so held on the facts described here, and no regulator has so found. Where the article says an official restricted, deleted, or blocked speech, it means that F'nAround reported that observation, or that the screenshot shows a limited comments state, unless a court record or other primary source is cited. The Stratton office was not, at the time of drafting, shown to have responded to a pre-publication request for comment on the May 2025 screenshot. The Stratton office is invited to respond to the observations reported here, and any response received will be noted in a revised version.
1. Introduction: a setting is a decision
Social media did not invent the problem of a public official who wants to speak without being answered. It changed the mechanics of that problem, and it made the mechanics visible. A town hall can be closed. A press conference can end. A comment section can be limited, filtered, hidden, or reset by reposting the same content without the comments that were attached to the first version. Each of those actions looks like a small technical choice. Each of them changes who gets to speak in a space the official created for public communication.
The research question is therefore not whether politicians dislike criticism. Most do, and the First Amendment does not require them to enjoy it. The question is when a restriction on an official account crosses from private moderation, which the Constitution does not regulate, into state action that is subject to the First Amendment, and then, if it does cross that line, whether the restriction was based on viewpoint.
This article argues three things. First, after Lindke, the threshold question is narrower and more fact specific than the earlier public forum cases suggested. Second, the most important evidence in a comment control case is often not the setting itself, but the pattern around it: who could still comment, whose comments disappeared, and whether the same content reappeared without them. Third, a single screenshot showing limited comments is a lead, not a case. It proves a restriction existed on one post at one moment. It does not prove motive, and it does not prove that critics in particular were excluded.
2. Doctrine: from Knight to Lindke
The starting point for most public discussion of this issue is Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, 928 F.3d 226 (2d Cir. 2019). The Second Circuit held that President Trump's Twitter account, used as a channel for official communication, created a public forum in its interactive space, and that blocking users based on viewpoint violated the First Amendment. That holding is often quoted as if it were still controlling law. It is not. On April 5, 2021, the Supreme Court vacated the Second Circuit judgment and instructed that the case be dismissed as moot, because Trump was no longer president and the account had been removed from the platform. A vacated judgment does not control a later case in Illinois, and it does not settle the law in the Seventh Circuit. It remains useful as history and as an argument, not as a citation for a settled rule.
The controlling decision is Lindke v. Freed, 601 U.S. 187 (2024). Lindke concerned a city manager in Port Huron, Michigan, who deleted comments and blocked a resident from his Facebook page. The Supreme Court, unanimously, adopted a two part test for state action. A public official's social media activity is state action only if the official (1) possessed actual authority to speak on the State's behalf on a particular matter, and (2) purported to exercise that authority when speaking in the relevant social media posts. The Court stressed that the distinction turns on substance, not labels, that officials retain their own First Amendment rights, and that a page that looks official is not enough on its own. Actual authority must be real, not a mirage, and it must be tied to the particular matter in the post, not to the office in general.
Lindke answers the threshold question, but it does not answer every question that follows. Once state action is established for a particular post, courts still have to decide what kind of forum, if any, the interactive space is, and whether a restriction was viewpoint based, content based, or a neutral time, place, and manner rule. The older circuit cases, including Davison v. Randall, 912 F.3d 666 (4th Cir. 2019), treated the interactive component of an official page as a public forum and held that viewpoint discrimination in that space was impermissible. That reasoning remains influential, but after Lindke it must be applied post by post, not account by account. An official can have some posts that are state action and other posts that are private, even on the same account.
Two related doctrines limit the claim further. Government speech doctrine allows the government, when it is itself the speaker, to choose its own message without being required to include opposing views. That doctrine protects the official's own post. It does not, without more, protect the official's decision to exclude critics from a comment space the official opened for public interaction. Platform action is also distinct from state action. Instagram, as a private company, can set its own comment defaults and moderation rules. A First Amendment claim against an official must show the official's own action, not merely that a platform limited reach or flagged content as spam.
3. A taxonomy of comment controls
Academic and journalistic writing often collapses different controls into the single word blocking. That collapse hides the evidence problem. At least five distinct controls need to be separated, because each one leaves a different trace and supports a different inference.
First, outright blocking. A blocked user cannot view, comment on, or interact with the account in the usual way. Blocking is the clearest restriction, and it is also the easiest to document, because the blocked user can show the block state and the date it appeared.
Second, deletion. A comment is removed, but the post remains. Deletion is harder to prove after the fact, because the absence of a comment is not itself evidence that it existed. Screenshots, archives, and contemporaneous notes become essential.
Third, delete and repost. The same content is posted again, without the comments attached to the first version. The May 2025 F'nAround article reported exactly this pattern for Stratton: the same thing deleted and reposted multiple times, with comments mysteriously gone, where F'nAround was the only reply on those posts. If that pattern is proved with archived versions showing identical content and a reset comment count, it is stronger evidence than a single missing comment, because it shows a repeated choice to reset the conversation. If it is not archived, it remains an account, not a record.
Fourth, audience limitation. Instagram allows an account to limit comments to everyone, to people the account follows, to followers, or to people the account follows and its followers, and to block comments from specific accounts. The May 2025 screenshot shows the result of some limitation, in the words Comments on this post have been limited, but it does not show which limitation was chosen. A followers only limit excludes non followers regardless of viewpoint. A people you follow limit excludes almost everyone except a curated list. A specific account block excludes named users. Those three settings have very different First Amendment implications, and a screenshot of the limited message alone cannot distinguish them.
Fifth, filtering and algorithmic suppression. Word filters, hidden words, spam flags, and platform ranking can hide or reduce the visibility of comments without a visible block. The May 2025 F'nAround article suspected, but did not prove, a spam flag workaround for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, on the basis that posts were not showing up on her page despite appearing on others. Suspicion is not a finding. Algorithmic visibility is affected by many factors, including platform defaults, engagement history, and account settings, and it requires comparative data across accounts and time to test.
4. The Stratton case: what is documented, and what is not
Juliana Stratton is the Lieutenant Governor of Illinois, and, in the 2026 election cycle, the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Senator Dick Durbin. The general election is November 3, 2026. That dual role, incumbent officeholder and Senate candidate, makes the distinction between an official account and a campaign account especially important. An official account, @ltgovstratton, branded with the Office of the Lieutenant Governor, is a stronger candidate for Lindke state action than a campaign account used only for electioneering, but the post by post test still applies. A campaign post on an official account, or an official post on a campaign account, would each require separate analysis.
The May 2025 F'nAround article, Speech Ain't Free If You Gotta Tiptoe, published May 22, 2025, reported a small experiment. The authors said they politely, persistently, and publicly asked officials in Illinois, Michigan, and Kentucky about alleged illegal or unethical actions, and then tracked who blocked, deleted, changed posting patterns, or stayed consistent. The article reported that Senator Dick Durbin did not block or change, that Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear stayed on message, that Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul posted less without blocking or deleting, and that Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker did not block or delete but changed posting rhythm in a way the authors called the Legal Team Waltz. Those comparative observations are F'nAround's account, not independently verified findings in this article, and they are included here only to show the comparative design of the test, not as findings about those officials.
Stratton was, in that article, the standout case. The article reported that she did not block F'nAround, but deleted and reposted the exact same thing multiple times with comments gone, where F'nAround was the only reply, and that her Instagram settings allowed only approved users to comment. The article then stated, Per Knight v. Trump, officials can't curate public discourse on official platforms, and concluded that the practice was illegal. That conclusion cannot be carried into an academic article unchanged, for two reasons already given. Knight was vacated in 2021, and Lindke now requires a post by post state action showing plus viewpoint evidence. The May 2025 article also did not, in the text retrieved for this article, publish archived before and after versions, post links, or a list of approved users that would allow a reader to test the approved users claim.
The May 2025 screenshot adds a new, narrower observation. It shows the @ltgovstratton account, a post branded with the Office of the Lieutenant Governor, an empty comments sheet, and the limited comments message. It does not show the post caption, so the particular matter in the post cannot be assessed under Lindke prong one or prong two from this screenshot alone. It does not show whether the viewer was a follower, whether supportive comments were allowed on that post, or whether other posts on the same account were open. It is consistent with the May 2025 account, in the sense that both point to comment limitation on an official account. Consistency is not corroboration. A later limited post does not prove an earlier delete and repost, and it does not prove that the limitation was viewpoint based.
The F'nAround Illinois timeline adds a third data point, also limited. It records a May 2025 entry stating that Stratton blocked First Amendment rights, and a later entry stating that Stratton was late in response to a records request. The timeline is the author's own record, not a court record, and the May 2025 entry does not, in the form retrieved, name the specific posts, users, or dates that would allow independent verification.
5. Applying Lindke to the Stratton observation
Apply the Lindke test step by step, and the gaps become visible. Prong one asks whether Stratton possessed actual authority to speak on the State's behalf on the particular matter in the post. As Lieutenant Governor, she plainly has authority to speak on some state matters, but Lindke requires authority on the particular matter, not authority in general. Without the post caption and subject, prong one cannot be assessed for the May 2025 post. A post about a state initiative, a state office function, or a matter within the Lieutenant Governor's portfolio would be a stronger prong one case than a post about a campaign event or a personal message, even if both appear on the same official account.
Prong two asks whether she purported to exercise that authority in the post. The Office of the Lieutenant Governor branding in the screenshot points toward purported official speech, but branding alone is not dispositive under Lindke. The content and function of the post matter, and the screenshot does not supply the content. A court would look at the caption, any links to state resources, any staff involvement, and whether the post was presented as an official announcement or as a personal view.
Only if both prongs are met for a particular post does the viewpoint question arise. Viewpoint discrimination means exclusion because of the speaker's opinion, not merely exclusion that happens to affect critics. A followers only limit that excludes all non followers, including supporters who do not follow, is a different claim from a limit that allows supportive followers to comment while excluding critical followers. A delete and repost pattern that resets all comments, including supportive ones, is a different claim from a pattern that resets only critical comments. The evidence needed to distinguish those cases is comparative: who could comment, who could not, and what did their comments say.
The distinction that decides the case is comparative. A restriction that excludes all non followers is not the same as a restriction that excludes critical followers while allowing supportive followers to comment. A repost that resets all comments is not the same as a repost that follows critical comments only. The evidence that separates those cases is who could comment, who could not, and what their comments said.
6. Rival explanations
A credible academic article must state the rival explanations that could produce the same screenshot. First, harassment and safety moderation. Officials, like other public figures, face abusive, threatening, and spam comments, and Instagram's limit tools are marketed for exactly that purpose. A limit adopted after harassment does not automatically become viewpoint discrimination, although a limit that is then applied selectively to critics would still raise a viewpoint question.
Second, platform defaults and staff error. Comment settings can be changed by staff, by a platform update, or by a post level setting that differs from the account level setting. A single limited post could reflect a post level choice, not an account policy.
Third, campaign and official account confusion. During an election cycle, staff may manage multiple accounts, and a setting on one account may be misread as a policy on another. The screenshot here is from the official account, which reduces that confusion, but it does not eliminate the need to check the campaign account separately before claiming a cross account policy.
Fourth, timing and audience. A post limited shortly after publication, during a surge of comments, may reflect a temporary limit, not a permanent policy. The screenshot does not show how long the limit lasted, or whether comments were later reopened.
None of these rival explanations proves that no viewpoint discrimination occurred. They define what a viewpoint claim must rule out. An article that does not address them will be read, correctly, as advocacy, not as research.
7. Going down the Illinois executive ladder
The Stratton screenshot is the clearest single observation in this article, but it is not the only Illinois observation in the May 2025 F'nAround account. Taken together, the Illinois executive offices in that account form a ladder, not a single case. At the top, Governor J.B. Pritzker did not, in that account, block or delete F'nAround comments, but changed posting rhythm after critical posts, in a pattern the authors called the Legal Team Waltz. Attorney General Kwame Raoul did not, in that account, block or delete, but posted less. Lieutenant Governor Stratton, in that account, limited, deleted, and reposted. Senator Dick Durbin, who is not part of the Illinois executive branch, did not block or change, and is included here only as a contrast case showing that non restriction was possible in the same test.
That ladder matters for two reasons. First, it prevents a single official theory. If every office had blocked, the pattern would point to a coordinated policy. If only one office limited comments, the pattern points to office level practice, staff practice, or individual choice. The May 2025 account, taken at face value, points to the second pattern: different offices, different responses, with the strongest restriction at the Lieutenant Governor's office. Second, the ladder shows that restriction does not have to be a block to be effective. A governor who changes rhythm after criticism, an attorney general who goes quiet, and a lieutenant governor who limits comments all reduce the public visibility of criticism, but they do so by different mechanisms, and only some of those mechanisms are reachable by a Lindke claim. Posting less is not state action against a commenter. Limiting a comment section on an official post may be, if the Lindke prongs and viewpoint are proved.
The ladder also raises a question about records. Illinois officials who use social media for official business create records questions as well as speech questions. The F'nAround timeline records a later, separate allegation that Stratton answered a refined records request by saying she deleted and did not keep records discussing murder or intent to harm, and related material. That timeline entry is the author's record, not a verified finding in this article, and it is not the same as the comment limitation claim. It is included here only because it shows why a researcher cannot study comment controls in isolation. If a comment is deleted, a post is reposted, and a record is not kept, then the public loses three things at once: the comment, the original post with its comment thread, and the record that would show what happened to either one. That records question is separate from the comment limitation claim, and it is not resolved on the timeline entry alone.
8. What the literature adds beyond case law
Case law establishes what courts may do. Scholarship explains why the practice matters even before a court acts, and why a single block is rarely only about a single user. This section draws on that literature, not as a substitute for Lindke, but as the theoretical frame that makes Lindke intelligible.
Helen Norton, in The Government's Speech and the Constitution, draws the line that runs through this entire article. Government may speak in its own voice, and it may control the content of its own message. A surgeon general's report, a policy announcement, or a lieutenant governor's post about a state initiative is government speech, and critics have no right to rewrite it. Norton adds the crucial second half: once government chooses a platform that permits public comment, it has created a type of forum for nongovernmental parties' speech, and it is then bound by traditional First Amendment principles when it regulates the speech of commenters. The government may not, in Norton's phrase, use its power as speaker to throttle dissent in a forum it opened. That distinction defeats the most common official defence in advance. Stratton's office may control what Stratton posts. That control does not, without more, give her office control over who may answer her in the comment space attached to that post, if that space is state action.
Clare Norins and Mark Bailey, in their study of Campbell v. Reisch, show why the account label matters and why it can be abused. In Campbell, the Eighth Circuit held that a Missouri state representative's Twitter account, created as a campaign device and still used to promote her fitness for office, was private, so she could block a critic. Norins and Bailey call that a campaign loophole, because an official who continues after election to use a campaign account to communicate about official duties can then block users based on viewpoint while claiming private capacity. The loophole is important here precisely because it does not fit Stratton's case. The account in the May 2025 screenshot is not presented as a campaign account. It is @ltgovstratton, verified, branded with the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. If an official wants the freedom of a campaign account, the literature suggests she should use a campaign account, and accept the political cost of separating campaign speech from official speech. She cannot, on the Norins and Bailey analysis, take the authority of the office account and then claim the freedom of a private account when a critic appears.
Joseph D'Antonio, in Whose Forum Is It Anyway, published in the Duke Law Journal, asks the question that Lindke later answered in part: when can an individual official create a public forum at all? D'Antonio argues that forum analysis must start with authority, not with appearance. An official who lacks authority to speak for the state cannot create a state forum by looking official. That argument, read after Lindke, strengthens rather than weakens the Stratton analysis, because it forces the same discipline. The article does not claim that every Stratton post is a forum. It claims that a post branded as an Office of the Lieutenant Governor post, on an official account, is the kind of post where authority and purported exercise must be tested, and where, if both are present, forum principles apply. D'Antonio's work also warns against the opposite error: treating every personal post by an official as a forum would erase the official's private life. The article avoids that error by staying post by post.
Frederick Schauer's chilling effect theory explains why a block is not only a harm to the blocked user. Schauer defined a chilling effect as the deterrence of protected activity by government regulation not specifically directed at that activity, driven by uncertainty about whether speech will be punished and by the cost of being wrong. In the social media context, the chill is multiplied. A user who sees a critic blocked does not need to be blocked himself to learn the lesson. He learns that criticism on that account carries a risk, and he trims his next comment, or he does not comment at all. When the blocked user is a journalist, the chill spreads further, because readers lose not only that journalist's comment, but also the reporting that journalist might have done after seeing the official's post. The Supreme Court's reasoning in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964), that critics of official conduct need breathing space because they may be deterred even when their criticism is true, applies with full force here. A comment section that only tolerates praise does not need to punish every critic to chill criticism. It needs to punish enough critics, visibly enough, that others self censor.
Jurgen Habermas, in A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, argues that digital platforms have fragmented the public sphere into semi publics, where citizens encounter mainly consonant voices and reject dissonant ones, and where the connection between citizen input and government action is weakened. Habermas's diagnosis is often read as a warning about platforms themselves. Read in the Stratton context, it is also a warning about officials who use platforms to accelerate that fragmentation. An official who limits comments to approved users, or who blocks a critical outlet and its associates, does not merely use a fragmented platform. She creates a semi public of her own, in which her posts are seen, praised, and shared, while dissent is removed before other constituents can read it. That is not deliberation. It is a performance of deliberation, with the audience pre selected.
Ronald Dworkin, in Freedom's Law, provides the normative core that the other sources assume. Dworkin argues that a government is legitimate only if it is willing to listen to and tolerate criticism from its citizens, and that freedom of speech is a condition of political legitimacy, not a favour granted by a tolerant official. On that view, the wrong in blocking a critic is not only that one user lost a comment. It is that the official treated criticism as an intrusion to be managed, rather than as a condition of her own legitimacy. That framing matters for an elected official, and it matters more for a candidate for higher office, because legitimacy is exactly what an election is supposed to test.
9. Team-Wide Restriction and the Inference It Supports
In the author's account, the Stratton restriction did not stop with the author. The author states that he was blocked from commenting after calling Stratton out, and that her team then restricted his whole team and some known associates from commenting as well, not just him. The author interprets that pattern as purposeful: her team researched who was connected to him and restricted them too, in order to avoid conflict.
The case material clarifies the platform breakdown as follows: on Instagram, Stratton blocked the author from commenting, not by a complete account block, and on X, she deleted and reposted. Combined with the May 2025 Instagram observation of approved only commenting and reposting, the Instagram pattern in the case material therefore includes comment blocking, comment limitation, and reposting at different points, while the X pattern reported here is delete and repost. The distinction matters, because a comment block is narrower than a complete block, but it is still an exclusion from the forum: the user may still be able to view posts, but cannot participate in the comment space attached to them. The article does not, on the present record, give dates or screenshots for the Instagram comment blocks or for the X reposts, and a platform by platform breakdown with those records is still the material that would make the both mechanisms claim fully testable. The author's October 2026 account adds that the comment restriction extended to his team and known associates as well, as a restriction on commenting, not as a claim of complete account blocking for each of them.
If the team wide pattern is proved, it changes the legal and normative inference in three ways. First, it defeats the single user explanation. A single block can be explained, rightly or wrongly, as a response to one user's tone, frequency, or content. A block of a team and its known associates cannot be explained by one user's tone, because the associates did not, in the case material, supply that tone. Second, it defeats the spam explanation, unless spam is shown for each restricted user. A spam filter that happens to catch an entire critical outlet and its associates is not a neutral filter. It is a viewpoint pattern with a technical label. Third, it shows the chilling effect in its team form. Restricting associates does not only silence the author. It signals to anyone who works with, follows, or is seen with a critic that association itself carries a cost. That is a classic associational chill, and it is more damaging to a media outlet than a single block, because it pressures the outlet's network to distance itself from the outlet in order to keep access to the official.
The motive the author attributes to this pattern, to avoid conflict, also needs to be stated carefully. Avoiding conflict is not a malicious motive in ordinary life, and an official may prefer a quiet comment section for entirely human reasons. In First Amendment terms, however, avoiding conflict is not a lawful justification for viewpoint exclusion in a forum. If the conflict being avoided is critical speech about official conduct, then avoiding conflict is the same as avoiding criticism, and the motive, whether it is called comfort, safety, or message discipline, does not cure the exclusion. The article therefore does not need to prove that Stratton or her staff acted from hostility. It needs to show, if the pattern is proved, that critics and their associates were excluded while supporters were not, and that the exclusion was tied to their critical association, not to a neutral rule applied to all.
10. Why a Senate candidacy aggravates the First Amendment concern
Stratton is not only the incumbent Lieutenant Governor of Illinois. She is the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate, for the seat being vacated by Senator Dick Durbin, with the general election on November 3, 2026. That candidacy does not create a new First Amendment rule, but it changes the stakes of every restriction in three ways that the literature supports.
First, the audience changes. An official account used during a Senate campaign reaches voters who are deciding whether to promote the official to federal office. If critics are excluded from that account, voters see a curated record: the official's achievements, praised by supporters, with dissent removed before it can be read. That is not merely a harm to the critic. It is a harm to the voter, who is deprived, in the Knight Institute's phrase, of the opportunity to hear critical voices in the very forum where the official is making her case. An election does not require an official to amplify her critics, but it does require that, if she opens a forum for public comment, she not use state authority to turn that forum into an echo chamber for her campaign.
Second, the account choice becomes a campaign advantage. If Stratton uses her official account, with its office branding, its verified status, and its incumbent audience, to build support for a Senate run, and then excludes critics from that account, she gains the benefit of incumbency without the burden of incumbency, which is public accountability. The Campbell loophole analysis shows the alternative: use a campaign account for campaign speech, and accept that a campaign account may be treated as private, while an official account remains subject to forum principles. Using the official account for campaign benefit while claiming private freedom to block is the worst of both worlds for voters, and it is exactly the combination that Norins and Bailey warn against.
Third, the Senate itself raises the standard of legitimacy. A senator does not only govern a state. She votes on federal law, on confirmations, and on oversight of the executive branch, all of which depend on a public sphere in which criticism is visible. Dworkin's legitimacy argument applies with greater force to a candidate for that office, because she is asking voters to trust her with power over a national public sphere while, on the case material, she is restricting the state public sphere she already controls. That is a political argument, not a legal holding, and the article presents it as such. A court would not decide a Senate election on that basis. A voter, a journalist, and a scholar may, and should, weigh it.
11. Comparative Case Law: Trump, Ocasio-Cortez, and the Blocking Pattern
Stratton is not the first elected official whose blocking of critics has been challenged. The pattern crosses party, office, and platform, and courts and officials have already addressed the defences available in the present case. The pattern crosses party, office, and platform, and the courts and the officials themselves have already rejected the defences that are now available to Stratton. Comparing her to those cases does not prove her liability. It shows that her practice, as reported, belongs to a recognised pattern that has already been named as viewpoint discrimination, and that the remedy in several cases was not a court order alone, but unblocking and apology.
Donald Trump is the central comparison, and it is a comparison that cuts against Stratton, not in her favour. In Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, the Knight Institute sued on behalf of seven people blocked from the @realDonaldTrump Twitter account after criticising the president and his policies. The seven included a university professor, a surgeon, a comedy writer, a community organiser, an author, a legal analyst, and a police officer. The district court held in May 2018 that the account was a public forum and that viewpoint based blocking was impermissible. A unanimous three judge panel of the Second Circuit affirmed in July 2019, holding that the First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilises a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees. The Supreme Court vacated that judgment in April 2021, but it did so as moot, because Trump had left office and the account had been removed, not because it reversed the Second Circuit on the merits. A vacated judgment is not a vindication. It is a case that ended without a merits reversal.
The comparison with Trump is stronger on the account question. Trump argued that @realDonaldTrump was personal, even though the White House had said his tweets were official statements, and even though he used the account to announce policy, hire and fire staff, and engage foreign leaders. Stratton, by contrast, is reported on an account that is already labelled official: @ltgovstratton, verified, branded with the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. She does not need to argue that a personal account became official through use. She is using an official account, and then, in the account analysed here, restricting critics from commenting on it. If Trump's personal account, used for official purposes, could not be used to exclude critics, then an official account, used for official purposes, is in a weaker position to claim private freedom to exclude them. The difference in mechanism does not save the comparison either. Trump blocked completely. Stratton, on the author's clarified account, blocked from commenting on Instagram and deleted and reposted on X. A comment block is narrower than a complete block, but the forum harm is the same in kind: the critic cannot participate in the comment space, and other constituents cannot read the criticism in that space. A narrower exclusion is still an exclusion, and it is still viewpoint based if supporters can comment and critics cannot.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez provides a bipartisan example, and an example of a non-judicial remedy. Ocasio-Cortez blocked former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind and New York congressional candidate Joseph Saladino from her Twitter account. After the Second Circuit's Trump decision, Hikind sued, and Ocasio-Cortez settled, unblocked Hikind, and issued a public apology on November 5, 2019, stating that Hikind has a First Amendment right to express his views and should not be blocked for them. That settlement matters for two reasons. First, it shows that the blocking problem is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is an incumbent problem, and it has been challenged on both sides. Second, it shows a remedy that does not require a court to decide every Lindke prong. An official who is challenged can unblock, apologise, and restore the forum. Stratton, as a Senate candidate, has that same remedy available, and the fact that she has not, on the present record, taken it, while seeking promotion to the Senate, is a political fact that voters can weigh, even before a court weighs the legal fact.
The other cases in the pattern fill in the remaining defences. In Davison v. Randall, Loudoun County Board Chair Phyllis Randall banned a constituent from her Facebook page after he criticised corruption on the school board. The Fourth Circuit held that the interactive component was a public forum and that banning him for that criticism was black letter viewpoint discrimination, noting that speech criticising public officials occupies the core of First Amendment protection. In Garnier v. O'Connor-Ratcliff, Poway school board members blocked parents who posted lengthy, repetitive criticisms, including the same comment on 42 posts and the same reply to 226 tweets. That is the strongest version of the persistence defence, and it still failed: on remand after Lindke, the Ninth Circuit held on May 14, 2025 that the school board president's blocking violated the First Amendment. Persistence, repetition, and annoyance did not convert viewpoint exclusion into neutral moderation. In Campbell v. Reisch, the Eighth Circuit reached the opposite result, but only because the account was a campaign account, created to promote candidacy and still used to promote fitness for office. That case is the exception that proves the Stratton distinction: a campaign account can be private, an official account cannot claim the same freedom on the same facts.
Taken together, these cases establish a comparative pattern. Officials from the president to a school board member have been challenged, sued, or required to apologise for the same basic practice: using a social media account for official communication, and then excluding critics from the comment space attached to it. Trump was challenged in court. Ocasio-Cortez was challenged in court and apologised. Randall was challenged in court. The Garnier board members were challenged in court. Reisch was not, but only because her account was a campaign account. Stratton sits, on the case material, on the Trump, Ocasio-Cortez, Randall, and Garnier side of that line, not on the Reisch side, because her account is official, her posts are branded official, and her restrictions, as reported, fall on critics, their team, and their associates. That is not a partisan claim. It is a pattern claim, and it is the pattern that makes the Stratton case recognisable as a First Amendment case, rather than as a personal dispute about one comment.
12. Comparative Evidence Across States: Settlements, Holdings, and the Absence of a Recorded Response in Illinois
The Trump and Ocasio-Cortez cases are the most widely discussed, but they do not exhaust the pattern. Across the United States, from governors to school boards to police departments, officials who blocked critics or deleted critical comments have faced the same sequence: a complaint, a lawsuit or a settlement, and then a consequence that Stratton, in the public record analysed here, has not faced in Illinois. Unblocking, a new viewpoint neutral policy, an appeals process, an apology, attorney fees, or a court holding. The list below is extensive because the practice is widespread, and because the consequences are not theoretical. They are the normal outcome when the same practice is reported elsewhere.
Maryland, Governor Larry Hogan. The ACLU sued on behalf of four users who said they were blocked from Hogan's Facebook page and had critical comments deleted. Hogan settled in early 2018. The state paid 65,000 dollars in payments to plaintiffs and attorney fees, Hogan revised his social media policy to bar viewpoint discrimination, created an appeals process for deleted posts and blocked accounts, and created a second Facebook page to serve as a public forum for constituents. A Washington Post editorial described that settlement as a model social media policy for other elected officials. The consequence was not only unblocking. It was a written policy that future critics could invoke.
Kentucky, Governor Matt Bevin, and Maine, Governor Paul LePage. Both were sued by the ACLU for blocking critics, Bevin on social media and LePage on Facebook. Bevin contested his case, and a federal judge ordered him to turn over screenshots of blocked users' comments, putting the blocking practice into the litigation record itself. LePage settled with two women who had sued him, ending the case without a trial but with the settlement as the consequence. The point for Stratton is not that Bevin and LePage lost on identical facts. It is that, in both states, a governor's blocking practice became a federal case, with discovery, settlement, or a court order, rather than remaining a private setting that no one outside the office could test.
Colorado, State Senator Ray Scott. A constituent, Anne Landman, sued after Scott blocked her from his official social media accounts. The settlement, reported in August 2019, required Scott to unblock Landman and everyone else he had blocked for political viewpoints, and required the state to pay the ACLU's attorney fees. The consequence was collective, not individual. It did not restore only the plaintiff. It restored the whole class of viewpoint blocked users.
Indiana, Beech Grove and other cities. In June 2016, the ACLU of Indiana sued on behalf of two Beech Grove residents blocked from the city's Facebook pages and its police department's pages. By August 2016, the city settled, restored access, agreed not to block users or remove comments based solely on viewpoint, and adopted and posted a new terms of use policy for official social media pages. Other Indiana cities, after ACLU suits, agreed to change their policies by no longer blocking users or deleting comments. The Indiana pattern shows how quickly a settlement can follow a complaint when a city, unlike an incumbent lieutenant governor seeking higher office, decides that a policy rewrite is cheaper than a fight.
Hawaii, Honolulu Police Department, and California, San Diego County Sheriff. In Hawaii, a federal court in 2014 ordered the Honolulu Police Department to pay 31,000 dollars in attorney fees after users sued for deleted critical Facebook posts. In California, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, after deleting critical posts and banning a gun parts dealer from commenting, took down its Facebook page after being sued and paid the dealer 20 dollars as part of the settlement, plus attorney fees. The dollar amounts are small in the San Diego case and larger in Hawaii, but the principle is the same: deleting criticism from an official page costs the government money, fees, and the page itself, if the government will not change the practice voluntarily.
Arkansas, Arkansas State Police, Tanner v. Ziegenhorn. James Tanner commented on the State Police Facebook page, including the comment, this guy sucks, in response to a trooper promotion. The State Police deleted comments, blocked Tanner from commenting, and used a strong profanity filter and a custom word list that included pig, copper, and jerk. After a jury trial, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas held in 2021 that blocking Tanner violated the First Amendment, that the filter was overbroad, and that the word list was viewpoint discrimination, noting that the First Amendment protects disrespectful language. The Arkansas case is directly relevant to Stratton, because it shows that even a filter, even a word list, and even a comment block, not only a complete block, can be a violation when it targets disrespectful criticism of government.
California, Poway Unified School District, Garnier, and Rhode Island, Smithfield School District. The Garnier case, already discussed, ended with a Ninth Circuit holding on remand in May 2025 that blocking violated the First Amendment, and with reporting that the district could face more than 425,000 dollars in legal fees. In Smithfield, Rhode Island, a June 2025 settlement required the school district to unblock all previously banned accounts on its X pages, to agree not to block users based on First Amendment protected viewpoints, to end pre approval for access, and to pay 12,000 dollars in attorney fees and court costs. A pre approval requirement, like an approved only comment setting, was itself treated as part of the violation to be removed, not as a neutral administrative tool.
New Jersey, Montvale Mayor Mike Ghassali, and other local officials. After a lawsuit over restricting access to his Facebook page, Ghassali restored access in the spirit of transparency, even while denying that the suit had merit. That local example illustrates a remedy available without an admission of liability: restore access, and the dispute ends. No such restoration is recorded for Stratton.
Illinois presents a contrasting record. F'nAround reported the Stratton pattern in May 2025, in Speech Ain't Free If You Gotta Tiptoe, and reported that it had asked the rest of the Illinois team about it, with no response. The F'nAround Illinois timeline records Stratton as late in response to records requests. The May 2025 screenshot shows comments limited on an official @ltgovstratton post. As of October 29, 2026, no unblocking from commenting, no apology, no viewpoint neutral policy rewrite, no appeals process, no second public forum page, no attorney fee payment, and no court holding is on record for Stratton in Illinois. That is a claim about the public record, not about internal discussion within the office, which is not observable from outside it: in Maryland, Kentucky, Maine, Colorado, Indiana, Hawaii, California, Arkansas, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, a reported blocking practice produced a public consequence. In Illinois, the reported Stratton practice, as of October 29, 2026, has produced no public consequence on the record available to this article. That contrast is the article's strongest comparative point, because it shows that Illinois is not following the national pattern of correction. It is following a pattern of non response, while the official at the centre of it seeks promotion to the United States Senate.
The comparative record therefore does more than add examples. It shifts the evidentiary burden. In other states, officials who were challenged had to explain, settle, pay, rewrite policy, or lose in court. In Illinois, no such requirement is recorded for Stratton, and she has continued to use an official account with comments limited, while running for Senate. The Illinois absence is therefore not a neutral gap. It indicates that a publicly reported comment restriction, supported by a screenshot and consistent with a national pattern that has produced settlements and holdings elsewhere, has not produced a recorded response in Illinois. A system that corrects blocking in Maryland and holds it unlawful in Arkansas, but leaves it unaddressed in Illinois, does not protect speech on equal terms. It protects incumbency in Illinois, and that is the comparative claim on which this article rests.
13. Counterarguments
The counterarguments are stated at their strongest, not as caricatures. Seven arguments are addressed below, with the reasons each is incomplete on the facts analysed here. The point is not that every opposition argument is frivolous. Some are serious, and some would succeed on a different record. The point is that they do not succeed on the record as the author reports it, for an official account, with a team wide pattern, during a Senate campaign.
Opposition one: this is a private account, or a campaign account, and Stratton has the same right as any citizen to choose her audience. This argument is serious, and it is the argument that won in Campbell. It fails here on the account label. The screenshot shows @ltgovstratton, with Office of the Lieutenant Governor branding. That is not a campaign handle, and it is not presented as a personal account. Under Lindke, the question is not whether Stratton has a private life. It is whether she possessed actual authority to speak on the particular matter in the post, and purported to exercise it. On an official post, that test is at least arguable, and on a campaign post on an official account, it is stronger, not weaker, because the official is using state branding to gain a campaign audience. The private account defence would require showing that the post was personal, not official, and the branding in the screenshot points the other way.
Opposition two: government speech means Stratton controls her message, and she does not have to host dissent. Norton answers this directly. Government speech protects the official's own post. It does not protect the official's control over the comment forum once she opens it. If Stratton wants to post without comments, she can turn comments off for everyone, or post on a platform that does not allow comments, or issue a press release. What she cannot do, if Lindke and forum principles apply, is open comments for supporters and close them for critics, because that is not controlling her message. It is controlling other people's messages in a space she created for them.
Opposition three: the restriction was about harassment, safety, or spam, not viewpoint. This is the most sympathetic opposition, and it would succeed if it were proved. Officials, especially women officials, face abusive and threatening comments, and Instagram's limit tools are designed for that problem. The argument fails here in two ways. First, harassment must be shown, not assumed, and it must be shown for each restricted user, not merely for the account in general. A team wide restriction that includes associates who, on the case material, did not harass, cannot be justified by harassment by one user. Second, a harassment justification must be viewpoint neutral in application. A filter that removes threats and spam from all users is neutral. A filter that removes criticism from critics and their associates, while leaving praise untouched, is not neutral, even if it is called a safety filter. The label does not cure the pattern.
Opposition four: the blocked users can speak elsewhere, so no speech was lost. This argument, associated with Volokh's distinction between muting and blocking, is important, and it draws a real line. Muting, where an official simply does not see a critic's comments, but the critic can still speak to others, is different from blocking, where the critic is excluded from the forum and other users cannot hear him in that forum. The Stratton pattern, as reported, is blocking and team wide restriction, not muting. The critic can still post on his own account, but he cannot participate in the official's forum, and other constituents cannot read his criticism in the place where the official's post is being discussed. The Knight Institute's point applies: the harm is not only to the speaker, but to the audience that is deprived of dissent. Speaking elsewhere does not restore the forum.
Opposition five: officials have their own First Amendment rights, and they should not be forced to listen to abuse. Lindke preserves that right, and this article does not deny it. An official may ignore, mute, or choose not to read criticism. She may post her own views, and she may campaign on them. What Lindke and forum doctrine deny her is the right to use state authority to exclude critics from a state forum based on viewpoint. The official's right to speak is not a right to silence others in a forum she opened with state authority. That distinction is the entire point of the state action test, and it is why the official's private rights argument, while true in general, does not decide this case.
Opposition six: Instagram is a private company, so this is platform moderation, not government censorship. This argument confuses the tool with the actor. Instagram provides the limit button, the block button, and the approved users setting. Stratton's office, in the account analysed here, chose to press those buttons on an official account. When a state actor uses a private platform's tools to exclude critics from a state forum, the state action does not disappear because the tool is private. If it did, every official could launder censorship through a platform, and Lindke would be meaningless. The platform's private status matters for a claim against Instagram. It does not matter for a claim against the official who used Instagram's tools as a state actor.
Opposition seven: the criticism was persistent, repetitive, or rude, so the official was entitled to manage her page. This argument fails on the core of First Amendment protection. Criticism of public officials occupies, in the Fourth Circuit's phrase in Davison, the core of the protection afforded by the First Amendment, and Sullivan gives critics breathing space precisely because persistent, sharp criticism may be deterred even when it is true. Persistence is not disruption, and rudeness is not a viewpoint neutral category, because officials will almost always experience critical speech as rude. If persistence or rudeness alone justified a block, then the most persistent critics, who are often the most informed, would be the first to be excluded, and the forum would be left to the least engaged supporters. That is the opposite of a public forum. Only a showing of true threats, or of conduct that actually disrupts the forum's function for all users, would support a neutral restriction, and no such showing is in the record supplied for this article.
Taken together, the opposition arguments do not fail because they are absurd. They fail because they each require a fact that is not present here, or that points the other way: a private or campaign account, a closed forum, a documented harassment pattern applied neutrally, a mere muting rather than a block, a private speech act rather than state action, a platform act rather than an official act, or a true disruption rather than persistent criticism. On the case material, the facts are an official account, an open forum closed to critics and their associates, and a Senate campaign that benefits from that closure. That combination is why the article concludes that the practice, if proved as reported, is wrong in a way that goes beyond a single comment.
14. Conclusion
The conclusion follows from the preceding analysis. An elected official who uses an official social media account to speak to constituents, and then blocks critics from commenting on that account, deletes and reposts to erase their comments, and restricts their team and known associates from commenting as well, is not managing a page. She is managing the electorate's record of herself, and she is doing it with state authority, on a state branded account, while asking voters to promote her to the United States Senate.
That conclusion depends on three things that are documented or reported here, and that the Stratton office can dispute only by producing its own record. First, the May 2025 screenshot shows an official @ltgovstratton post with comments limited. Second, the May 2025 F'nAround account and the author's clarification report a consistent pattern across platforms: Instagram comment blocking, X delete and repost, approved only commenting, and team wide comment restriction. Third, the comparative record shows that Trump, Ocasio-Cortez, Randall, and the Garnier board members were all challenged for the same pattern, and that the only official in that pattern who escaped liability did so because her account was a campaign account, which Stratton's is not.
The opposition arguments, addressed in the preceding section, do not alter that conclusion. A private account defence fails on an official account. A government speech defence protects her post, not her control over the comment forum. A harassment defence requires proof, applied neutrally, for each restricted user, not a blanket label for a team. A speak elsewhere defence confuses viewing with participating, and ignores the audience that loses dissent. A platform defence confuses the tool with the actor who pressed it. A persistence defence was already rejected in Garnier, where the criticism was far more repetitive than anything reported here. Each defence, on this record, requires a fact that is not present, or points the other way.
For a lieutenant governor, that practice is already wrong, because it treats criticism as an intrusion to be removed, rather than as a condition of legitimacy, in Dworkin's sense, and as a necessary input to deliberation, in Habermas's sense. For a Senate candidate, it is worse, because it asks voters to decide on a curated record, and because it uses incumbency to gain a campaign advantage without its burden. Stratton is not entitled, as a candidate, to a larger right to exclude critics from an official account. She is entitled, as every candidate is, to make her case, to post her views, and to ignore criticism if she chooses. She is not entitled to use state branding to open a forum, and then use state authority to close it to the people who disagree with her, their team, and their associates.
The remedy that follows from that conclusion is straightforward. Unblock from commenting, restore the comment space to a viewpoint neutral rule, and publish that rule, so that constituents can test whether it is applied to supporters and critics alike. Verification of a contrary account would require the dates, settings, and neutral rule applied to each restricted user. On the record analysed here, the pattern corresponds to conduct that was challenged in the Trump case, apologised for by Ocasio-Cortez, and held unlawful in Randall and Garnier, and it is occurring on an official account while its holder seeks election to the Senate. That is not a technical setting. It is a governance choice.
References
Lindke v. Freed, 601 U.S. 187 (2024).
Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, 928 F.3d 226 (2d Cir. 2019), vacated as moot, Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute, 593 U.S. ___ (2021) (order vacating and remanding with instructions to dismiss as moot).
Davison v. Randall, 912 F.3d 666 (4th Cir. 2019).
Phelan, J. Speech Ain't Free If You Gotta Tiptoe. F'nAround, May 22, 2025. https://www.fnaround.com/articles/speech-aint-free-if-you-gotta-tiptoe
Phelan, J. The Pritzker Legacy: Protectionism and Selective Enforcement in America's Two-Tier Cannabis Markets. Preprint, ResearchGate, 2026. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.25767.10404.
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Author's screenshot, May 2025. Screenshot of @ltgovstratton, Office of the Lieutenant Governor post, comments sheet showing: Comments on this post have been limited.
Norins, C. R., and Bailey, M. Campbell v. Reisch: The Dangers of the Campaign Loophole in Social Media Blocking Litigation. University of Georgia School of Law, First Amendment Clinic scholarship, 2023. https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/1609/
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New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).
Campbell v. Reisch, 986 F.3d 822 (8th Cir. 2021).
O'Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, 601 U.S. 198 (2024) (per curiam, vacating and remanding); Garnier v. O'Connor-Ratcliff, on remand, 9th Cir., May 14, 2025 (holding blocking violated the First Amendment).
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Hogan settlement, Maryland. ACLU of Maryland, Davis Wright Tremaine summary, 2018: 65,000 dollars, revised viewpoint neutral policy, appeals process, second public forum page.
Tanner v. Ziegenhorn, E.D. Ark. 2021: blocking and profanity filter and word list, including pig, copper, and jerk, held viewpoint discrimination.
Beech Grove, Indiana, ACLU settlement, August 2016: restored access, viewpoint ban, new terms of use policy.
Honolulu Police Department, 2014: 31,000 dollars in attorney fees ordered for deleted critical Facebook posts.
Smithfield School District, Rhode Island, settlement, June 9, 2025: unblocking, no viewpoint blocking, no pre approval, 12,000 dollars in fees.
Scott v. Landman, Colorado, settlement, August 2019: unblocking of all viewpoint blocked users, state payment of ACLU attorney fees.