The most common technical social media question we receive at Julie Parker Communications is, “Can we delete a comment if …”

What follows is not legal advice but communications advice based on our many years of social media experience and study of the issue.

For private companies and organizations the answer is simple. There is no legal prohibition to moderating comments on your social media pages. But … consider that there could be public relations fall-out for moderating comments.

For government entities, it’s a lot trickier. The Supreme Court hasn’t provided a definitive answer to date, but their decision on other social media issues as well as lower court decisions are sending a clear message- the comments section of government agencies’ social media pages is a public forum and a free speech zone. As just one example, a 2021 decision by the United States District Court Eastern District of Arkansas Central Division indicated that a state police agency violated the law when they used Facebook’s profanity filter to automatically moderate comments.

Let’s make this clear up front. Any moderation of public comments can result in a 1st Amendment violation accusation.

That said, there is simply some speech for which most government entities are willing to take that risk; racist language, threats of violence, language that is sexually graphic.

If you’re interested in potentially moderating egregiously offensive language, you should first have a comment policy in place and it should be accessible to the public. We recommend having it reside permanently on your organization’s website and social media pages, as well as sharing it with your social media audience periodically.

What should it contain? We’ll address that issue and our 5-step advice to navigating this tricky issue in Part II.

We address topics like these and other communications issues in our training courses. Our publicly available courses in 2023 include stops in in the Illinois, Utah, Ohio, and Arizona.

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