Should a Politician's Block List from Twitter Be Public Knowledge?

Does the public have a right to see every tweet a lawmaker sends out? What about the people the politician chooses to block on social media? Those questions are at the heart of a complaint filed in Miami Beach, Florida.

Grant Stern is the executive director at a website called Photography Is Not a Crime. In August, Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine tweeted a picture of himself with Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine. Stern responded with a tweet of his own, accusing the mayor of causing Miami Beach's water pollution problem, and a link to an article he wrote on the subject. Levine, or whomever runs his account, then blocked Stern on Twitter.

Stern went on Levine's Facebook page and requested all of the mayor's official tweets for the last 30 days. That comment was deleted, and after Stern posted the request again, he was blocked from Levine's Facebook page as well. After the Facebook block, Stern contacted city hall and made a public records request for Levine's block list. He also requested audio recordings of Levine's weekly SiriusXM show, “The Mayor." Stern said his request was denied, then ignored by the city.

Now Stern is suing Levine for the information. 

“I want to find out the total number of people that he’s silenced and expose him as someone practicing extensive official censorship,” he told the New Times. “I want to expose his official censorship for what it really is. It’s lawless activity.”

In a statement, Stern's attorney Faudlin Pierre echoed the same sentiment: "Government officials have an obligation to provide public records, no matter what form they may be in. Citizens have a right to know what kind of public business their mayor or city is doing, whether on SiriusXM Radio, Facebook or Twitter."

The lawsuit comes at a time when many civil rights groups are demanding that Facebook clarify its censorship policies. More than 70 advocacy groups recently signed a letter that was sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, informing him that the groups are, "deeply concerned with the… cases of Facebook censoring human rights documentation, particularly content that depicts police violence."

The topics of censorship and privacy in social media are frequently debated, but how do we assess these issues if that social media is sponsored by the government? If a politician creates an interactive public forum, what are the rules on who can and can't be excluded?

A Columbia Journalism Review piece on the lawsuit, by Jonathan Peters, points out there's very little recent case law pertaining to this topic, but Peters cites a similar case from 2014 in which the Honolulu Police Department was ordered to pay the attorney’s fees of activists who sued after the department removed their comments from the HPD Facebook page.

Stern's entire complaint can be read at Scribd.