The Legality: What Officials Risk When They Block Constituents

Why blocking a critic isn’t just bad optics for an elected official — it can be a federal case

The First Amendment’s core premise is what the courts call the marketplace of ideas: the government doesn’t get to silence speech it dislikes, and it especially doesn’t get to silence speakers because of their viewpoint.

When an elected official turns a social-media page into a channel for conducting public business and then blocks the residents who criticize him there, he isn’t moderating a personal profile — he may be excluding citizens from a public forum. Since the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Lindke v. Freed, that is a question with a federal test attached, and officials who get it wrong have been sued, lost, and paid.

The Rule: Viewpoint Discrimination Is the Cardinal Sin

Government actors may impose reasonable rules in the spaces they control — but under decades of First Amendment doctrine, what they may not do is pick and choose speakers by viewpoint. Blocking the residents who ask hard questions while leaving supporters’ comments up is the textbook form of the problem. The courts’ term for it is viewpoint discrimination, and it is presumptively unconstitutional in any forum the government opens for public comment.

An official’s interactive social-media page — the comment threads where the public can speak — can qualify as such a forum when the page is used to conduct the business of the office.
“Harassment” is not a magic word. Officials who justified blocks as responses to harassment or incivility have still lost where the record showed the real trigger was criticism. Courts look at what the blocked users actually said, not at the label the official put on it afterward.

The Test: Lindke v. Freed (2024)

In Lindke v. Freed, 601 U.S. 187 (2024), a unanimous Supreme Court set the test for when an official’s social-media activity is state action — the trigger for First Amendment liability. An official’s conduct on a page is attributable to the government when the official:

(1) possessed actual authority to speak on the government’s behalf on the matters he posted about, and
(2) purported to exercise that authority in the relevant posts.

The Court was explicit that a “mixed use” page — part personal, part official — does not immunize the official: page-wide blocking on a page containing any official speech exposes the official to liability as to all of it. A sitting county Treasurer or county Auditor posting about the business, records, or conduct of his office on the page where he engages voters is squarely the fact pattern the test was built for.

Source: Lindke v. Freed, 601 U.S. 187 (2024) — opinion, supremecourt.gov

Officials Have Already Lost These Cases

Davison v. Randall, 912 F.3d 666 (4th Cir. 2019) — the chair of a Virginia county board of supervisors blocked a constituent from her “Chair” Facebook page for about 12 hours after he posted critical comments. The Fourth Circuit held the page’s interactive space was a public forum and the block was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Twelve hours. One constituent. Federal liability.
Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump, 928 F.3d 226 (2d Cir. 2019) — the Second Circuit held that a public official’s blocking of critics from an account used for official business violated the First Amendment. (Later vacated as moot when the presidency ended — on mootness, not on the merits.)
Nominal damages are enough to keep a case alive. Under Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, 592 U.S. 279 (2021), a plaintiff whose rights were violated can pursue the case for $1 in nominal damages — meaning “no real harm done” is not a defense that ends the suit.

Sources: Davison v. Randall, 912 F.3d 666 (4th Cir. 2019) | Knight First Amendment Institute v. Trump — case page | Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, 592 U.S. 279 (2021)

The Exposure: What a Losing Official Actually Faces

The vehicle for these suits is 42 U.S.C. § 1983 — the federal civil-rights statute that lets a citizen sue a state or local official who deprives them of a constitutional right under color of law. For an official found to have blocked constituents unconstitutionally, the consequences stack:

An injunction ordering the official to unblock the residents and stop viewpoint-based blocking.
A declaratory judgment — a federal court stating on the record that the official violated the First Amendment.
Damages — nominal at minimum; more where actual harm is shown.
Attorney’s fees under 42 U.S.C. § 1988 — the provision with teeth. A prevailing plaintiff’s reasonable attorney’s fees are paid by the losing side, which is how a “$1 case” becomes a five- or six-figure judgment. This fee-shifting is exactly why civil-rights attorneys take these cases.
Individual-capacity exposure. Officials sued personally may invoke qualified immunity — but that defense weakens as the law grows clearer, and Lindke made the law a great deal clearer in 2024.

The bottom line

An elected official who blocks constituents on a page he uses for the business of his office isn’t taking a social-media shortcut — he may be volunteering for a federal civil-rights suit with fee-shifting attached. Officials in materially similar cases have been held liable for blocking a single constituent for half a day. The documented post on this site’s home page shows a sitting Platte County officeholder announcing blocks on the page he uses to engage voters — publicly, in writing, with a “#Unbothered” hashtag. Whether that conduct meets the Lindke test is a question for a court. It is not a question any officeholder should be eager to have asked.

Applied to Platte County

The record documented on this site so far: sitting Treasurer Chris Kendall’s own August 2026 post announcing that he has blocked users from the “Chris Kendall for Platte County Treasurer” page (reproduced here).

Preserved on the home page as Exhibits B–D: residents’ comments posted to the pages of Dale Brouk, Chris Kendall, and Kevin Robinson — asking about the petition drive, the financial disclosures, and the 30% raise — which, per the residents who posted them, no longer appear on those pages.

Blocking by Collector candidate Holly Cayer’s page has been reported as well, a pattern spanning all four members of the “Neighbors First” ticket. Comment deletion raises the same First Amendment question as blocking: courts in these cases have treated the removal of critical comments from an official’s page as part of the same viewpoint-discrimination analysis. The questions a court would ask, under Lindke:

Does the page carry posts about the business of the office — the county’s finances, the official’s conduct of his duties, official announcements?
Did the official have authority to speak for the county on those subjects? (A sitting Treasurer or Auditor speaking on his office’s work is the easy case.)
Were the blocked residents critics — and does the record show criticism, rather than genuine harassment, was the trigger?
Was the block page-wide — cutting the resident off from official content along with everything else?

Every screenshot residents preserve makes those questions easier to answer. If you’ve been blocked, document it and submit it here.

This page is general legal information about publicly reported court decisions and statutes, not legal advice. Whether any particular block by any particular official violates the First Amendment is a determination only a court can make, on a full factual record. Nothing on this page alleges that any named official has been found to have violated any law; no such finding exists as of publication. Residents who believe their rights were violated should consult a licensed attorney.