Troll Blog Series

 

The Troll From City Hall

 

My neighbor Rich Buongiorno asked a really good question regarding a city-moderated Facebook page: “Do deletions constitute falsification or destruction of records?”

Tuesday, on the city Facebook the Antioch City Manager admonished the public to stop reading blogs written by trolls. Leaving us to guess who the trolls were, he told us to go through proper channels starting with himself, Steve Duran, to be fed the facts. He didn’t say what in particular he had in mind to educate the public on. Offense was taken as shown in the comment boxes, or was shown, before it was all deleted. By Wednesday forty replies had been posted but only five, ambiguous enough to slip by City Hall censors remained. “Very professional Steve;” “Wow. Very classy;” “Troll blogs? Seriously?” “Ya very!” “Lol.” By Thursday Steve “The Troll From City Hall” Duran’s post went down the memory hole. Except for the screen-shots.

If government pages are public forums do comments have to be agreeable to the bureaucrat in charge, or be “uplifting and appropriate and edifying?”   Was it right for city council member Lori Ogorchok to make Steve Duran disappear his post? Mayor Wade Harper and I think not. We believe in upholding Duran‘s First Amendment rights, although the mayor doesn’t think those rights should be extended to me or you. Even after Harper looked up “troll” in the dictionary (trolls are bad, he discovered) he stood firm in his belief that the Constitution protects unpopular speech, Duran’s anyway. And his own of course. Steve Duran and his defender Wade Harper could do a lot worse than add insult to injury on Facebook, and have.

“We wanted transparency, not invisibility,” Buongiorno wrote. “I posted a comment and noticed there were 24 comments (see capture). I went to look and see who else said what – NOT! Look at the other capture. There appears to have been some intentional hiding of comments, or deletes.”

So can bureaucrats delete comments they don’t like? They can in Antioch. But coast to coast and all the way to Hawaii cities are taking the law into account. The Honolulu Police Department was censoring comments posted by a gun-rights group on HPD Facebook. The gun-rights group sued and won, forcing the HPD to stop censoring comments.