Citing a briar patch of potential legal issues, the City of Redondo Beach, California has for the moment called it quits on Facebook. As reported in the local paper, The Daily Breeze, City Attorney Mike Webb recommended deactivating the city’s Facebook page out of concerns arising from, inter alia:
- The City’s obligation to retain user comments under the California Public Records Act, Cal. Gov. Code § 6250-6270
- First Amendment protections afforded user comments and the potential liability of the City if it blocked or removed offensive comments
- Whether postings by three or more elected officials on a single topic would violate California’s Open Meetings Law, a.k.a. The Brown Act, Cal. Gov. Code § 54950-54963
A video of the city council’s August 17 meeting at which the decision was made, as well as a Power Point presentation outlining the city attorney’s legal analysis of the city’s use of social media, can be seen here starting at 2:26:12. Redondo Beach’s farewell Facebook post can be seen here.
Public and private sector entities face numerous legal pitfalls as they attempt to embrace new technologies, like social networking sites, that offer unprecedented access to constituents or consumers. The instantaneous and extraordinarily public nature of interactions on sites like Facebook requires companies and agencies with legal duties to the public to think twice about how they will manage those interactions. In the case of Redondo Beach, the city chose to take the cautious route and defer the use of Facebook until a day when the courts have provided more definitive answers and guidance regarding the above issues (or until Facebook changes its functionality such that the above issues become moot.) Notably, Redondo Beach continues to maintain a presence on Twitter, Youtube, and Nixle, a public safety social networking platform, because those platforms can be managed to limit the user comments. As noted in The Daily Breeze article, another California city has addressed these issues by providing a Social Media Policy, available to users through the city’s Facebook page, which addresses some of the issues that concerned Redondo Beach.
- Suzanne Wilson and Emilia Morris
