{"id":1968,"date":"2013-09-26T13:31:39","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T13:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ncjolt.org\/?p=1968"},"modified":"2020-06-04T20:54:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-04T20:54:00","slug":"giving-it-a-thumbs-up-the-fourth-circuit-court-of-appeals-provides-first-amendment-protection-to-liking-something-on-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/blogs\/giving-it-a-thumbs-up-the-fourth-circuit-court-of-appeals-provides-first-amendment-protection-to-liking-something-on-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving It a \u201cThumbs Up\u201d: The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Provides First Amendment Protection to \u201cLiking\u201d Something on Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thursday, September 26, 2013, by Kelly Morris
\nLast week, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals announced that \u201cliking\u201d a page on Facebook constitutes an expression of free speech and is entitled to constitutional protection.
\nThe case, Bland v. Roberts<\/i><\/a>, arose out of an employment dispute. In 2009, Sheriff B.J. Roberts was up for reelection in the City of Hampton, Virginia. Six Sheriff\u2019s Office employees, not loving the idea of Roberts continuing as Sheriff, expressed their support for his opponent. Some did so by liking and commenting on the opponent\u2019s Facebook page<\/a>. When the Sheriff was reelected, the plaintiffs were fired. They argued that they had been fired for expressing their political opinions and that accordingly, the terminations violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of association.<\/p>\n

The Court characterized this expression as the \u201cInternet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one\u2019s front yard,\u201d which the Supreme Court has already protected as free speech.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In April of 2012, the U.S. District Court of Eastern Virginia dismissed the case<\/a>, holding that a \u201clike\u201d was not an \u201cactual statement\u201d and therefore was \u201cinsufficient to merit constitutional protection.\u201d The Court of Appeals overturned this decision. Previous court decisions have already ruled that other social media posts are protected as free speech, and U.S. Circuit Judge William Traxler extending this protection to clicking \u201clike,\u201d explaining that \u201cus[ing] a single mouse click to produce [a] message that [a person] likes the page instead of typing the same message with several individual key strokes is of no constitutional significance.\u201d Aside from qualifying as pure speech, giving the virtual \u201cthumbs up\u201d is also a symbolic expression. The Court characterized this expression as the \u201cInternet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one\u2019s front yard,\u201d which the Supreme Court has already protected as free speech.
\nIn its decision, the Court described the substantive effect of clicking the \u201clike\u201d button on Jim Adams\u2019s campaign page: one simple click published Campaign Page\u2019s name and photo to the clicker\u2019s profile; the click caused an announcement that the plaintiff liked the Page to appear in his connections\u2019 news feeds and; it caused the plaintiff\u2019s name and profile to be added to the Page\u2019s \u201cPeople [Who] Like This\u201d list. Clicking the \u201clike\u201d button literally publishes, in multiple forms and locations, that the user likes or approves of something, \u201cwhich is itself a substantive statement.\u201d
\nThe Facebook like button is used on over 125 million websites<\/a> (about one in five websites) around the world, effectively providing the opportunity to make a statement of preference almost any time we surf the web. Over 500 million active people use Facebook every day, and in an average day, Facebook pages get over 50 million likes. The Fourth Circuit\u2019s decision gives constitutional protection to each and every one of these likes.
\nFacebook got involved<\/a> in this decision, supporting the fired employees by filing a friend-of-the-court brief. In a statement following the decision, Associate General Counsel Pankaj Venugopal said, \u201cWe are pleased the court recognized that a Facebook \u2018like\u2019 is protected by the First Amendment.\u201d Facebook may soon find itself again defending the \u201clike\u201d button feature, as it is currently being sued<\/a> by a patent-holding company that claims Facebook ripped off its technology.
\n 
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thursday, September 26, 2013, by Kelly Morris Last week, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals announced that \u201cliking\u201d a page on Facebook constitutes an expression of free speech and is entitled to constitutional protection. The case, Bland v. Roberts, arose out of an employment dispute. In 2009, Sheriff B.J. Roberts was up for reelection in …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[51],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1968"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7574,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1968\/revisions\/7574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.unc.edu\/ncjolt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}