This Missouri state legislator made a extremely dubious and just all-around shitty claim, pitting healthcare and education against each other, that a whole detailed series of deep cuts to individual schools would somehow automatically happen if Medicaid expansion passes in Missouri. (And Missouri would need a lot of expansion even to cover as many people as a normal state did before Obamacare was ever passed: their income eligibility cutoff for adults is absurdly low, somewhere in the four figures.)
It appears she has now not only disabled comments, preventing anyone from further arguing with her, but has also deleted all of the negative comments that previously existed! So now if people look at the post, they can only see what she wrote and what her sycophants wrote, and can “like” any of those as they desire. That’s so fucked up.
Are you seriously asking if a politician can lie? On a private social media page? On an opinion on an issue rather than a formal statement by the government?
Before you let yourself get carried away by scornful snark: are you aware that a federal judge ruled that Trump (on his private Twitter account, not @POTUS) cannot block anyone?
How is this different in principle (as opposed to scale)?
ETA: You may have missed that I’m not questioning whether she can lie, but whether she can delete the comments that take issue with what she said, keep the ones that support her, and then block anyone else from weighing in.
From your cite: "The judges wrote “that the First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilizes a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees.”
Is Cindy O’Laughlin using her Facebook page for official purposes, or is it a personal page?
I certainly didn’t miss the title in large font asking “Is this a violation of election law?” If you didn’t mean your thread to have anything to do with that question, why should we care about it?
She’s a public official (member of the legislature) advocating a vote against a referendum authorizing Medicaid expansion, with a warning that she will cut individual schools’ funding by X amount if it passes. How can that not be “for official purposes”? The Twitter account the judge ruled on was Trump’s personal one, that he used for his various celebrity feuds, long before he ran for president.
??? I certainly did mean it to revolve around precisely that question. But you seem to have interpreted “this” to mean “her lying in the post”, when what I meant by “this” is her deleting responses she didn’t like, leaving up the ones she did, and then blocking any further discussion.
ETA: Let’s look back at the Twitter case the judge ruled on. There are actually a lot of people who don’t actually tweet themselves, but just “lurk” on Twitter to use it as sort of a news feed. If Trump edited out all the replies to his tweets so it looked like there was nothing but unanimous praise for what he says, that would be very misleading to voters. Same principle applies here.
Absolutely not true. The case was on his Presidential account. Your own link says:
The judges wrote in the opinion that Trump’s Twitter account shows “all the trappings of an official, state‐run account,” and that Trump and his aides have described his tweets as “official statements.”
O’Laughlin’s account, as easily shown by clicking on her name in your own link, is clearly personal and not official.
Do you have any evidence that she is violating the terms of a personal account or breaking any actual state or federal law?
You’re wrong, but part of the problem is that the article I linked used the wrong wording. Here is one that makes it clear that it’s about his personal account:
Again, from your link: " On Monday, the appellate court underlined how the Twitter account [@realDonaldTrump] is used for the President’s official communications. Blocking people on Twitter, the court found, violates the First Amendment because it excludes people from interacting with the President in a public forum, according to a statement from a judge today and previous court opinions."
He was using his personal account to transmit official communications, understand?
The judge’s ruling has nothing to do with Twitter’s rules. She could keep her Facebook account limited to friends and that would be totally different.
She has now added:
I updated my post on the education cuts we would see if Medicaid is expanded. Here is how the numbers were derived:
It’s school district financial data from DESE, DHSS (actuarial study on MedEx by Mercer) and Foundation for Government Accountability.
It was calculated on 8% cut straight across the board for all public schools. Just like Parson did with current withholds. They won’t be held harmless on this.
Sure looks to me like constituent communication on official state business.
I don’t understand what this has to do with election law. If DJT made a separate Twitter account for his presidential campaign, and used that account to post only campaign-related propaganda, I think the federal court’s logic breaks down.
She is using Facebook to give her official opinions, while Trump is using Twitter to officially communicate White House policy with both the government and the public. If Trumps personal account is the primary way to communicate with the public(and it is), then tries to block the part of the public that he doesn’t want to listen to(which he tried to do), then he has effectively silenced communication between that part of the public and the President of the United States. Do we know if the same is true of Cindy O’Laughlin? And has been point out, there is a difference between an Official Opinion and an Official Proclamation.
It’s a poor argument maybe? She posted some spreadsheet. Is she calling for those cuts? Are those cuts just is what is going to happen? Maybe it is just something that might happen? A screenshot of an Excel spreadsheet is not really evidence of anything.