At the intersection of a citizen’s right to privacy and the need for a government entity to provide notice, problems can begin.
Social media is a tool- and like any tool, it can be misused. And social media is especially easy to misuse. Why?
- It is cheap and easy to use
- The reach can extend well beyond the intended audience
- Social media companies have rights to what you post
The last is the least obvious- you agreed to it when you signed up and probably haven’t read it since. For Facebook, your use grants “a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings)” With a government entity, that privacy setting is inherently very public. –Facebook Terms
All that is to say that a great deal of thought ought to go into shaping responsible social media use by our government officials.
What’s being challenged?
Facebook users who follow the Sheriff’s page (17 thousand followers- for context, Lincoln County has around 22 thousand residents, but there’s no way of knowing how many of the page’s followers actually reside in Lincoln County) will have noticed that there’s a practice of posting lists of those that fail to respond to jury summons on it.
This fall, Trego resident and new mother Erica Ness found herself among those listed. Like many people, she isn’t a frequent user of Facebook, and so only heard about it once other people brought it to her attention. This raised concerns for her, since the Sheriff’s Office essentially provided documentation of her residency in Lincoln County (and thus her voter registration in the same) and her status as a potential juror to be subject to Facebook’s terms of service.
The Sheriff holds that the practice is legal citing MC 3-15-301, which allows for publishing a list of those that failed to respond on “government-controlled or government-sponsored social media or web pages for the specific jurisdiction”
In response to the concerns about privacy which Ness raised, the Sheriff responded that “Much consideration was given to residents privacy. We felt that Facebook was no more intrusive than posting in a newspaper or web-based news site” (the alternative places to post a list indicated by MC3-15-301)
Ness has started a petition to ask the county to change their practice. It can be found on Change.org
Is Social Media equivalent to a newspaper? The short answer is: No, absolutely not. A newspaper, when in error, is expected to print a retraction. There’s no such requirement on social media. Social media has little requirement for accuracy. Additionally, a newspaper, at least the physical copy, doesn’t allow for a comments section.
And the comment section is where the rest of the privacy concerns can come into play. As I scroll through their Facebook page, I can see replies along the lines of “isn’t so and so dead?”, “pretty sure so and so already served on a jury in that calendar year”, “they moved”, and my personal favorite “isn’t she sitting in your jail right now?”
Is the information provided really a privacy violation? There doesn’t seem to be much by way of clearly defined “this is private info” laws, rather, it seems fairly context dependent. What I would point out is that “potentially present on a jury trial happening during this time period” is information that someone would have a hard time finding elsewhere (a newspaper- even an online newspaper, would be much more tedious to sift through), and that the reasons people have for trying to identify jurors aren’t necessarily good for their health and wellbeing. Additionally, the Sheriff maintains publicly visible comments on their page which may contain more information about the individuals listed (and frequently do). Furthermore, while they may be able to limit comments on their own posts, once it’s been shared to a social media group, comments are no longer theirs to moderate.
Is Facebook an effective means of contacting people? The Sheriff’s Office wrote that it was: “Publishing the list on that media source has been very successful in getting people to respond.” We have to take them at their word for that, since the people it doesn’t reach aren’t going to be found on Facebook to complain about it.
Do the size and frequency of the lists indicate another problem? A glace at the comments reveals “I turned in the paper” and “I never received a letter”. A follow-up question, then, is ‘how many jurors fail to respond and get posted on FB- and of those- how many never got a letter or returned their questionnaire as required?’
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