LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has many adult dogs and a puppy waiting to be adopted.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of border collie, boxer, bulldog, German shepherd, Great Pyrenees, hound, Labrador retriever, pit bull, Queensland heeler, shepherd and terrier.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.
Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.
The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
The California Highway Patrol welcomed 95 of the state’s newest members of law enforcement during a graduation ceremony at the CHP Academy in West Sacramento.
The Friday ceremony is the culmination of more than six months of rigorous training, hard work and commitment.
“During the past six months in the Academy, these men and women forged a foundation of dedication, discipline, and duty,” said CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee. “Congratulations to the newest members of our CHP family. They are not just officers — they are leaders who have chosen to serve and protect the communities that depend on them.”
At the CHP Academy, cadet training starts with nobility in policing, leadership, professionalism and ethics, and cultural diversity. Cadets also receive instruction on mental illness response and crisis intervention techniques.
Training also includes vehicle patrol, crash investigation, first aid, and the apprehension of suspected violators, including those who drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs. In addition, cadets receive training in traffic control, report writing, recovery of stolen vehicles, assisting the motoring public, issuing citations, emergency scene management, and knowledge of various codes, including the California Vehicle Code, Penal Code and Health and Safety Code.
The graduating class of 95 officers, including four women, report for duty on Jan. 15, 2024, to one of the CHP’s 103 Area offices throughout the state.
A new class of more than 100 cadets will begin their 26-weeks of training at the CHP Academy that same day, bringing the total number of cadets in training currently to more than 300.
In June 2022, the CHP launched a multi-year recruitment campaign to recruit and hire 1,000 officers.
If you are interested in an exciting career that offers diversity, challenges, and opportunities, the CHP invites you to apply to become a part of its professional organization.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — The Clearlake City Council kicked off the new year with a brief meeting in which members approved a series of appointments and received updates from staff.
New Mayor David Claffey took the gavel for the first time on Thursday night, leading the meeting, which ran under 45 minutes. Joyce Overton will serve as Claffey’s vice mayor this year.
Claffey started off the meeting with honoring outgoing Mayor Russ Perdock, noting that he believes 2023 was one fo Clearlake’s most successful years.
He also offered a proclamation declaring January 2024 as Human Trafficking Awareness Month. The presentation to the annual Breakfast with Santa volunteers was held over to a future meeting.
The main part of the meeting was approving a series of annual appointments.
Claffey recommended to the council that Overton remain the city representative to the quarterly CalCities Redwood Empire division business meetings — which includes representing the city and voting at the division legislative committee meetings — with himself as the alternate. The council approved that recommendation unanimously.
The council also approved a lengthy list of regular appointments, all of which Claffey suggested keeping the same as in 2023.
However, he said the ad hoc committee to advise on the Burns Valley Sports Complex project was not on the list, and he asked for Council members Russell Cremer and Dirk Slooten to remain on that committee.
City Manager Alan Flora asked for the council to make appointments to two additional committees in partnership with the Elem Indian Colony, which recently reached an agreement with the city for a new travel center. One will be for advising on a community benefit fund and the second will be for the city and tribe to meet quarterly to discuss and work through issues that arise.
Claffey said he and Perdock would sit on those two committees with the tribe.
Flora said there needs to be a lot of energy to deal with water issues and he asked for an ad hoc committee with two council members to work with staff. Claffey, who acknowledged it’s a very important issue, appointed Slooten and Perdock to that committee.
Claffey wanted to appoint two regular members, rather than just one, so the city’s traffic safety committee. His choices were Overton, the current member, and Perdock, the current alternate.
City Clerk Melissa Swanson said that committee was created by adoption of a resolution, so that will need to be brought back for council approve at the next meeting.
Slooten moved to approve Claffey’s appointments, which the council accepted 5-0.
In other news, Flora reported on a new mixed income project near the senior center which is nearing completion and has a temporary certificate of occupancy. He said it has 79 affordable units and one manager’s unit, and already 54 occupant applicants have been approved, with other units in process.
Flora said the move-in date is Jan. 20, and they expect 100% occupancy the following day. A ribbon cutting is expected sometime in February or early March.
In other updates, Flora said the city narrowly missed getting another Clean California grant through Caltrans, an issue he attributed to a mapping algorithm that made it appear that Clearlake is not as economically challenged as it is.
He said the city is preparing for the environmental analysis for the airport development project, with various contracts for the study expected to come to the council at an upcoming meeting.
Flora also said the city hall renovations are nearly complete. In July, city administration and staff moved out of city hall and over to the Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College while the work was underway. The police department remained in place and City Council meetings continued in the chambers.
He said staff was moving back into city hall and was pleased to be back.
Regarding the city’s request to be involved in the Golden State Water Co. rate case, Flora said the California Public Utilities Commission notified the city that the filing has been accepted.
Claffey moved to closed session at 6:42 p.m. in order to hold a confidential discussion with legal counsel to discuss a liability claim filed by June Linet Cejavasquez and two cases of anticipated litigation.
Email Elizabeth Larson at eThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
Wet snow pelts my face and pulls against my skis as I climb above 8,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada of eastern California, tugging a sled loaded with batteries, bolts, wire and 40 pounds of sunflower seeds critical to our mountain chickadee research.
As we reach the remote research site, I duck under a tarp and open a laptop. A chorus of identification numbers are shouted back and forth as fellow behavioral ecologist Vladimir Pravosudov and I program “smart” bird feeders for an upcoming experiment.
I have spent the past six years monitoring a population of mountain chickadees here, tracking their life cycles and, importantly, their memory, working in a system Pravosudov established in 2013. The long, consistent record from this research site has allowed us to observe how chickadees survive in extreme winter snowfall and to identify ecological patterns and changes.
In recent history, intense winters are often followed by drought years here in the Sierra Nevada and in much of the U.S. West. This teeter-totter pattern has been identified as one of the unexpected symptoms of climate change, and its impact on the chickadees is providing an early warning of the disruptions ahead for the dynamics within these coniferous forest ecosystems.
Our research shows that a mountain chickadee facing deep snow is, to borrow a cliche, like a canary in a coal mine – its survivability tells us about the challenges ahead.
The extraordinary memory of a chickadee
As Pravosudov calls out the next identification number, and as my legs slowly get colder and wetter, a charming and chipper “DEE DEE DEE” chimes down from a nearby tree. How is it that a bird weighing barely more than a few sheets of paper is more comfortable in this storm than I am?
The answer comes down to the chickadees’ incredible spatial cognitive abilities.
Cognition is the processes by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from their environment. It is critical to many species but is often subtle and difficult to measure in nonhuman animals.
Chickadees are food-storing specialists that hide tens of thousands of individual food items throughout the forest under edges of tree bark, or even between pine needles, each fall. Then, they use their specialized spatial memory to retrieve those food caches in the months to come.
Conditions in the high Sierras can be harsh, and if chickadees can’t remember where their food is, they die.
We measure the spatial memory of chickadees using a classic associative learning task but in a very atypical location. To do this, we hang a circular array of eight feeders equipped with radio-frequency identification and filled with seed in several locations across our field site. Birds are tagged with “keys” – transponder tags in leg bands that contain individual identification numbers and allow them to open the doors of their assigned feeders to get a food reward.
The setup allows us to measure the spatial memory performance of individual chickadees, because they have to remember which feeder their key enables them to open. Over eight years, our findings demonstrate that chickadees with better spatial memory ability are more likely to survive in the high mountains than those with worse memories.
However, chickadees may be facing increasing challenges that will shape their future in the high mountains. In 2017, a year with record-breaking snow levels, adult chickadees showed the lowest probability of survival ever measured at our site. This exceptionally extreme winter came with recurrent storms containing cold weather and high winds, making it difficult for even the memory savvy chickadees to forage and survive.
Nevertheless, triumphant populations have persisted in high-elevation mountain environments, but their future is becoming uncertain.
What’s the problem?
“It’s weather whiplash,” says Adrian Harpold, a mountain ecohydrologist. Harpold works to understand variations in climate patterns within forest environments, and one of his field sites lies alongside our chickadee research site.
The Sierra Nevada and other mountain ranges in western North America have been experiencing more extreme snow years and drought years, amplified by climate change. Extreme snow linked to global warming might seem counterintuitive, but it’s basic physics. Warmer air can hold more moisture – about 7% more for every degree Celsius (every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) that temperatures rise. This can result in heavier snowfall when storms strike.
In 2023’s record winter, over 17 feet (5 meters) of snow covered the landscape that our chickadees were using every day. In fact, these intense storms and cold temperatures not only made it difficult for birds to survive the winter but made it almost impossible for them to breed the next summer: 46% of chickadee nests at our higher elevation site failed to produce any offspring. This was likely due to the deep snow that prevented them from finding emerging insects to feed nestlings or even reaching nesting sites at all until July.
The cascading harms from too much snow
Even in years of tremendous snowfall, chickadees can still use their finely honed spatial memories to recover food. However, severe storms can shorten their survival odds. And if they do survive the winter, their nesting sites – tree cavities – may be buried under feet of snow in the spring.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t reach your nest.
Extreme snow oscillations also affect insects that are critical for feeding chickadee chicks. Limited resources lead to smaller chickadee offspring that are less likely to survive high in the mountains.
Snow cover is good for overwintering insects in most cases, as it provides an insulating blanket that saves them from dying during those freezing months. However, if the snow persists too long into the summer, insects can run out of energy and die before they can emerge, or emerge after chickadees really need them. Drought years also can drive insect population decline.
Extremes at both ends of the spectrum are making it harder for chickadees to thrive, and more and more we are seeing oscillations between these extremes.
These compounded effects mean that in some years chickadees simply don’t successfully nest at all. This leads to a decline in chickadee populations in years with worse whiplash – drought followed by high snow on repeat – especially at high elevations. This is especially concerning, as many mountain-dwelling avian species are forecasted to move up in elevation to escape warming temperatures, which may turn out to be hazardous.
Lessons for the future
Chickadees may be portrayed as radiating tranquil beauty on holiday cards, but realistically, these loud, round ruffians are tough survivors of harsh winter environments in northern latitudes.
Our long-term research following these chickadees provides a unique window into the relationships between winter snow, chickadee populations and the biological community around them, such as coniferous forests and insect populations.
These relationships illustrate that climate change is a more complicated story than just the temperature climb – and that its whiplash and cascading effects can destabilize ecosystems.
On Friday, Chair of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force Mike Thompson (CA-04) applauded the Department of Justice announcement that over 500 illegal gun purchases by Americans under the age of 21 have been stopped thanks to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
“The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is the most significant law enacted in 30 years to keep our country safe from the epidemic of gun violence,” Thompson said Friday. “Today’s announcement by the DOJ proves that this law is working and is keeping firearms out of the hands of people who are a danger to themselves or others. Preventing young people who have a criminal record or have been shown to be dangerous from purchasing a firearm is helping to reduce suicide rates, stop domestic violence, and prevent mass shootings.
He added, “We have a lot more to do to end the scourge of gun violence, but this announcement makes clear that we are moving in the right direction. House Republicans must stop playing political games and work with House Democrats to pass legislation that would help save lives and keep firearms out of the hands of people who are a danger to themselves or others.”
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provided enhanced background checks for people under 21.
The law requires an investigative period to review juvenile and mental health records, including checks with state databases and local law enforcement, for buyers under 21 years of age, creating an enhanced, longer background check of up to ten days.
Thompson represents California’s Fourth Congressional District, which includes all or part of Lake, Napa, Solano, Sonoma and Yolo counties.
The California Highway Patrol will give the public an inside look at its live-in training facility with this month’s release of the new reality series, “Cadets.”
Premiering Jan. 17 on the CHP’s YouTube page, the nine-part docuseries focuses on a cadet class navigating the six-month journey through the CHP Academy on the way to becoming officers.
The release of “Cadets” is part of the CHP’s ongoing, multi-year recruitment campaign to recruit and hire 1,000 officers.
A trailer for the series, produced entirely by CHP staff, is available above.
“‘Cadets’ is not just a series; it’s a testament to the CHP’s commitment to excellence, diversity, and the relentless pursuit of transforming individuals from all walks of life into dedicated officers ready to serve the community,” said CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee. “We are excited to offer a start-to-finish look inside our Academy as future law enforcement officers are brought to life.”
Viewers will “ride along” with nine cadets as they overcome physical and mental adversity throughout the journey to earning their badge and becoming a CHP officer.
The audience will also hear firsthand from the cadets as they speak candidly about their experience.
“By sharing their experiences, in their own words, we hope to inspire more service-minded individuals to follow in their footsteps and join us for a rewarding career in law enforcement,” Duryee added.
If you are interested in an exciting career that offers diversity, challenges and opportunities, the CHP invites you to apply to become a part of its professional organization.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features a richness of spiral galaxies: the large, prominent spiral galaxy on the right side of the image is NGC 1356; the two apparently smaller spiral galaxies flanking it are LEDA 467699 (above it) and LEDA 95415 (very close at its left) respectively; and finally, IC 1947 sits along the left side of the image.
This image is a really interesting example of how challenging it can be to tell whether two galaxies are actually close together, or just seem to be from our perspective here on Earth.
A quick glance at this image would likely lead you to think that NGC 1356, LEDA 467699, and LEDA 95415 were all close companions, while IC 1947 was more remote.
However, we have to remember that two-dimensional images such as this one only give an indication of angular separation: that is, how objects are spread across the sphere of the night sky. What they cannot represent is the distance objects are from Earth.
For instance, while NGC 1356 and LEDA 95415 appear to be so close that they must surely be interacting, the former is about 550 million light-years from Earth and the latter is roughly 840 million light-years away, so there is nearly a whopping 300 million light-year separation between them.
That also means that LEDA 95415 is likely nowhere near as much smaller than NGC 1356 as it appears to be.
On the other hand, while NGC 1356 and IC 1947 seem to be separated by a relative gulf in this image, IC 1947 is only about 500 million light-years from Earth.
The angular distance apparent between them in this image only works out to less than 400,000 light-years, so they are actually much closer neighbors in three-dimensional space than NGC 1356 and LEDA 95415.
Kaitlin Woolley, Cornell University and Paul Stillman, San Diego State University
It’s a familiar start-of-the-year scene. You’ve committed to a healthier lifestyle and are determined that this time is going to be different. Your refrigerator is stocked with fruits and veggies, you’ve tossed out processed foods, and your workout routine is written in pen in your daily planner.
Yet, as you head out one morning, the tantalizing aroma of fresh doughnuts wafts through the air. How can you resist the call of this sugary treat and stick with your healthy choices?
Conventional wisdom, grounded in years of research, suggests that the best way to resist unhealthy choices is to think about the long-term consequences. For example, you could consider how the added sugar from eating too many doughnuts can lead to diabetes and obesity. Thinking about these long-term consequences, the argument goes, should help you avoid indulging right now and better stick to your goals.
In response, we propose three approaches, backed by recent research, to help you stick to healthier habits.
To resist temptation, think short term
One strategy to avoid indulging is to consider the short-term consequences of unhealthy behavior. We tested this approach in seven studies with over 4,000 participants.
In one study, we invited university students to view one of two public service announcements detailing reasons to avoid energy drinks. One message emphasized long-term costs of drinking high-sugar energy drinks, such as diabetes and obesity. The other stressed short-term costs, such as anxiety and a sugar and caffeine crash.
Students then had a choice between receiving an energy drink or another attractive prize. Those who read about the short-term costs were 25% less likely to choose the energy drink than those who read about the long-term costs.
In another study with a similar setup, participants read about either the short-term costs of eating sugar, the long-term costs of eating sugar, or they did not read about any downsides. Everyone then had to choose a delivery of cookies or a tote bag. Those who read about the short-term costs were 30% less likely to choose the cookies than those who read about the long-term costs and 45% less likely than those who didn’t read about any detriments to sugar.
We found that emphasizing short-term costs can also help you avoid other temptations. For alcohol, think about how excessive drinking can lead to poor sleep and hangovers. For fast food, think about how it can make you feel bloated or give you indigestion.
In our studies, immediate effects were a stronger motivator than long-term consequences that could take decades to occur. The takeaway is simple: To avoid indulging, think short term.
Focus on the fun of healthy options
Avoiding unhealthy foods is one thing. On the flip side, can you nudge yourself toward consuming more healthy foods?
Research that one of us (Kaitlin) conducted with behavioral scientist Ayelet Fishbach found that prompting people to focus on the good taste – rather than the health benefits – of foods such as apples and carrots increased consumption in the lab and the real world. These findings were independently replicated in an intervention at five university dining halls that used food labels focused on either tastiness or healthfulness.
This strategy can also promote other healthy behaviors, such as exercise. In one study, Kaitlin asked gymgoers to choose a weightlifting workout from a list of similarly difficult routines. The participants who were instructed to select a fun exercise completed more reps than those told to pick an exercise most useful for their long-term fitness goals.
Immediate rewards that result from pursuing long-term goals improve your experience right now, although they often go unnoticed. For this reason, focusing on the immediate versus delayed benefits of behaviors such as healthy eating and exercise can increase intrinsic motivation, making a behavior feel like its own reward and resulting in the immersed-in-an-activity feeling called “flow.”
Timing the reward sweet spot
Starting healthy behaviors is one important piece of the puzzle; another is sticking with these behaviors over time. One strategy for persistence is to use rewards to stay committed.
Research led by marketing professor Marissa Sharif, along with Kaitlin, involving over 5,000 people across eight experiments found that small, regular rewards were more effective for cultivating long-term commitment to healthy behavior such as exercising and flossing than were large, occasional rewards. Think watching 20 minutes of a guilty pleasure TV show each day you work out, rather than waiting to the end of the week to watch 80 minutes of TV to reward yourself for those four workouts.
But there’s a twist: Rewarding yourself too early may backfire. It seems rewards are most effective when people have to work to unlock them, after which they become regular. In other words, putting in initial effort while not being rewarded, followed by small, continual perks, is the most effective way to structure rewards.
In a study on exercise, Marissa and Kaitlin followed exercisers as they engaged in four initial workouts that came with no rewards. Then a work-to-unlock-rewards group began to receive small, continual rewards for each subsequent workout. They ended up persisting longer and completing more workouts than people in a lump-sum group who received a larger, occasional reward for every four workouts they finished.
A similar effect was evident in a 12-day study on tooth flossing. People in the work-to-unlock-rewards group – three days of flossing without rewards followed by daily rewards – flossed for more days than those who received continual rewards right way. Those who had to commit extra effort to unlock the rewards flossed 15% more days.
These studies suggest people can strategically incorporate rewards – with a short initial period without any rewards – into their routine to help them stick with healthy behaviors over time.
Resistance, enjoyment and persistence
Our research highlights three effective strategies to help you achieve your goals: prioritizing short-term consequences to resist temptation, finding enjoyment in long-term choices, and continually rewarding yourself for sustained persistence.
What’s great about these strategies is that you can adapt them to any personal goal you hold. For instance, if you’re finding it hard to swap social media for a book, consider reflecting on negative short-term consequences of endless scrolling. Or if carving out time for relaxation feels like a challenge, focus on the immediate benefits of engaging in meditative exercises.
By incorporating these evidence-based approaches, you can empower yourself to follow through on your long-term goals.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has several new dogs among those waiting to be adopted.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 38 adoptable dogs.
The adoptable dogs include “Panther,” a male mastiff mix with a black coat.
There also is “Turbo,” a male Belgian malinois mix.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Most of Lake County’s schools will be returning to session next week after winter break.
For most districts, winter break ended on Friday, with classes to begin next week.
The exception is Kelseyville Unified, which returned to class on Wednesday.
In Lakeport, where classes begin on Monday, the Lakeport Police Department is asking drivers to use caution when traveling in, on and around the Lakeport Unified campus.
“With winter weather ahead please remember to give yourself extra time to reach your destination safely. Officers will be in the area during the first few weeks conducting education and enforcement,” the department reported.
What's up for January? Some moderate meteor activity, several great pair-ups of the Moon and planets, and how just four minutes a day can make a big difference in your view of the universe.
The year kicks off with the Quadrantid meteor shower, which peaks after midnight on Jan. 4. Light from the third-quarter moon will brighten the sky on the peak night, causing fainter meteors to be lost from view. But the shower does produce a decent number of bright meteors called fireballs, so it can still be worth your time. If viewing from a dark sky location, you may see 20-25 meteors per hour at the peak.
You can catch a few meteors in the days before or after, as well. In fact, the shower is active through around Jan. 12, so you might catch a fireball in the week after the peak when the Moon has moved out of the predawn sky.
On Jan. 8, in the hour before sunrise, look for brilliant Venus rising with a slim crescent Moon in the southeast. Bright star Arcturus hangs high above them.
The Moon will appear quite close to the red giant star Antares, the fiery red heart of Scorpius, that morning. And for observers in parts of the Western U.S., the Moon will actually occult, or pass in front of, Antares as the pair are rising that morning.
And if you have a view of the horizon, this is also good morning to spot Mercury before the sky brightens. It's quite low, but rises above 10 degrees off the horizon as dawn warms the sky, and it will be shining even brighter than Arcturus.
Next up, the crescent moon visits Saturn on the 13th and 14th. You'll find the pair in the southwest for a couple of hours following sunset both nights. Then the Moon pairs up with Jupiter in the evening on the 17th and 18th.
This is actually a great week to pull out the telescope or binoculars, because as soon as it's fully dark, you can work your way across the sky, starting with Jupiter and its moons, our own Moon, the Pleiades, Aldebaran and the Hyades star cluster, and the Orion Nebula.
One of the things that makes skywatching so interesting is that the sky is always changing. The stars rise in the east and set in the west each night. The Moon gradually waxes and wanes as it goes through its monthly cycle.
And likely you've also noticed that which stars you can see on a given night changes slowly over the course of the year. The bright stars and constellations we see on warm summer nights are not the ones that fill the chilly sky in winter.
This is because the stars rise 4 minutes earlier each day, and it adds up over time. In just 1 week, a given star will rise 28 minutes earlier than it does tonight.
And in one month, the same star will be rising about two hours earlier. So at four minutes per day, or two hours per month, after six months, the stars of summer are rising a full 12 hours earlier than they did back in June, placing them high in the daytime sky. But in their place, the evening sky belongs to the stars of winter.
This slow-motion cycle in the sky plays out annually as Earth moves in its orbit around the Sun. Our view outward into space during the night depends on where Earth is in its orbit.
At one part of the year, our view of space from Earth's night side looks in one direction, and six months later the view is in the opposite direction.
And so our nighttime view of the cosmos changes over the course of the year, because the stars aren't moving, we are! And that change happens at a pace of 4 minutes per day.
Dyches works for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
If a school board member has a social media account, would it be wrong for them to block someone and delete their comments? That’s a question the Supreme Court has decided to take up after public officials, including two school board members, blocked constituents from seeing their accounts or removed critical comments.
A ruling in the case, likely to come in spring or early summer 2024, could have broad implications for American society, where nearly three-fourths of the population use social media in their daily lives. The ruling could also establish whether social media accounts of public officials should be treated as personal or governmental.
In a joint oral argument, the Supreme Court heard two separate cases on the matter, including the one involving school board members, in late October 2023. Interestingly, lower courts reached opposite outcomes, prompting the question of whether a post on a personal social media page can be considered state action.
The school board case
Beginning around 2014, two school board candidates in the Poway Unified School District in San Diego created Facebook and Twitter, now X, pages as part of their campaigns for office. They continued to use them after they were elected to communicate with residents and seek their input.
In 2017, the school board members blocked a couple with children in the district from commenting on their pages. Christopher and Kimberly Garnier repeatedly posted criticism on those pages over such issues as the board members’ handling of race relations in the district and alleged financial wrongdoing by the then-superintendent. The Garniers responded to being blocked by filing a lawsuit.
In the resulting case, O'Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit affirmed that the two school board members violated the Garniers’ First Amendment rights to free speech and expression. The court rejected the board members’ claims that their accounts were private because they were not controlled by their boards and their posts were not directly related to their official duties.
The 9th Circuit judges made three points in ruling that the board members violated the First Amendment. First, the pages identified the board members as government officials and displayed their titles prominently. Second, the social media accounts provided information about school activities. And third, the board members solicited constituent input about school matters on the social media pages in question.
However, the court concluded that the board members were not liable for monetary damages. This is because at the time the school board members blocked the Garniers, no court had yet established whether the First Amendment applies to public officials’ speech in the context of social media. It was – and remains – a new frontier in the law.
Critical comments over COVID-19
Conversely, in a similar case in Port Huron, Michigan, the 6th Circuit made the opposite ruling.
Years before he was appointed city manager in 2014, a man named James Freed created a personal Facebook page that he eventually made public when he reached the limit of “friends” allowed on Facebook. Once in office, he used the page for both personal and professional reasons, posting updates about his family as well as policies he was working to implement. During the pandemic, constituent Kevin Lindke posted on Freed’s page, criticizing his handling of the public health crisis. Freed deleted Lindke’s comments and blocked him from the page. Lindke sued.
In Lindke v. Freed, the 6th Circuit affirmed that Freed did not violate the First Amendment in deleting and blocking Lindke’s comments. And like the 9th Circuit in O'Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier, the court concluded that people’s First Amendment rights to comment on public officials’ social media pages had not yet been established.
The 6th Circuit ruled that Freed posted on his social media page as a private citizen, rather than as a governmental official. The court determined this for three reasons. First, no state law required him to run a social media page. Second, state funds and resources were not used to run the page. And third, the page belonged to Freed as an individual, rather than to the office of city manager – unlike the @POTUS page on X, for example. Therefore, the court concluded that the postings did not constitute state action subject to the First Amendment.
In April 2023, the Supreme Court agreed to intervene in both cases.
The future of the cases
Both cases not only have consequences for citizens’ First Amendment rights but also for social media companies and users. The Court may decide whether social media platforms such as Facebook and X can be liable for allowing a public official to block private citizens from commenting on their accounts.
These cases might also establish rules and standards about how public officials can control their social media accounts and the role of the courts in these disputes.
In a brief supporting the city manager in Lindke v. Freed, the U.S. Department of Justice basically argued that if the government neither owns nor controls the personal social media accounts of public officials, their behavior on the platforms “will rarely be found to be state action.”
The DOJ added that preventing public officials from blocking some messages might make them less willing to speak out about important issues. They warned that this could reduce, rather than enhance, free speech and discourse on matters of public interest, whether in schools or other agencies.
On the other hand, organizations such as the ACLU argue that allowing public officials to restrict comments on social media would be detrimental to democracy by limiting free speech.
“The upshot of the government officials’ argument is that they should have a constitutional blank check to silence or retaliate against their constituents for expressing disfavored viewpoints on social media,” the ACLU wrote about the two cases. “This would give officials a way to short-circuit our most fundamental First Amendment protections.”
Depending on how the court rules, social media may be headed into a new era of who can access and comment on the accounts of public officials.