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• 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.
• At stake is what constitutes state action – or action taken in an official governmental capacity – on social media.

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.
• In 2017, the school board members blocked a couple with children in the district from commenting on their pages.
• 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.

• And third, the board members solicited constituent input about school matters on the social media pages in question.
• 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.

Critical comments over COVID-19

• 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.
• In Lindke v. Freed, the 6th Circuit affirmed that Freed did not violate the First Amendment in deleting and blocking Lindke’s comments.

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.

Charles J. Russo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Over the past decade alone, they have expanded their range on the continent by more than 25%.
• This resurgence was brought into sharp focus in September 2023 following a controversial statement by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
• An examination of Spain’s motivations for protection may provide some insight into what motivates countries to adopt such different approaches to coexistence.

What does coexistence mean?

• Our findings revealed three distinct and, to some extent, conflicting views of what coexistence means and how it should be achieved.
• They saw people as a part of nature and interpreted coexistence as a state where the wolf was controlled to not disrupt pastoral activities.
• They saw coexistence as a state where human activities were controlled so that wolves could roam free.

The politics of wolf conservation

• Podemos, one of the left coalition parties, submitted a proposition for strict wolf protection in 2016 (when they were in opposition) in collaboration with pro-wolf advocacy groups.
• These criteria do not consider how stringent wolf protection measures might affect other cultural or ecological values, like pastoral farming systems.
• Spain’s decision was also influenced by the protectionists’ view of the wolf’s conservation status.
• For example, an assessment submitted to the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List in 2018 indicates that the Iberian wolf population is large, stable and slowly expanding.

This nature or that nature?

• Science plays a crucial role in evaluating various policy options and their consequences, such as the effect of an increased wolf population on sheep or deer behaviour.
• That choice depends on what people, livestock and wildlife in a particular place need to live well.
• With this in mind, it is concerning that the pragmatic interpretation is largely overlooked in the debate.
• Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue.

• The CRAs sent the dispute to the credit card companies for investigation.
• In their brief, the FTC and CFPB disputed the district court’s interpretation of the FCRA.
• Inaccurate information on a consumer report can hamper people’s ability to get housing, employment, and credit.
• Follow the FTC on social media, read our blogs and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.

• In the 2017-2018 school year, approximately 100,000 teacher jobs in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and mathematics – went unfilled at the high school level.
• At the middle school level, there were about 150,000 unfilled STEM educator jobs.
• As a professor of education policy – and also as a former state secretary of education in Virginia – I have examined the STEM teacher shortage from multiple vantage points.
• We think endowed chairs have the potential to retain and attract more STEM educators at the K-12 level, but it requires a willingness to rethink the ways that schools employ STEM educators.

What’s behind the gap?

• There are fewer college students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education that ever before.
• Between 1959-1976, bachelor’s degrees in education were the most popular college major in the United States, and they accounted for about 20% of all degrees.
• In 2021, K-12 teachers’ weekly salary was only $1,348 – about $660 less than the $2,009 earned weekly by other college graduates.

Prior efforts to close the gap

• The Senate and House passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958, and Eisenhower signed it into law on Sept. 2, 1958.
• This set in motion a national STEM education agenda for American colleges and K-12 schools for decades to come.
• Fifty-three years later, President Barack Obama utilized his 2011 State of the Union address to advance the national STEM agenda.
• But the goal of the 100,000 STEM teacher campaign was to narrow the gap, not end it.

The endowed chair as a potential solution

• Traditionally, an endowed chair is a prestigious faculty position funded through annual spending from a university’s endowment fund.
• The benefit of an endowed chair is that it will be paid for decades to come by the interest on investment.
• An endowed chair could also provide funding for teachers and students to have access to state-of-the-art learning technology.
• An endowed STEM chair salary may never outpace what educators could earn if they entered the private market.