Because Facebook is a private entity, the First Amendmentโwhich only limits government actorsโdoes not require it to honor expressive freedom. It is, however, at odds with the fact that Facebook provides governments the tools to censor. These tools enable public universitiesโand other government actorsโto quietly remove critical posts, transforming the Facebook pages into less of a forum and more of a vehicle for positive publicity.
This censorship has deleterious effects on campus and public discourse. Using public records requests, FIRE surveyed over public universities and colleges across 47 states and the District of Columbia. This means that Additionally, nearly a third of the universities surveyed 59, or Even without these tools, public actors can prune their Facebook comments, manually hiding comments to manipulate and shape the apparent public discourse.
Further, both Facebook and Twitter allow government actors to block members of the public from participating in these public forums. FIRE issued public records requests to five institutions in each state where public institutions of higher education are subject to public records laws, which are similar to the commonly known federal Freedom of Information Act FOIA.
Our approach has some logistical limitations. Some states, like Delaware and Pennsylvania, exempt some or all of their institutions of higher education from their public records laws, or limit the scope of the laws to specific expenditures.
Finally, some institutions could not be contacted due to the potential for conflict with a pending FIRE lawsuit against the institution. In those cases, the institution was replaced with the public institution with the next-highest enrollment. A full list of exceptions may be found in Appendix B. A full list of surveyed institutions may be found in Appendix A, which also identifies the institutions which failed or refused to produce records and includes data compiled from the survey.
