Packingham v North Carolina: A Constitutional Right to Social Media?

• Author: Edoardo Celeste
• Pages: 116-119

(2018) 17 COLR 116

116

PACKINGHAM v NORTH CAROLINA: A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO SOCIAL

MEDIA?

Edoardo Celeste

Dear Editor,

In North Carolina, a statute prevented registered sex-offenders who committed abuses on

minors to use social media after their conviction. On 19 June 2017, in the case Packingham v

North Carolina,

1

the US Supreme Court unanimously held that this statute was

unconstitutional. The key argument of the court was to identify social networking websites as

‘places where [all citizens] can speak and listen, and then, after reflection, speak and listen

once more’.

2

Even if the protection of minors was considered a valid governmental interest,

the ‘unprecedented’ restriction of the scope of First Amendment speech engendered by the

prohibition of the use of social media was deemed unacceptable.

3

As stated by Justice Kennedy, who wrote the opinion of the majority, ‘this case is one of the

first [the] court has taken to address the relationship between the First Amendment and the

modern Internet’.

4

Interestingly, this decision occurred exactly twenty years after the well-

known judgment in Reno v American Civil Liberties Union.

5

In Reno, the Supreme Court ruled

for the first time on the constitutionality of a federal statute limiting free speech on the Internet.

Two decades later, the Supreme Court not only affirmed – echoing Reno – that social media

allow anyone with an Internet connection to become a modern ‘town crier’,

6

but also that they

represent ‘what for many are the principal sources for knowing current events’ as well as ‘the

most powerful mechanisms available to a private citizen to make his or her voice heard’.

7

1

Packingham v North Carolina 582 US____ (2017).

2

ibid 1 (emphasis added).

3

ibid 8.

4

ibid 6 (emphasis added).

5

Reno v American Civil Liberties Union 521 US 844 (1997).

6

ibid 8.

7

ibid (emphasis added).