Mediaboss Marketing

The Supreme Court weighed a North Carolina law banning sex offenders from using social media. Matt Hoffman reports. Buzz60

The Supreme Court cast doubt Monday on a North Carolina law that bans sex offenders from social media websites.(Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, AP)

WASHINGTON The Supreme Court argued Monday that social networking websites have become such an important source of information, including President Trump's daily tweets, that evensex offenders should not be barred from social media.

Displaying their familiarity during oral arguments with such platforms as Facebook, Snapchat and LinkedIn, several justices said a North Carolina law that makes it a felony for sex offenders to access them appeared to violate the First Amendment.

It didn't help state officials that their case focused on Lester Packingham, whose sex crime in 2002 resulted only in two years of supervised probation, but who was arrested eight years later for celebrating the dismissal of a parking ticket with a Facebook post that began "Man God is Good!"

That appeared to go too far for at least five of the court's eight justices, who noted that social networking sites have become a major part of "the marketplace of ideas," in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's words.

"Increasingly, this is the way people get ... all information," Justice Elena Kagan said. "This is the way people structure their civic community life."

Although North Carolina's law goes further than most states, a victory for Packingham would represent a ringing defense of free speech rights for some of the nation's most reviledcitizens the estimated 850,000 registered sex offenders.

The state's senior deputy attorney general, Robert Montgomery, likened the law to a 1992 Supreme Court decision that forbids politicking within 100 feetof a polling place. He noted that social networking sites are used to gaininformation in more than 80% of online sex crimes against children.

"These are some of the worst criminals, who have abused children and others," he said.

Thirteen states defended the North Carolina law in legal papers as a weapon against the illicit use of social networking sites, which they said areused in one-third of Internet-related sex crimes resulting in arrest.

"There's a concern here for the safety of children," Ginsburg acknowledged, as some of her colleagues notably Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer searched for a more limited way in which states could protect victims without infringing on basic free speech rights.

But they found it difficult to defend North Carolina's law, passed in 2008 as a way to add "virtual" neighborhoods to the physical locations such as schools and playgrounds from which sex offenders are barred.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites offer a range of services beyond social networking. Kagan said they are an important channel for political information and conversation, including the president's proclivity for tweeting newsworthy musings.

Asthe youngest member of the court and one who spent time as dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan, 56, demonstrated the most intimate knowledge of social media -- at one point noting that the law's exceptions for chat rooms and photo-sharing sites created "a constitutional right to use Snapchat but not to use Twitter."

Only Justice Samuel Alito mounted much of a defense of the law, suggesting that it could be limited to core social networking sites rather than The New York Times or Betty Crocker. "There are still alternative channels," he said.

But David Goldberg of Stanford Law School's Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, who represented Packingham, said Twitter hosts about 500 million tweets a day, and Snapchat hosts 10 billion videos -- statistics that are not replicable elsewhere.

Alito acknowledged the addiction of many users. "There are people who think that life is not possible without Twitter andFacebook," he said.

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2lNgr4Z

Read more here:
Supreme Court justices defend social media, even for sex offenders - USA TODAY