By Hannah Saunders
UPDATE 3/23 4:41 p.m. Mayor Wilson’s media contact, Sage Wilson, got back to TtS and said, “We haven’t touched a single setting related to the comment section.” Wilson said they will go into the mayor’s Instagram account settings and get back to TtS. Additionally, phone calls went unanswered due to incorrect contact information on Seattle.gov, and our email was read by the city’s spam detector.
Meta, which owns Instagram, is notorious for censoring political content and has the ability to automatically limit comment sections if spam is detected. TtS could not find information about whether Instagram does this with government accounts.
Last week, Mayor Wilson held a press briefing on one of the city’s most pressing and controversial issues: video camera surveillance. A clip from the briefing was posted to the Mayor of Seattle’s Instagram account, and a source alerted TtS of comments being limited within an hour of the post being active. But this likely is a First Amendment violation of freedom of speech, according to the ACLU of Washington.
The ACLU of WA previously received an influx of complaints about officials in the state limiting and censoring constituents on social media. It responded with an open letter on February 21, 2025, stating that comment sections act as a modern-day “Town Square.”
“Courts have firmly established that restrictions placed by government actors on social media pages are protected by the First Amendment,” according to the open letter. “Viewpoint discrimination—for example, removing posts or blocking users on the basis of the point of view expressed—is never permissible.”
Likely plotting damage control, the Mayor’s media contact, Sage Wilson, has yet to respond to TtS but has opened our email, with a Friday deadline to address these actions.
Have you been censored by Mayor Wilson’s social media accounts? Please email us at editor@throughthestatic.org to discuss further.
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