# City’s Using Meta Moderation Assist Feature for Facebook Comments Doesn’t Violate First Amendment

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/citys-using-meta-moderation-assist-feature-for-facebook-comments-doesnt-violate-first-amendment/
- Published: 2026-11-03T13:33:15+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-03T23:06:20+00:00
- Original publisher: Reason
- Original article: https://reason.com/volokh/2026/11/03/citys-using-meta-moderation-assist-feature-for-facebook-comments-doesnt-violate-first-amendment/
- Topics: Politics

## Key points

- A judge let Poway keep using Meta’s automated comment filter.
- The system flagged a critic’s account as a possible bot.
- The city agreed to restore his previously hidden comments.

## Summary

A federal judge has declined to block Poway, California, from using Meta’s Moderation Assist on its public Facebook page, finding that its automated filtering was not shown to violate the First Amendment. The case concerns a resident who says his critical comments were hidden from other users, raising questions about when a local government is responsible for moderation carried out by a platform’s automated tools.

The city says no staff member hid the comments; Meta’s system flagged the resident’s account as a possible bot. The tool automatically hides comments when an account has no profile picture, has few or no friends or followers, or includes a link. The resident had no profile picture, one friend and no posts on his profile; the city agreed to unhide earlier comments but argued it could not exempt his account from the system. The ruling was based on a limited preliminary record.

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