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Anniston, Alabama To Censor Employees' Facebook Pages
ISurfTooMuch writes "If you're a city employee in Anniston, AL, you'd better watch what you say on Facebook. Under a proposal being considered by the City Council, employees would be banned from posting anything 'negative' or 'embarrassing' about the city. Note that they aren't talking about official city pages here, but employees' personal pages. Anyone care to educate these clowns on the existence of the First Amendment?"
No, it isn't reasonable at all, not when you're a division of the government. The first amendment exists so that individuals can speak out against government acts with impunity - you can't be held accountable for speaking out against the government. By instituting this rule, they're essentially saying that the first amendment doesn't apply. Legally speaking, they have no right to do it, and morally speaking, it's abject in every sense of the word.
Your employer has no right to censor your speech - period. Even less so when that employer is part of the government who's supposed to be upholding that right in the first place. Conflict of interest.