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The use of social media platforms has become ubiquitous. Twitter, for example, boasts 192 million daily active users, and the site processes roughly 6,000 tweets per second, or a billion every 48 hours.1 Judges are hardly immune to the siren song of social media use, and in many ways, that's a positive thing. As the author and other judges have pointed out, social media platforms can be a vital political tool for those who must run in partisan elections, a useful means of engagement with the communities we serve, and an important asset in educating the public about the judiciary's role and fostering confidence in the integrity of the judiciary.2
But judges are also human, and just as social media is often a window into the less desirable personality traits of people from other walks of life, judges' social media use has sometimes veered off into the inappropriate and inflammatory. In the polarized political climate that has characterized the United States in recent years, it is hardly surprising that some judges have given in to the temptation to venture onto social media to weigh in on political issues and controversies. In the spring 2021 issue of the Judicial Conduct Reporter, for example, Cynthia Gray of the National Center for State Courts has an illuminating article entitled Social Media Posts by Judges on Controversial Issues.3 In it, she describes a number of recent instances of judges who have been disciplined for social media posts about political or controversial issues. They include the following:
* Tennessee criminal court judge Jim Lammey, who received a public reprimand for making partisan Facebook posts on a wide range of political or politically charged issues, including sharing posts critical of the Democratic Party platform and then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton; undocumented immigrants; the Black Lives Matter movement; transgender bathrooms; professional athletes' kneeling during the national anthem; and the credibility of various federal agencies.
* New York town justice Robert Schmidt, who received an admonishment in 2020 for Facebook posts that implied former President Bill Clinton had killed Jeffrey Epstein, and that mocked gun control laws.
* Texas county judge Daniel Burkeon, who received a public reprimand in 2018 for "improper and inappropriate" Facebook posts that railed against liberals, endorsed the extermination...