Orange County Fair officials have restored social media users’ ability to comment on a controversial post about rising parking costs at the summer fair – after Voice of OC posed questions regarding potential First Amendment violations for deleting critical comments and removing the public’s opportunity to comment on the official post.
Voice of OC published a story last month detailing prices to park and enter the OC Fair, which have been trending upward over the past several years and remain high for this year’s fair, expected to draw 1 million visitors.
Last year, prices to park and enter the fairgrounds rose to $15, making parking more expensive than a weekday general admission ticket to the fair for the first time.
Admission costs have also been going up.
From 2017 to 2022, adult admission cost $12 on weekdays and $14 on weekends, while senior and children’s admission was $7 every day.
In 2023, adult admission increased to $13 on weekdays and $15 on weekends, and the price of senior and children’s admission also rose to $9. Those prices remain this year.
[Read: Orange County Fair Opens This Week As Prices Remain High]
A day after publication, the OC Fair and Event Center Instagram page posted a video defending the parking prices by claiming other venues around Orange County and Los Angeles charge $35 to park.
That post triggered dozens of negative comments from the public with users criticizing costs to park and enter the fairgrounds, in addition to critiques about high costs for food and rides inside the fair.
“Just because they charge double doesn’t mean $15 isn’t expensive,” one user commented.
“Everything inside is already overpriced too,” another user wrote. “Parking should be free or $5 at most for a county fair.”
“‘We’re only ripping you off, kinda of..’ is not a strong business plan,” another user commented.
Some commenters agreed with the post’s message that $15 is an acceptable price.
A few days later, the post’s comments were completely turned off, meaning users were no longer able to leave comments on the post. All comments that were previously left on the post were also removed.
After Voice of OC reached out to fairgrounds Communication Director Terry Moore for a response about why the comments were removed and limited, they were back on later that day.
In a Friday email, she said the comments were “paused” after the “discourse had become rude.”
“Yes, comments were restored when the team realized that they were still down,” she wrote. “Thanks for the heads up.”
Can Public Agencies Erase Critical Public Feedback?
Before comments were restored in the post, David Loy, Legal Director with the First Amendment Coalition, said the situation posed a “very significant First Amendment problem.”
“Not only did they close off the ability to comment on this one post, they actually deleted comments — that’s even worse,” he said in an interview while the comments were still removed. “Deleting previously posted comments is the essence of censorship.”
When asked about potential First Amendment issues, Moore said all the other social media posts had commenting available to the public.
The OC Fair and Event Center is not the only public agency in Orange County that’s been questioned about turning off social media comments.
In August 2022, the county-run animal shelter called OC Animal Care also turned off comments on Instagram and Facebook during a period of increased criticism from animal advocates who were unhappy with some of the shelter’s practices.
[Read: OC Animal Activists Call on County Supervisors to Reopen Animal Shelter]
According to the ACLU of Southern California, social media pages for elected officials and government agencies create public forums when they open up the ability to comment on posts — and preventing critics from commenting on or viewing these accounts can restrict free speech protected under the First Amendment.
“Because it is unconstitutional for an elected representative to block critics from entering a public townhall simply because of their views, it’s also not allowable for that representative to create a social media page and then restrict people with critical viewpoints from posting or viewing content,” reads the Southern California ACLU’s website.
That debate has sparked complex legal issues over the past several years about whether or not social media accounts run by individual government officials are considered private speech or official government speech, and by extension, whether deleting comments violates the First Amendment.
Last year, a Supreme Court case known as Lindke v. Freed established a test to determine if a government official’s social media page is considered state action, and whether or not that official is engaging in viewpoint discrimination by deleting comments or blocking users.
Loy said when a social media account is run by a government agency, instead of an individual official, it’s much more straightforward that the comment section is viewed as a public forum.
“The government is not obligated to make a social media page at all,” he said. “It’s not necessarily obligated to open it to comments, but once it does, then it cannot silence people just because it doesn’t like their viewpoint.”
Angelina Hicks is the Voice of OC Collegiate News Service Editor. Contact her at ahicks@voiceofoc.org or on Twitter @angelinahicks13.