1. Limited Public Forum. Our social media accounts are created and maintained as limited public forums under the case law pertaining to the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment to the U.S Constitution. We invite members of the public to view and, where possible and permitted, provide comments or other engagement on our social media posts. However, the law permits us to hide and/or delete comments that are not protected speech under the First Amendment and relevant case law. As a general rule, we will not hide and/or delete comments solely because such comments are critical of The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office or its officials.

2. Prohibited Content. As indicated above, we may hide or delete:

a.Comments expressly advocating direct violence or other illegal activity;

b.Comments containing or linking to obscenity, which is defined as sexually explicit and/or pornographic content that is patently offensive, appeals to prurient interest, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value;

c.Comments that expressly encourage or advocate our agency to illegally discriminate based on race, age, religion, gender, national origin, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other legally protected class;

d.Comments containing links to malware and/or malicious content that affects the normal functioning of a computer system, server, or browser;

e. Duplicate comments posted repeatedly within a short period of time;

f. Comments containing actual defamation against a specifically named person or organization, either as determined by a court or comments that are patently defamatory by easily discovered facts;

g. Comments that contain images or other content that violate the intellectual property or copyright rights of someone else, if the owner of that property notifies us that the property was posted in a comment on our social media account.

h. Comments that contain a hyperlink to any website other than those controlled by The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. This will be done without regard to the viewpoint of the comment containing such a link or the content of the site to which the link redirects.

3. Retention. When a comment containing any of the above content is posted to our social media account, a copy or electronic record of that content may be retained or archived pursuant to our records retention policy, along with a brief description of the reason the specific content was deleted. Once documented, the content will be removed, where possible, from our social media account.