As First Amendment lawyers, we get asked that quite a bit, sometimes about our clients. The answer is not too hard to figure out. People want to be heard, and social media platforms give them a megaphone.
Charlie Kirk understood that better than almost anyone. He created a provocative style built for social media and amassed an empire with millions of followers in his tragically short life. So, when he was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025, his admirers and his critics raced online to say something about it.
What followed was an unprecedented wave of public-employee firings based on social media posts.
One year on, at least 46 of those disputes have been in court, from Florida to Washington State. Tennessee has six. Florida has ten, two of them against the same wildlife agency. Iowa has five. The plaintiffs include teachers, professors, a landscaper, a paramedic who was named medic of the year in 2025, and a public defender who argued before the Iowa Supreme Court days before losing her job.
One concerning trend from these cases deserves special attention: Government employers are vastly overstating the impact of social media posts on their operations. Under the First Amendment, the government may punish an employee for off-the-job speech on a matter of public concern only if it can show that its actual operations were disrupted or if it could reasonably predict that disruption. If the government can’t do either, it’s simply punishing someone for sharing a disfavored opinion. And that appears to be the case of late.
Brittney Brown’s case is a perfect illustration. Brown, a biologist, spent seven years monitoring shorebirds for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. FWC fired her five days after Kirk died over a repost on her private Instagram. When she asked the court to reinstate her, Brown’s supervisor, Melissa Tucker, swore that FWC’s channels received “hundreds of citizen contacts” in two days. The court refused to put Brown back to work while her case proceeded.
Then the lawsuit proceeded to discovery, where the parties exchange information relevant to the claims. Turns out there weren’t “hundreds” of outraged citizens demanding Brown be fired. In fact, Tucker didn’t actually know how many people contacted FWC. FWC’s inspector general documented about 50 emailed complaints, but none from employees, partners, or volunteers. What’s more, a sizable minority were from out of state, and one of those actually complained about FWC’s decision to fire Brown.
By comparison, FWC’s bear hunt the year before drew over 4,000 complaints, some of them threatening. The hunt went on. In other words, Florida used an inflated complaint count to justify terminating an individual for sharing her opinion but had no problem continuing the bear hunt in the face of thousands of real complaints.
In May, Judge Mark Walker struck FWC’s misrepresentations from the record and ordered it to pay attorneys’ fees. Walker found no knowing lie, but sanctioned the government’s refusal to correct the record, which he referred to as “doggedly defend[ing] the indefensible.” And while he acknowledged the false statements were material to his earlier ruling, he concluded that striking them would not have changed the outcome. Ultimately, Florida paid Brown a $485,000 settlement.
“Hundreds of complaints” might sound like disruption, but as Brown’s case demonstrates, the details matter. Are the complaints real? If so, who are they from? Is a “like” on a social media post calling for a public worker to be fired a complaint? Perhaps, but it’s certainly not disruption.
While the volume of terminations is new, the pattern is not. The same kind of outrage has been used to target employees who shared more conservative views. In 2020, social media users expressed outrage over public employees’ views on Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. That outrage often turned into demands to fire the employees.
In Beathard v. Lyons, for example, an Illinois State football coach alleged he was fired after replacing a Black Lives Matter poster on his office door with a sign reading, “All Lives Matter to Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ.” Sound familiar?
Both then and today, social media has amplified the heckler’s veto, in which the government uses popular opinion or audience reaction to justify censorship. If the government is allowed to cite online mobs when it fires an employee for controversial — but off-the-job — speech, the prevailing mood on social media trumps an individual’s right to speak their mind. In a country that values free speech, that’s the opposite of what we should strive for. The First Amendment protects the most controversial speakers in society, even (and especially) in the face of vehement disagreement. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t mean much.
As with the 2020 cases, some of which are still being litigated, we’re seeing some patterns emerge. Preliminary relief — asking the court for your job back while the case proceeds — has broken almost perfectly along a line that has nothing to do with speech.
Two plaintiffs have won early relief — and they were the only two still on the payroll when they filed their lawsuits. A federal court reinstated Phillip Hook, an art professor, after the South Dakota speaker of the house publicized his post and then called the university himself. While the state board of regents issued a notice of intent to terminate his contract and placed him on administrative leave, the termination had not become final when he sued. Melisa Crook, an Iowa teacher, received a partial injunction barring her school district from terminating her employment over a Facebook post.
Unlike Hook and Crook, every plaintiff who was already fired lost their bid for early reinstatement. But that doesn’t mean that the cases have been losers — quite the opposite. Defendants have mostly failed to get these cases dismissed. At least six plaintiffs survived motions to dismiss, with courts rejecting qualified immunity at least five times. One court dismissed a plaintiff’s lawsuit based on qualified immunity, but she is appealing.
The important question is how little it took to end these careers: a handful of phone calls, a few dozen emails that no one bothered to count, and a couple of days of online anger.
Of the 46 federal cases we’ve found, 29 are still active, 16 have settled, and only one is completely closed. In the ongoing cases, discovery has been the plaintiffs’ best asset because it allows them to see the evidence of disruption (or lack thereof) on which their government employer relied.
The publicly reported settlements demonstrate the cost of censorship. So far, they come to over $4 million. And that’s just the floor because there are very likely other settlements that will never be public.
Surely, some of you reading have little sympathy for the plaintiffs in these cases. You saw their posts, and you asked yourselves the question we opened with: Why would someone post that?
It’s a fair question. It’s not, however, the important one. The important question is how little it took to end these careers: a handful of phone calls, a few dozen emails that no one bothered to count, and a couple of days of online anger.
A year later, early court results show that public employers should stop equating controversial social media posts with workplace disruption. When they do, they erode our deeply ingrained free-speech values, and they upend the lives of hard-working public employees in the process.
You can dislike what someone posts, and you can do so loudly. That’s your First Amendment right. But when the government leverages complaints to fire employees for exercising the same right, that’s not accountability — it’s intolerance, and it’s the state punishing an opinion.
And we are not better off for it.
No, what came to mind was “who wants to work with someone who get excited about a murder” and “why would any parent allow their child to be taught or lead by someone who cheers on murder?” A benefit of being religious employer is that we seem to be the only one who can hold employee to any defined moral standard.