Victory for Free Speech: North Carolina National Guard Restores Voice to Veteran Silenced for Criticizing Leadership

Settlement requires the Guard to stop censoring critics on social media and rewrite its own rules to protect free speech for everyone

The First Amendment doesn’t go on leave simply because speech occurs online.  That’s the message of a favorable settlement reached in Stanhope v. Hunt, a federal civil-rights lawsuit on behalf of retired North Carolina National Guardsman Timothy Stanhope. After 23 years in uniform, Stanhope was blocked from his unit’s official Facebook page for criticizing leadership.

Under the settlement, the North Carolina National Guard has agreed to:

• Restore Stanhope’s access to its Facebook page;
• Make reasonable efforts to unhide his previous comments and make them visible again;
• Stop banning or blocking users and discontinue filtering, hiding, or deleting anyone’s comments because of views they express;
• Remove language from its Facebook page rules that let the Guard delete “inappropriate comments” at its “sole discretion”;
• Replace that language with a clear promise: “Posts will not be removed, hidden, or deleted, and users will not be banned or blocked, based on the viewpoint expressed in any comments.”

“After serving my country for 23 years, I know that constitutional rights are not optional,” Stanhope said. “The right to speak freely includes the right to criticize the government, and that right doesn’t disappear when the conversation moves online. Officials don’t get to pick and choose which opinions are allowed. I’m glad the Guard finally agrees.”

Stanhope served in the North Carolina National Guard for 23 years. Over that time, he grew increasingly concerned about how leadership treated Guardsmen and managed the unit. When he began posting those concerns on his unit’s official Facebook page—a page open to the public—officials pressured Stanhope to retire, and then deleted his critical posts, removed his comments, and blocked him from the page altogether.

“When a government agency opens an official page for public comment, it cannot treat that page as one-way bulletin board where praise is welcome but criticism is censored,” said CIR Associate Counsel Michelle Scott. “Government officials don’t get to invite public comment and then censor the citizens who take them up on their invitation.”

That principle is now reflected in the Guard’s own revised policy. This case is a reminder that government social media pages belong to the public, not the officials who run them. When public officials use government accounts to communicate with the public and invite public comment, the First Amendment goes with them online.