“A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT” Signed, President DONALD J. TRUMP, Private Citizen


Shiffrin argues that some government speech violates the First Amendment, including official lies, culpable misrepresentations, and attacks on the legitimacy of dissent . Her framework requires some distinction between officials speaking “qua official” and officials speaking as private citizens. This distinction is important throughout her argument. Her argument requires officials to make clear “either (1) that they do not speak in their capacity as a governmental official; or (2) if they do speak in their capacity as a government official, their speech must make clear what the extant protection is” (1004). This rule needs a stable line between official and personal speech.


I would like to raise a question about this line/distinction between official and personal speech. Consider a future president who reads Shiffrin’s article and opens two accounts on a social media platform. The official account stays meticulously constitutional. The personal account posts that the press is “the enemy of the American people” (994), with each post carrying a disclaimer that views are personal. Should platforms refuse to host this speech?


The platform seems to face a tension with two sides. On one side, suppose platforms accept clear and credible disclaimers as enough to make the speech count as personal rather than official. Then an official could post speech that would be unconstitutional if spoken officially, place it on a personal account, add a disclaimer,  and thus escape the duties Shiffrin assigns to government speakers. This would give officials significant control over the qua-official category through their own labeling. But what changes in practice when officials can move speech across categories in this manner? The speech that Shiffrin identifies as unconstitutional, including attacks on the press and lies about elections, would still reach the public, and would still carry the rhetorical influence of the speaker’s office. Even if each personal account post had a disclaimer that the views were personal, would it change how the public reads the speech, given that the speaker is still the president? Even if Shiffrin rejects superficial disclaimers, it is unclear to me whether sufficiently explicit disclaimers can truly neutralize the audience’s tendency to read speech as official when it comes from a powerful officeholder.


On the other side, suppose platforms followed the logic of Shiffrin’s claim that the First Amendment “prohibits officials from giving the public rational grounds for uncertainty about whether the officials affirm the legal free speech protections that they are responsible to uphold” (1001).On this approach, disclaimers do not automatically make the speech personal rather than official, because the question is not controlled only by the speakers labeling. It also depends on the context, including how a reasonable audience would understand the speech. But this puts pressure on Shiffrin’s commitment that officials “may criticize how citizens exercise their speech rights” (1002). If a senator’s tweet criticizing a journalist gets treated as official speech whenever reasonable audiences see the tweet as coming from the senator in their official role , then the senator's personal speech room becomes narrower. Disclaimers may help, but they may not cure the problem because audiences may continue to read the speech as carrying official weight based on the speaker’s identity, prominence, and political authority. 


So how should platforms go about it? The answer depends on how Shiffrin’s commitments fit together:  the personal speech room she preserves for the officials, or the rational uncertainty standard that makes audience understanding relevant. Can both commitments hold at once, especially for high ranking officials whose personal speech may still be heard as carrying the authority of office?




Comments

  1. Michelle LeeApril 29, 2026 at 11:14 PM

    I would like to engage with your “consider a future president who reads Shiffrin's article and opens two accounts on a social media platform” scenario, Tonalli! You make a good point when you question, “Even if each personal account post had a disclaimer that the views were personal, would it change how the public reads the speech, given that the speaker is still the president?”

    However, I think a possible way to partially resolve this issue using Shiffrin is her discussion of prior government officials. Shiffrin's main point, which you do identify, is that government officials and experts have special access to sources of information that create special obligations to speak sincerely and accurately about matters of public concern. Shiffrin then says on page 1024 that prior government officials may be viewed as experts about their actions and policies during their time of service. The special epistemic access they had or have makes it easier to demand that officials "get it right." If this applies to former officials, I believe it would also apply to a sitting president. This suggests that the president's role-based duties don't disappear when they switch to a personal account. Therefore, I believe that the question isn't about how the speech is labeled, but what the official had a responsibility to accurately represent, given their privileged access. The main idea is that heightened access to information = heightened responsibilities to speak accurately.

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  2. GeorgiaApril 30, 2026 at 8:53 AM

    I agree with the distinction that you make between the public and private capacity that
    government officials could create platform specific constraints. I would argue that your concerns about a “reasonable audience” are really addressed by Shiffrin’s proposals for the companies involved. She anticipates that private actors, particularly major social media platforms, serve as an enforcement mechanism for under-enforced constitutional norms. This shifts the burden away from the speaker's labeling and the audience's perception, and onto the structural rules platforms set. Platforms do not need to resolve whether audiences read the speech as official or personal. They can simply ask whether the speech, whoever it is attributed to, violates the terms they have independently established. The speaker's identity and the audience's perception become less decisive when the platform's own rules apply uniformly. But the rational uncertainty standard is preserved because platforms can enforce against speech that, regardless of disclaimers, would give the public rational grounds for uncertainty about protected rights. The distinction between official and personal speech governs what constitutional duties attach to the speaker; platform terms of service govern what speech gets hosted at all. These are parallel tracks rather than competing ones, and together they close the gap that disclaimers alone cannot. However, the problem is that Social media companies cannot be relied on to do this, and a question of social culture changing is relevant.

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