Unreported / Non-Citable
Background
Reza Ray Jalisi, a Poway resident who has long criticized City decisions, sued the City of Poway and an unidentified social media manager. He alleges that the City hides his comments on its official Facebook page because of his viewpoint, violating the First Amendment and the California Constitution. He says his comments were hidden or "shadow banned" several times in the past year, meaning they stayed visible to him but not to other users, while similar comments by others stayed visible. He cites a comment on a July 4 post asking about the "clown with the cowboy hat," and a question about taxpayer input on development that was hidden although his wife's word-for-word repeat was not.
The City filed a limited opposition. A City declaration asserts that no employee hid or removed Jalisi's comments, and that Meta's Moderation Assist program hid them automatically after flagging his profile as a non-human bot. The asserted factors were no profile picture, one Facebook friend, and no posts. The City says it uses the tool because it cannot manually monitor every comment around the clock. It did not oppose an order against viewpoint-based suppression or manual unhiding of his past comments. It did oppose an order removing any restriction on his comments, saying it had not found a way to disable the tool for one commenter. These are the parties' assertions on an early record.
The Court’s Holding
The court granted the motion in part, relying on the City's non-opposition. Defendants must, within 24 hours of notice, restore public visibility of every comment by Jalisi hidden on the City's official page. They must also refrain from hiding, deleting, or suppressing his comments on the basis of their viewpoint. The Rule 65(c) security requirement was waived, and Jalisi must serve the order and file proof of service.
The court denied the request to remove any restriction causing his comments to be hidden. It noted that, on the limited record, the comments were likely hidden by Meta's program rather than by City policy. It assumed, without deciding, that the program's effects could be attributed to the City, and said that issue was unbriefed. It found the restriction facially content neutral because flagging turns on profile characteristics rather than message content. It found the restriction content neutral in justification because the City adopted the tool to manage bot spam, with no sign of disagreement with any message. Critical comments by others remain visible. Under intermediate scrutiny, the court found that two-way communication between citizens and government is a substantial interest unrelated to suppressing expression. On the early record it saw no obvious less intrusive alternative, and the incidental hiding of a human user's comments was addressed by the order. Because likelihood of success is a threshold inquiry, it did not reach the remaining TRO factors.
The court also found that the California Constitution claim supplied no independent basis for relief, since Jalisi offered only a brief unbriefed argument. It ordered the parties to meet and confer and file a joint status report of no more than six pages by October 30, 2026. The report must address remaining issues and whether a settlement conference with the magistrate judge would help. No preliminary injunction hearing will be set until then.
Key Takeaways
- The order is temporary and partial: it restores the hidden comments and bars viewpoint-based suppression, but it does not finally decide the federal or state claims.
- On this record, automated moderation that flags accounts by profile characteristics rather than message content was treated as facially content neutral.
- Intermediate scrutiny was satisfied at this early stage because the City's interest in preventing bot spam was unrelated to suppressing expression and no obvious less intrusive alternative appeared.
- A brief, undeveloped state constitutional argument did not justify separate injunctive relief.
Why It Matters
This is a preliminary, unpublished district court order and carries no precedential weight. It shows how a court may analyze a city's reliance on a platform's automated moderation when a known critic's comments are hidden, while still ordering manual restoration and a ban on viewpoint-based suppression.
Open questions include whether the Meta program's effects are attributable to the City, how the page should be classified as a forum, and whether a preliminary injunction should issue.