City Government Can Use Facebook’s Anti-Bot Tool–Jalisi v. Poway

October 26, 2026 · by · in Content Regulation

The City of Poway has a public Facebook page. Jalisi has been a critic of the city government, and he made critical posts on the city’s Facebook page. He claims that his posts were hidden or shadowbanned there.

The City of Poway used the Meta Moderation Assist for its page. It flagged Jalisi’s posts as bot postings because “Plaintiff does not have a profile picture, has only one Facebook friend, and has no posts on his own profile.”

The court says the deployment of Meta Moderation Assist isn’t inherently unconstitutional:

  • “the restriction is facially content neutral….[Profiles] are flagged based on the presence of certain predictive factors, such as the absence of a profile picture or the absence of other Facebook friends. Thus, determining whether a comment may be hidden has nothing to do with the content of the comment.” [That’s true, though the tool does account for the content on the profile page.]
  • “The City uses Meta Moderation Assist because it “does not have the resources nor ability to actively monitor each and every comment made in real time in order to manually hide bot comments.” There is nothing in the record to suggest that the City turned to Meta Moderation Assist “motivated by disagreement with any particular expressive” conduct. Indeed, Plaintiff’s evidence that identical comments published by other users remained visible actually strengthens the finding that the restriction is content neutral; critical speech is clearly tolerated by the City.”
  • “the two-way exchange of information between the citizenry and the City is a substantial governmental interest….the interest runs counter to the suppression of free expression; it seeks to ensure that residents have effective access to the exchange of ideas with their neighbors and their government….. The interest is related to the suppression of expression by non-human bots, but bots are neither “human beings with First Amendment rights” nor the “[corporations] … composed of [them … that] possess First Amendment rights themselves.” [cite to Barrett’s Moody concurrence].”

The court concludes:

on the early record before it, the Court finds that the City has no alternative methods to prevent nonhuman bot accounts from flooding their Facebook page. This is not a situation where there is an obvious, alternative method of regulation that would achieve the governmental interest and incidentally censor no speech….

even assuming the Meta Moderation Assist program can be considered a government restriction on speech, the restriction is content-neutral and on this record survives intermediate scrutiny.

For this reason, the court mostly rejects Jalisi’s TRO request.

Nevertheless, now that Poway knows that Facebook made a false positive when it screened Jalisi’s posts as bot content, the court says Poway must reverse its blocks of his content:

1. Within 24 hours of receiving notice of this Order, restore the public visibility of every comment by Plaintiff that has been hidden on the City’s official Facebook page; and

2. Refrain from hiding, deleting, or otherwise suppressing Plaintiff’s comments on the City’s official Facebook page on the basis of their viewpoint.

This opinion indirectly addresses one of the main questions left open by the Lindke case: if a government entity has a social media account and the social media service exercises its own independent content moderation, how will courts evaluate the constitutionality of the social media’s moderation overlaid on top of any social media policies adopted by the government entity? This court doesn’t directly adddress that issue, but its implicit answer in this case is that anti-bot efforts are likely to survive constitutional scrutiny, though perhaps only if the city corrects known false positives.

Also, now that the simplicity of Facebook’s anti-bot criteria are clearer, Jalisi and other critics can end-run them quite simply.

Case Citation: Jalisi v. City of Poway, 2026 WL 3169675 (S.D. Cal. Oct. 22, 2026)

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